Author Archives: Alden Young

About Alden Young

Alden Young is the director of Africana studies and assistant professor of history at Drexel University. His first book, Transforming Sudan: Decolonisation, State-Formation and Economic Development, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. This book tells the story of how the Sudanese state was made and unmade as a result of economic thinking. His next project examines how the international system of visa regulations and refugee policy impacts mobility in northeast Africa.

African Bureaucrats and the Exhaustion of the Developmental State: Lessons from the Pages of the Sudanese Economist

March 19, 2017 by
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In the popular and scholarly imagination, Sudanese history is framed as a story of successive failed states, war, and destruction. This impression is aided by the fact that with the division of the country into the Republic of Sudan and the Republic of South Sudan in 2011, Sudan became one of only two states in postcolonial Africa formally partitioned. Additionally, Sudan was embroiled in civil wars for more than two-thirds of its history.1 Given this legacy, is it possible to write of a functional Sudanese Continue reading → Continue reading →