Bangladesh, Jan. 29 -- The horror of the Sudanese civil war is not exhausted by the enumeration of its atrocities, though those alone are staggering: mass killings, ethnic cleansing, systematic rape, the razing of villages, famine used as a weapon, and the deliberate destruction of the conditions of life

What distinguishes Sudans catastrophe—stretching from earlier civil wars through Darfur and into the present conflict between rival military powers—is not only the scale of suffering, but the way violence has become structural, embedded in the very organization of political power. The war is not merely a breakdown of order; it is the triumph of a particular conception of order itself.

At the center lies a grim philosophical ...