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.

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 political geometry of Sudan defies resolution. No sooner had a framework been agreed for the provisional settlement of the North-South conflict in 2002 than the war in Darfur blew away all conventional wisdom about how the country could achieve peace and stability. The twin challenges of deciding whether Sudan is one country or two, [...]

It’s frequently observed that Darfur’s conflict has “spilled over” into Chad and Central African Republic. It is probably more accurate to say that Darfur has become part of a regional nexus of conflict that includes these two countries, characterized by a political pattern in which both local elites (tribal chiefs, militia commanders, small-town political leaders) [...]