While I read the article on the ABC News website titled “Chad Breaks with Sudan After Rebel Attack,” a certain idea bubbled in my head. The internal conflicts I have seen occurring in nations around the world – nations including Iraq, France, the U.S., Sri Lanka and several others – are all heavily based on interracial, interethnic, or inter-religious conflicts. I’m going to go out on a limb, but using the Chadian-Sudanese conflict as my paradigm, I strongly believe that nationalism in the postcolonial world has been one of the largest contributing factors to the political destabilizing of several nations worldwide.

The Chadian-Sudanese conflict has not only brought about heightened tensions between the two African nations, but it has also highlighted specific conflicts between religions – Animists, Christians and Muslims – different tribes of Africans, and different political factions within the respective countries. The recent rebel uprising in Chad’s capital city of N’Djamena has caused the Chadian government to lash out against the Sudanese, claiming the Sudanese government supported these rebels and therefore the attacks. The rebels, however, claim that their attacks were provoked mostly by president Idriss D