Social Science Research Council

In the early days of AMIS deployment, the Sudan government raised fears that peacekeepers from sub-Saharan Africa would be bringing HIV/AIDS into Darfur, and talked about screening incoming troops for HIV. At the time, Khartoum was opposed to increasing the AU peacekeeping presence, and these statements must be interpreted in that light. Nonetheless, there are [...]

Reporting to the U.N. Security Council on the situation in Darfur last April, the U.N.-African Union Joint Special Representative to Darfur, Rodolphe Adada, revealed to members evidence of remarkable progress in the region during the past year. Compared to the murderous conflict which caused AU-UN troops to be send there in the first place, the [...]

The incident statistics collected and verified by UNAMID for June show that harassment of UNAMID and international actors continues unabated. The general pattern of violence continues to manifest the characteristics of a low-intensity conflict, with a low level of confirmed fatalities amidst a generalized situation of insecurity.
Sixteen fatalities have been recorded in June. Twelve of [...]

When the Joint Special Representative of the UN and AU for Darfur, Rodolphe Adada, presented his report to the UN Security Council on Monday, he felt confident enough to make public the findings of UNAMID’s monitoring of the situation in Darfur.
The language Amb. Adada used and evidence he presented came as a surprise to [...]

Before his final departure from Sudan in December 2006, Jan Pronk addressed the UN staff in Khartoum and Juba. In his address he presented fifteen guidelines for peacekeepers. They were reproduced on his weblog.
Here they are:
First: United Nations peacekeepers in a country are visitors. Their presence is temporary. Their function is catalytic, no more. Peace [...]

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 [...]

Conventional peacekeeping operations are designed as stop-gap measures, either for a brief period of time or with a limited brief in a frozen conflict. This can be functional if the peacekeepers are dealing with institutionalized belligerents, with functioning hierarchies. In so-called ‘fragile states’, there is a risk that peacekeeping missions will turn into open-ended commitments.
Fragile [...]

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. [...]

On September 12, the UN Secretary-General released the UN/EU midterm review of the UN and EU missions in Chad. A key finding of the review was the deterioration of the security situation in eastern Chad in the past six months. While the review notes that EUFOR’s presence was beginning to have a positive effect, the [...]

First of all, I would like the thank Zoe Marriage, Michael Barnett and Angela Raven-Roberts for taking the trouble to read the book, and for their insightful, critical and sympathetic comments.
A large part of what I am trying to get across in the Complex Emergencies book, as Michael Barnett correctly perceives, is that the aims [...]