How is Sudan perceived by the American public? And what does this mean over the long term? These questions arose in two different fora I attended this week, and the answers were worrying. Humanitarians and commercial investors alike fear that

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When the Joint Special Representative of the UN and AU for Darfur, Rodolphe Adada, presented his report to the UN Security Council on Monday, he felt confident enough to make public the findings of UNAMID’s monitoring of the situation in

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Recently on this blog, an interesting question was posed: where was Save Darfur “and its advocacy and influence” in 2003? It is a good question, but seems to valorise advocacy excessively (as has this whole Mamdani / Save Darfur debate)

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I thought I should share some of the more amusing efforts at promoting public awareness (in America) about human rights issues. This was sparked by the ‘Save Darfur petfood bowl’ which has the slogan, ‘If we don’t speak up we

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The debate on Mahmood Mamdani’s Saviors and Survivors, Save Darfur and its advocacy and influence is not asking one of the more important questions of those wanting to understand Western responses to conflicts like Darfur. Large scale violence in Darfur

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In the last chapter of Saviors and Survivors, Mahmood Mamdani brings up the war in northern Uganda as a point of comparison with Darfur. Brief as the comparison is, it caught several reviewers’ attention, as well as my own, since

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Several contributors to this blog have disputed Mahmood Mamdani’s arguments about the links between ‘Save Darfur’ (in the wider sense of the mass movement) and the George W. Bush Administration’s ‘global war on terror,’ or conversely supported them. I think

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Mahmood Mamdani makes many interesting and persuasive points, but he does nonetheless take a strong position that seems a bit like an apologetic. At the level of macro-political economy of the region, Mamdani has it right. Thus, I now am

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Having oscillated between exhilaration and despair in my experience with humanitarianism, finding a middle ground (what I call a ‘critical-hope’ position) has been and continues to be a challenge. This article seeks to present a critically-hopeful analysis of mainstream advocacy

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From a distance, a mountain range can appear as an undifferentiated mass—a sheer wall in which the foothills and the peaks cannot be distinguished. For the mountaineer, standing in the middle of the range, the contours of the summits and

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