Social Science Research Council

A new briefing paper by Helen Young, Karen Jacobsen and Abdalmonim Osman
Livelihoods, Migration and Conflict is the most recent briefing paper in the Tufts University series on livelihoods in Darfur. It is as good as its predecessors and is essential reading for those wishing to understand the dimensions of the crisis of livelihoods and survival. [...]

The border region between Chad and Sudan is formed by an inhospitable climate and breathtakingly beautiful nature. It is an area marked by a colonial boundary where the French colonial outreach in Africa once met its rival British counterpart, an extremely sparsely populated part of the African continent that has nevertheless become one of the [...]

Most of Darfur’s internally-displaced camps are urban settlements in all but name. In geographical terms the most striking impact of the last seven years has been to change Darfur from being overwhelmingly scattered rural villages and hamlets to huge extended cities. In the wake of the abrupt expulsion of the international NGOs which provided a [...]

The New Sudan (al Sudan al Jadiid) of the late Dr John Garang was a vision of a Sudan of equality and non-discrimination in which the provinces—the margins of the South, west, east and north—all enjoyed a fair share of power and resources. Dr John’s vision was shaped by his prescient analysis of the fatal [...]

With 13,000 humanitarian workers and a hundred relief agencies, Darfur hosts the largest humanitarian operation in the world. The aid apparatus started to be deployed in Western Sudan in mid-2004 in a context of acutely high mortality among civilian displaced living in camps and those remaining in rural areas. Since that time – thanks to [...]

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 [...]

Jim Lewis has a fascinating article in today’s New York Times–in the Architecture section. It’s called “The Exigent City” and poses the question, why are refugee camps and IDP camps designed how they are? According to the most recent estimates, refugees stay in camps for an average of seventeen years–so that camps are far from [...]

Asif Faiz claims that Khartoum resembles capital cities in “virtually every” developing country. In the sense that, for the first, time the majority of people in the world now live in cities he is correct. However, this claim is at a level of generality comparable with the equally correct statement that Khartoum is [...]

Mark Duffield’s comments are thoughtful but I would ask him a simple question. Is Khartoum that different from imperial cities like Delhi, Mexico City, Lima., Buenos Aires, in relation to their surrounding areas. So why is Khartoum singled out as an anomaly when virtually every Sub-Saharan African country exhibits the same trends in terms of [...]

Posted on behalf of AbdouMaliq Simone
The discussion that has taken place on this weblog over the last weeks concerning urbanization in the Sudan has raised many critical points to which I do not take issue. These discussions have provided incisive attention to how the complex and multiple historical trajectories—of movement, political mobilization, and economic [...]