Social Science Research Council

Alex de Waal’s Christian Michelsen lecture, ‘Fixing the Political Marketplace,’ given last month in Bergen, Norway, is now available online at this link. His article ‘The Price of Peace’ in Prospect magazine can be accessed here.

These days’ mood in Khartoum is a mixture of disillusionment, suspicion and fear: not the best feelings for a country which finds itself at a crucial moment to determine its future. Amidst a growing anxiety, the different actors involved on the political scene seem to be affected by a form of paralysis: they are not [...]

According to the reports received by UNAMID, there were 67 deaths directly attributable to violence in Darfur during October.
This figure is subject to the usual caveats, which is that UNAMID access is uneven. In some places UNAMID patrols have been turned back by security officers, for example when investigating inter-tribal clashes in south-east Darfur. In [...]

The Government of South Sudan (GOSS) has announced that it intends to establish a news agency that will cover areas of the south starved of mainstream media coverage [1]. The idea for establishing the News Agency of South Sudan (NASS) was endorsed at a cabinet meeting chaired by President Salva Kiir at the end of [...]

It is frequently heard that Arabs/Muslims and their media were silent, unmoved or without opinion over Darfur. These suppositions tend to contain a measure of moral equivalence and finger-pointing, suggesting that responding as a Westerner — regardless of the quality, timing or efficacy of response — is the most correct option. In most conceptions, there [...]

Thoughts on the future of Sudan from an unlikely source: Winston Churchill in his book ‘The River War‘.

“It might seem at first a great advantage that the people of the Soudan, instead of being a multitude of wild, discordant tribes, should unite of their own accord into one strong community, living under fixed laws, [...]

Most political figures and commentators, Sudanese and international, made up their minds about the AU Panel on Darfur report before they had seen the contents of the report. Many were then struck silent when the report was actually released. Some have had the grace to admit that they were surprised by how substantive and principled [...]

The most recent effort to grapple with the far-reaching international response to the Darfur conflict comes from Steven Fake and Kevin Funk in “The Scramble for Africa, Darfur-Intervention and the USA.” The book offers a leftist critique of humanitarianism in Darfur that is inspired by Noam Chomsky’s accounts of NATO’s 1999 intervention in Kosovo. The [...]

War and Survival in Sudan’s Frontierlands: Voices from the Blue Nile, by Wendy James, is now available in paperback. We reprint the review from its earlier (hardback) publication.

Wendy James’s three books on the Uduk people of southern Blue Nile, a frontier area of northern Sudan that abuts both southern Sudan and Ethiopia, describe not only [...]

The advent of the Thuraya phone has radically changed warfare in across the Sahara desert, as illustrated in the case of Darfur. Twenty five years ago, I remember travelling across Darfur with no phone lines, with telecommunication possible only through ageing two-way radios in the police stations. The mail was slow and unreliable. The only [...]