After only two years of deployment, the UN Mission in the Central African Republic and Chad (MINURCAT) will, at the request of the Government of Chad, start its drawdown and exit by 31 December this year. MINURCAT will hand over

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Sudan’s electoral system allocates 25% of seats in the national, southern Sudan and state assemblies for women. That’s a progressive system. It has some unexpected effects – for example the majority of the PCP representation in the national assembly will

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This ethnography is based on extensive anthropological research for a period of about 16 months all together in the provincial town of Kebkabiya in North-Darfur (1990-1995). The title of the book, ‘One foot in heaven’ conflates two main perspectives on

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Karin Willemse’s One Foot in Heaven: Narratives on Gender and Islam in Darfur, West-Sudan is a highly theoretical, complex, 547-page long book by a Dutch feminist anthropologist who did about one year and a half of field work in Kebkabiya

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A review of Karin Willemse, One Foot in Heaven: Narratives on Gender and Islam in Darfur, West-Sudan (Leiden: Brill, 2007). “Women started making tea seven or eight years ago. The first woman making tea was Hauwa Al-Fadl from the Birgid

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For social science research in Darfur, the 1990s were a black hole. After Darfur’s descent into violence at the end of the 1980s, and the National Salvation coup, few researchers ventured into the field there. Karin Willemse is one of

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Without doubt, the statistics of Sudan’s elections will be pored over and debated at length, and the interpretation of every figure will be open to dispute. But there seems to be one consistent feature across the country. Women were the

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What is a ‘low-intensity conflict’? It is still a conflict. Even though lethal violence is low, the other other dimensions to the conflict may continue with a high intensity, including a risk of high-intensity violence. In this posting I will

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tories of men being forcibly circumcised and even castrated peppered news accounts of the madness that overtook Kenya in the aftermath of the December 2007 elections. According to the Waki commission that investigated the Post Election Violence (PEV), by January 2008 the ethnic militia of the Kikuyu ethnic group, Mungiki, used blunt objects such as broken glass to forcibly circumcise at least eight men, some as young as eleven and five years old. While exact numbers are hard to come by, one can deduce that tens of men endured genital mutilation during the first three months of 2008. Continue reading →

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The AU Panel has spent between six and ten hours each day, for the last week, in meetings with large delegations from Darfurian civil society, native administration, IDPs and pastoralists, as well as national political parties. Today, at a hearing

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