Robert Bates’ When Things Fell Apart: State Failure in Late Century Africa is a seminal contribution to understanding state crises Africa. Bates’ thesis is that in the late 20th century, sub-Saharan African states suffered a catastrophic lowering of public revenues

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Posted on behalf of Sarah Barga Alex de Waal makes a compelling argument for the possibility of the underground lake found in the northern part of Darfur as having negative effects. It is easy to look at the situation at

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Many thanks to Alex de Waal for posting my briefing on land issues in Sudan on his blog last month and for stimulating so many interesting contributions on such a critical topic. I have just returned from Juba where I

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Overview 1. The NCP-SPLM partnership for the CPA stands at a critical juncture. The NCP sees the 2009 elections as its route to internal and international legitimacy and is hoping that problems with the census and elections can be pinned

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Posted on behalf of Ambassador Hassan E. Talib. First of all, I would like to extend my gratitude to this blog for allowing this opportunity for the debate on the issue of culture and political conduct of the Islamic Movement

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A report by Jérôme Tubiana for the Small Arms Survey, “The Chad-Sudan Proxy War and the “Darfurization” of Chad: Myths and Reality,” provides excellent analysis of the Chadian conflict. It is a fine succinct run down of the domestic crisis

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One of the great ironies of the Islamist adventure in coup-making (leading to the creation of the National Salvation regime in June 1989) was that the move dealt a more serious blow to the Islamist movement than it to any

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Asif Faiz claims that Khartoum resembles capital cities in “virtually every” developing country. In the sense that, for the first, time the majority of people in the world now live in cities he is correct. However, this claim is at

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Mark Duffield’s comments are thoughtful but I would ask him a simple question. Is Khartoum that different from imperial cities like Delhi, Mexico City, Lima., Buenos Aires, in relation to their surrounding areas. So why is Khartoum singled out as

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In his comment yesterday, Michael Swigert of Africa Action usefully compares the memorandum that Abdul Mohammed and I submitted to the mediation meeting on March 18, with the Enough report published the following week. Clearly we’re aiming at the same

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