The establishment, development and destruction of the settlement of al-Amud al-Akhdar in Darfur’s deep south forest belt provides a microcosm of Sudan’s modernization projects and their contradictions, interlocking strata of conflict, and their violent manifestations in the recent Darfur war.

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To a considerable extent, crises in far-off lands are defined by foreigners and not by those living through them, which then creates a perceived moral imperative to do something about it. Darfur became Darfur when the West got involved, and

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III. The Mbeki Mission and the Way Forward Mamdani is right on target in his criticism of the Save Darfur tendency to offer simplistic solutions and manifesting misguided belligerence and a blind belief in the virtues of aggressive external intervention,

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II. The State, War and Sudanese Identity Mamdani has in fact written not one book, but several. His attack on the enthusiastic but misinformed international response to the Darfur crisis is the first book. His tracing of the deep roots

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I. Recolonisation without Responsibility As many commentators have already pointed out, Mahmood Mamdani’s recent book, Saviors and Survivors has almost single-handedly shifted the debate on Darfur from a monologue (or a series of rival monologues) into a (very heated) dialogue.

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Reading Adam Smith’s book now, after the intense debates around the ICC’s arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omer al-Bashir, provokes a deep sadness at how impoverished the discussion of international judicial proceedings is when it comes time for policy prescriptions.

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Due to the Court of Arbitration decision in The Hague, around 1460 square kilometers which were inhabited by two clans of the Missiriya tribe (Mazaghna and Awlad Kamal), have become part of Abyei. This means if the people of Abyei

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Human Rights Reporting as the First Draft of the Indictment Journalism has been described as the “first draft of history.” By the same token, the human rights report is the “first draft of the indictment.” The genre of the human

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Activist and Apologist: Contrasts and Parallels This section uses techniques of textual and discourse analysis to examine two leading books on the Darfur crisis, identifying the strategies employed by the respective writers. One is by Prof. Eric Reeves the leading

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The Kenyan Cabinet recently resolved to put forward the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC) as a way to address the post-election violence. In this first of three essays looking at some of the misconceptions in the transitional justice debate in Kenya (the next two contributions will consider domestic and international prosecutions respectively), I evaluate whether the establishment of the TJRC makes the Kenyan situation inadmissible before the International Criminal Court (ICC). Continue reading →

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