This posting is a guide to three online sources of scholarly material on Darfur (and Sudan in general) that provide different resources for the student or professor.

The most comprehensive online resource on Sudan is the Rift Valley Institute’s Sudan Open Archive. While containing material covering the whole of Sudan, and especially an important archive of otherwise-unobtainable material on Southern Sudan, it also contains some key documents on Darfur. For example, Victor Tanner’s “Rule of Lawlessness” is an important analysis from the early days of the current war. (The chapter by Abdel Jabbar Fadul and Victor Tanner in War in Darfur and the Search for Peace is in several respects a reflection upon and update of this report.)

The Coalition for International Justice’s “Chronology on Events Concerning the Conflict in Darfur” is also available on the open archive.

The report, “Local Peace Processes in Sudan” is also an essential resource for those seeking to understand how community-level peacemaking can work.

The Center for African Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, hosts UnderstandingSudan.org, which is a resource specifically geared for teachers planning classes or courses on Sudan, including a teaching module on the crisis in Darfur. This provides a select array of primary sources and secondary texts, carefully chosen. They include some key documents such as the Justice and Equality Movement’s 2000 Black Book (and its later update) and the Darfur Peace Agreement, academic commentaries and reviews on Darfur, maps and multi-media resources, and a sample or model class assignment.

R. S. (Sean) O’Fahey is the premier historian of Darfur, and author of two books (a third is in press) and numerous articles. During his numerous sojourns in the region in the 1960s and ’70s , O’Fahey photographed an unparalleled collection of documents (especially land charters) from the Sultanate, and also read through the entire colonial era archive before its destruction. Prof. O’Fahey has a website dedicated to his research in Darfur, which includes some invaluable primary resources (he is gradually putting his own unique archive on this website) and also a collection of secondary sources including several of his own recent papers, such as a review of recent writings on Darfur, which covers important recent books in Arabic and English.

Other online scholarly resources on Darfur will be briefly reviewed and referenced on this blog. Please draw my attention to them!