Social Science Research Council

Any human rights activist who has worked on Sudan is familiar with the name Kober prison, the century-old British building which was ‘Cooper Prison’ for its first half century, and which has ‘graduated’ entire classes of Sudanese political leaders, from the early nationalists to the entire parliamentary, trade union and civil society leadership in 1989-90. [...]

Several posts over recent days have pointed to the discrepancy between media attention and levels of mortality. The analysis of media coverage of Darfur during and after the height of hostilities in 2003-04 finds that there is a striking inverse correlation between violence and media coverage – as killings decline, coverage increased. The contrast between [...]

Abd al-Wahab Abdalla (25 March) says “The worst massacre of the last 12 months was by JEM! It killed 128 Meidob over 2 days.”
There have been a number of allusions on this blog to the unrest at JEM’s base in eastern Chad on January 1 this year, but hard facts and clearly identified sources are [...]

Starvation isn’t an accident of nature. Starving more like wounding—something people do to one another. For many years I was a staunch advocate of criminalizing some forms of famine creation—especially the military measures that create the most extreme manifestations of famine, such as massive outright starvation. Today I am not so sure. The case for [...]

Last Sunday the Washington Post ran a column by me in the section This Writing Life. It begins:
Some years ago in a rebel-held enclave of Sudan, I met a man whom I had reported as assassinated. He was chief Hussein Karbus, and I was introduced to him by the man I had said killed him, [...]

Earlier this year in the run up to the release of the anti Islam ‘film’ Fitna by the Dutch maverick right-wing politician Geert Wilders, the leading Dutch political scientist Job van Amerongen warned the left liberal chattering classes against stirring up hysteria, that Wilders was leading the Dutch back into the darkest days of the [...]

Six days after the aerial attack on Shigeg Karo, UNAMID has finally spoken out, in a press release that raises more questions than it answers. A verification team visited Shigeg Karo on Thursday—a full four days after the bombing, taking nothing to assist the wounded still remaining there—and confirmed the market was “completely burned”. [...]

Posted on behalf of Julie Flint.
At 2 pm on Sunday 4 May, a single Antonov bomber targeted the village of Shegeg Karo in North Darfur, destroying the market and hitting the village school during classes. At least 11 people were killed outright, six of them children between the ages of five and eleven. More [...]

The point of departure for the report, Darfur: Dimensions and Dilemmas of a Complex Situation, published by the Uppsala University Department of Peace and Conflict Research, is a field study conducted by the
author in Sudan during the fall of 2007. The purpose of this analysis is
to deepen knowledge about the current crisis in Darfur through [...]

In her posting yesterday, Mia Farrow identifies the success of the "genocide Olympics" campaign—which she was instrumental in starting—as a "defining moment." She is right. For the first time, an international activist movement has compelled the Chinese government to recognize that it has global human rights responsibilities. Beijing’s rebuttal of Stephen Spielberg’s charges is the [...]