On April 11th Sudan will hold a general election. These are the first multi-party elections in a quarter of a century. General Al Bashir, who came to power with a military coup in 1989, has held his people in check for over twenty years thanks to a fanatical interpretation of Shari’a law. Marc Lavergne, director of research at the CNRS in Paris and an expert on Sudan, explains the behind-the-scenes for these elections to ResetDoC. A member of the Scientific Council at the French Institute for the Middle East and the author of a number of books on this subject, Marc Lavergne has been the coordinator of the United Nations Security Council’s group of experts on Darfur since 2006.