Social Science Research Council

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 [...]

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 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 [...]

Today, the Sudanese Foreign Minister Deng Alor spoke to an audience at the end of a two day seminar in Khartoum and said that the last hopes for unity were being extinguished. Sharia, he said, had destroyed the last chance for unity, and the CPA was not being implemented the way it was supposed to [...]

The AUPD report is available in Arabic on this link.

The slogan ‘African solutions to African problems’ has become hackneyed and discredited. One reason why it is not taken seriously is that there has been little African analysis of African problems, because African institutions have borrowed their definitions and methodologies from elsewhere. The agenda has usually been set by non-African governments, multilateral institutions and NGOs, [...]

The report of African Union High Level Panel on Darfur (AUPD) has injected a new dynamic into Sudanese political life. President Thabo Mbeki has confounded those who had forgotten that he was the architect of the negotiated dismantling of Apartheid, and short-sightedly misperceived him as a member of the club of African status quo statists. [...]

The scenario exercises by Clingendael and USIP are extremely useful, both in the possible futures that they pose, and in the questions they oblige us to ask. The comment and elaboration by John Ashworth, which portrays the CPA as no more than a truce in a war of separation that is, implicitly, generations old, concentrates [...]

The U.S. Sudan strategy is now published. After seven months of often public acrimony, the Administration has adopted its policy.
One of the major benefits of Monday’s step was that, for the first time for several years, the Sudanese parties have a clear idea of the U.S. position, including clarity who speaks for the government [...]

Sudan faces two momentous events in the next fifteen months. The first is the general election, intended as the first multi-party nationwide elections in the nation’s history (earlier multiparty elections in the 1960s and 1980s did not include war-affected areas in the south, an exclusion that doomed the resulting governments). The second is the referendum [...]