Social Science Research Council

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 [...]

Two things are immediately noticeable about Kevin Funk’s and Steven Fake’s Scramble for Africa: Darfur-Intervention and the USA. The first is the long list of excerpts from positive pre-publication reviews at the front of the book. (Among the 16 reviews listed, the comment by Princeton’s Richard Falk that the book is “utterly convincing” [...]

Claims that the war in Darfur is intimately linked to vast untapped oil reserves have been made ever since the conflict began and are revived in The Scramble for Africa, where Steven Fake and Kevin Funk repeat a series of assertions that, as far as is known in the often secretive world of oil exploration, [...]

It seems the White House and the Obama administration has made the African continent the focus of their P.R. campaign this summer. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will soon begin her seven-country tour of Africa. This comes on the heels of President Barack Obama’s speech in Ghana earlier this summer; the aim of both tours [...]

This blog has become a hotbed for ardent discussions about the inefficacy of the Save Darfur Coalition and the theories for American influence in Sudan. While much of the criticism is astute and deserved, it seems as though the SDC and the American government have become proverbial punching bags lately, often at the expense [...]

Over the next few months, Making Sense of Darfur will be running an occasional series of reviews of the book The Scramble for Africa: Darfur, Intervention and the USA by Steven Fake and Kevin Funk. It has a different take on the Darfur crisis and the American response, both governmental and activist, and it highlights [...]