Social Science Research Council

Peacemaking is an art—but increasingly we can apply sound measurements to rate a mediator’s efforts. In the run-up to the long-awaited announcement of the U.S. policy on Sudan, I will use a paper by Lakhdar Brahimi and Salman Ahmed, “In Pursuit of Sustainable Peace: The Seven Deadly Sins of Mediation,” to outline some of the [...]

The central challenge facing Sudan is the exercise of self-determination in southern Sudan. If business as usual continues, the default scenario is violent contest over the partition leading to major disaster. Little time is left for averting this. Fortunately, the key policymakers in the U.S., Europe and Africa are at the point of consensus in [...]

The Sudan government and the Justice and Equality Movement are meeting in Doha, and the US envoy for Sudan, Scott Gration, is doing the rounds of the usual suspects in Khartoum, meeting Ali Osman and Salva Kiir, Nafie Ali Nafie, Minni Minawi etc… But where in all this traffic are Darfur’s Arabs? Gration made [...]

After the Sudan Government and JEM signed a ‘Declaration of Intent’ in Doha earlier this week, hopes have been raised that a ceasefire might be in prospect. We should be cautious.
Since September 2003 there has been a succession of ceasefires, declarations of cessation of hostilities, and efforts to agree an end to fighting. None has [...]

Having originally intended this to be a three-part posting, I am inserting an extra short essay focusing on Sudan, before applying the framework to the case of Darfur.
The Sudanese civil wars of the last quarter century have witnessed perhaps half a dozen episodes of extreme violence. The most striking cases include the militia raids into [...]

This is the first of three postings on the topic ‘How Genocides End,’ a topic which has interested me for ten years. This first posting explains my personal interest in the subject, sparked by work in the Nuba Mountains in 1995. The next posting will raise general issues and the third will focus upon Darfur.
My [...]

The Kenana sugar project, inaugurated by President Jaafar Nimeiri in 1975, aimed to be the biggest integrated sugar plant in the world. With 40,000 hectares of prime irrigable land, a state-of-the-art factory, and new transport infrastructure, Kenana promised to meet the demands of Sudanese people’s famous sweet tooth. For five years the factory produced next [...]

The reaction to the likely indictment of President al-Bashir stands as a microcosm for the international response to the Darfur crisis: there is a lot of noise and there are many actors with good intentions, but their interests and strategies differ so starkly that their combined voices appear incoherent and ultimately cancel each other out. [...]

If peace and justice in Sudan are on a collision course, one reason why is the way in which the Darfur peace talks and the accountability process have been structured, so that each process has been isolated from the other.
In the early rounds of the Darfur peace talks, the armed movements repeatedly raised the issue [...]

Many thanks to Alex de Waal for posting my briefing on land issues in Sudan on his blog last month and for stimulating so many interesting contributions on such a critical topic. I have just returned from Juba where I have been carrying out research on the reintegration of IDPs and refugees returning to the [...]