Wars are either political or of religious nature. Either way, both types suggest a conflict in ideologies which both parties wanted to pursue. One party assumes the role of the offensive in the beginning, while the other assumes the defensive.

The Darfur political landscape was severely altered during the last decade owing greatly to the fact of the Darfur war. While previous wars in Sudan—such as the second Sudanese war—was religious in nature, the Darfur war is of political nature, specifically that of ethnic and tribal leanings.

In 2003, the insurgent groups Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLA) incited arms against the Sudanese government for being oppressively favoring Arabs over non-Arabs. These are African groups with strong leanings toward their tribes and race. Along with this accusation of oppresion, other accusations include the neglect of the Sudanese government over the Darfur region and the opposition of the Sudanese government against the African farming communities in Fur, Zagawa and Masalit. The government of Sudan’s response over these insurgencies was to bombard the rebel groups aerially and to employ the help of the Arab militia, the Janjaweed.

The Sudan conflict is typically characterized as between the predominately Arab/Muslim North and the non-Arab/Muslim “African” South. Dr Deng (Sudanese known journalist) explains that Northerners’ identification with Arabism, “is the result of a process in which races and religions were ranked, with Arabs and Muslims respected as free, superior and a race of slave masters, while Negroes and heathens were viewed as legitimate targets of slavery, if they were not in fact already slaves.” From a conference on North-South relations: “Northern intellectuals look at Southerners as ‘tribes-men’, while they refer to the Northerners as ‘people’. Even those Northerners who are considered to be leftist think in the same way!” The government has built anti-Dinka militias to fight the war by proxy. To persuade Arab Sudanese to join militias, the old Sudanese ideas of racial cleavage between the north and the south were deployed. Southerners were characterized as abid [slaves]. The prosecutor at Omar al-Bashir‘s trial, being accused of genocide, charged the Arab-led government with a genocidal strategy against Darfur’s black African ethnic groups.

The New York Times (15 May 2004) said that many of the racist attitudes traditionally directed toward slaves have been redirected to the sedentary non-Arab  racist ideology plays an important part of the Genocide, the sharp distinctions between Arabs and Africans in the racially mixed Darfur region had not been drawn (as much) until the ideology of pan-Arabism that came out of the Libya made itself felt. Some of the nomadic sheiks of the region came to see themselves as the avatars of Arabism, the authentic representatives of their Bedouin origins. They foisted a racial label on a farming people whose way of life they simultaneously disdained and felt threatened by. Blacks in Sudan are seen as inferior to the Arabs, the racism, racial sentiments against non-Arabs have been used & manipulated by the central government. The Christian Science Monitor asserts that racism is at root of Sudan’s Darfur crisis, that reluctance to call it genocide perpetuates hypocrisy in Afro-Arab relations, “Arab militias is the racist, fundamentalist, and undemocratic Sudanese state”  those who call themselves Arabs point to Arab ancestors who arrived as traders both before and after the arrival of Islam, and who gradually converted local Sudanese to the Islamic faith. president Nimeiry of Sudan, said in 1969: “Sudan is the basis of the Arab thrust into the heart of Black Africa, the Arab civilizing mission.” this genocide has been described as an example of Arab racism at its worst.

The Arab Gathering, a shadowy Nazi type brotherhood deeply embedded in the Bashir regime, preaches a doctrine of Arab supremacy and a Sudan “cleansed” of non-Arabs. Der Spiegel wrote that the Sudanese regime uses tribal conflicts and Arab racism.