Social Science Research Council

24 Hours for Darfur recently released “Darfurian Voices,” a report detailing the results of the first ever representative survey of Darfurian refugees’ opinions on peace, justice, and reconciliation. The US-based non-profit research organization spent four months in the 12 Darfurian refugee camps in eastern Chad, interviewing 1872 randomly-sampled civilians and 280 civil society and rebel [...]

On 23 November 2004 at 6:00 a.m., the village of Adwa in South Darfur was attacked by the Sudanese army and the Janajaweed militia. Most villagers were still asleep, or had woken up for the morning prayer, while two helicopter gun-ships and an Antonov plane approached the village. Meanwhile, heavily armed militia men entered the [...]

The April 2010 general elections in Sudan have been largely considered by commentators and observers of the Sudanese political life as an irrelevant exercise mainly destined to foreign consumption. This has been confirmed by the very low number of comments about the election results in the press and on the web. Everyone is focused on [...]

A new research report into local violent conflicts within southern Sudan, Southern Sudan at Odds with Itself: Dynamics of conflict and predicaments of peace, provides insights into the processes generating and sustaining conflicts. It debunks some important assumptions. The research team was headed by Mareike Schomerus and Tim Allen, based at the LSE, commissioned through [...]

If the implications were not so seriously fatal one would not begrudge the Argentinean bruiser and striker of the ICC team Luis Moreno-Ocampo aka ‘Ocambo’ to his adoring fans to feel the elation as if he had won the World Cup after the ICC’s Pre Trial Chamber I quashed on 12 July its original ruling [...]

This morning I learned from the Sudan Tribune that the African Union has agreed to establish a liaison office for the African Union in Addis Ababa. But I also read on the newswires that the selfsame Chairman of the AU Jean Ping has condemned the ICC decision to indict President Omar al-Bashir for 3 counts [...]

The number of confirmed violent fatalities, according to UNAMID figures, in Darfur during June was 221. Though a marked decline on the nearly 600 deaths during May, this is still well above the average for the last two and a half years. The major cause of fatalities was intra-Arab fighting in West Darfur state, which [...]

STATEMENT OF THE CHAIRPERSON OF THE AUHIP, THABO MBEKI, AT THE LAUNCH OF THE SUDAN POST-REFERENDUM NEGOTIATIONS: KHARTOUM, JULY 10, 2010. Your Excellencies, Members of the Negotiating Teams, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen: On behalf of the African Union Panel on Sudan, I would like to welcome to this important occasion everybody present here to [...]

A revised version of my 2009 Christian Michelsen lecture is published by the London Review of Books. In the lecture, I argue that conventional models of state-building that are based on trying to achieve an end-state that accords with an idealised, western view of a state, are not only doomed to failure, but also miss [...]

In my dealings with American universities, I am often struck how there is a missing generation of scholars on Sudan. There is an older generation of academics who studied, taught and worked in Sudan in the 1960s, ’70s and early ’80s, many of them now either in retirement or approaching that age. And there is [...]