In less than 12 months’ time, Southern Sudan’s voters will pass judgement on Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), which set out to make attractive the unity of a divided country over a six year interim period. In a burst of

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Sudan’s election is for real. The SPLM candidate, Yasir Arman, has set his sights on the Republican Palace. Sadiq al Mahdi has now also put forward his candidature. There is a growing chance that the presidential election will go to

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Dr. Edward Thomas’s report for The Royal Institute for International Affairs (Chatham House), Decisions and Deadlines: A Critical Year for Sudan contains some very insightful remarks about the dangers and risks inherent in the months leading to the 2011 referendum

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A survey of surveys of Darfur mortality since 2003 in the latest issue of The Lancet, by the reputable analysts Olivier Degomme and Debarati Guha-Sapir, provides the most reliable estimates yet for not only the extent, but the pattern of

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There is a small but growing minority view among Darfurians, that their region is entitled to self-determination with the option of independence. This issue will be discussed for sure in the coming year. The biggest case against self-determination is that

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I was sorry to see the Human Security Report (HSR) released today. I was sorry because this report draws unjustified conclusions and will leave the world more ignorant and misguided for its release. There are four very weak aspects of

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The Human Security Report has become well-known for its argument, backed up by careful statistical analysis, that wars are becoming less common since the early 1990s, and also becoming less lethal. The new HSR study, ‘The Shrinking Costs of War’,

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Once upon a time, ordinary Sudanese citizens followed a set of social mores that we all understood. Everyone’s door was open – it had to be so because nobody had a working telephone. Even the highest officials in the land

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Jérôme Tubiana has published an article under this name in a recent issue of the London Review of Books. It provides a rare, ethnographic, field-based account of the conflict in eastern Chad, including both its links to Darfur and its

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The Harmonised Draft Constitution’s provisions on citizenship go a long way to resolving the problems of belonging to and identification with Kenya that pertain today. Through those provisions, Kenyans will finally propel themselves into the 21st century world—which is a world far beyond the limited conception of an ethnically and racially homogenous and patriarchal single-nation state. If it were to be on those provisions alone that the referendum’s outcome was to be determined, the Harmonised Draft Constitution would and should pass. Continue reading →

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