There is a good ‘Enough’ report on Chad published this week, identifying the absence of any political process in Chad save the power calculations of Idris Déby as the weakest link in the Darfur peace process. It is widely recognized

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There seems to be consensus around the need to deal with injustices– gross human rights violations, economic crimes and abuse of power –perpetrated in Kenya over the last 35 years. However, Kenya lacks a coherent policy on the broader question of transitional justice: which institutions should be used (Special Tribunal for Kenya (1), Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission(2) [TJRC] or criminal courts), how these mechanisms should be deployed, how they would relate to each other, and how such mechanisms would fit within the ongoing constitutional and institutional reforms proposed under Agenda Four of the Kenya National Dialogue and Reconciliation (KNDR) process that produced the current Government of National Unity (GNU) Continue reading →

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The incident statistics collected and verified by UNAMID for June show that harassment of UNAMID and international actors continues unabated. The general pattern of violence continues to manifest the characteristics of a low-intensity conflict, with a low level of confirmed

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The Kenyan Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC) is mandated to enquire into human rights violations, including community displacements, settlements, evictions, historical land injustices, and the illegal or irregular acquisition of land, especially as these relate to conflict or violence. access to land is often cited as one of the key structural causes of violence in Kenya. However, political figures have manipulated and misrepresented the ‘land issue’ in the country, to the extent that it often seems to be an excuse, rather than a valid grievance. How should the TJRC address the land issue, which is so easily instrumentalized and so deeply linked to problematic conceptions of ethnicity? In order to answer this question, we first have to ask: why is the land issue relevant today? Continue reading →

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The Save Darfur Coalition, in one of its circular emails, has again given us an opportunity–in this case to urge U.S. senators to ask questions of Special Envoy Scott Gration. The draft letter is entitled “Ask tough questions of General

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Peacemaking is an art—but increasingly we can apply sound measurements to rate a mediator’s efforts. In the run-up to the long-awaited announcement of the U.S. policy on Sudan, I will use a paper by Lakhdar Brahimi and Salman Ahmed, “In

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Last week, the Abyei Arbitration Tribunal, sitting in The Hague, made a technical decision on the status of the findings of the Abyei Boundary Commission, which translates into defining the boundaries between Abyei district and the rest of Kordofan. The

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The victory of retired general and former acting president Mohamed Ould Abelaziz in the 18 July presidential elections in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania is another slap in the face of the EU’s Africa policy, but a vindication of AU

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Saviors and Survivors became instantly controversial, probably more from the Darfur context and conflict it seeks to address than for its detailed scholarship and extensive research. Mamdani’s book is nonetheless an important work. It is well known that the author

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Twenty years ago I heard the story of a southern Sudanese villager who stumbled out of the war zone into a small town in Kordofan and exclaimed, “at last, government!” As a human rights activist—a position that merged with being

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