Social Science Research Council

The Kenana sugar project, inaugurated by President Jaafar Nimeiri in 1975, aimed to be the biggest integrated sugar plant in the world. With 40,000 hectares of prime irrigable land, a state-of-the-art factory, and new transport infrastructure, Kenana promised to meet the demands of Sudanese people’s famous sweet tooth. For five years the factory produced next [...]

A young, NYC-based novelist, Nick McDonell, asked Alex (his former Harvard prof) if he could accompany him on his recent travels into Sudan. The upshot is a revealing portrait of Alex and his work, published in next month’s Harper’s Magazine: “The Activist: Alex de Waal among the war criminals.” NOTE: Harper’s subscription required.

In 2004, Marcus Bleasdale visited Chad and parts of Darfur and took a series of compelling black and white photographs. Some of them are reproduced in David Elliot Cohen’s volume of essays and photography, What Matters. One of twenty chapters in the book is devoted to Darfur.
Some pictures tell compelling stories, needing hardly any explanatory [...]

The Nigerian minority rights activist and insurgent leader Ken Saro-Wiwa said, “It’s one thing being an issue, another achieving our aims.” Two years afterwards he was hanged—he fatally misjudged the power of western publicity in the face of a thuggish government. His Ogoni people have won only a marginally better deal. Darfurians may come to [...]

The reaction to the likely indictment of President al-Bashir stands as a microcosm for the international response to the Darfur crisis: there is a lot of noise and there are many actors with good intentions, but their interests and strategies differ so starkly that their combined voices appear incoherent and ultimately cancel each other out. [...]

It has been unfazed by the turmoil in US financial markets; but Sudan faces a bigger exogenous toxic threat to its stability if the demand by the International Criminal Court prosecutor to arrest Omar al-Bashir, Sudan’s president, succeeds. Supporters of the move, like Save Darfur Coalition, Amnesty International and other activist groups, argue charging President [...]

The Sudanese polity runs on political credit notes. The big issues are constantly deferred because the political price of coming to a decision is too high, with cash paid only for interim settlements to try to manage the crisis. Over the last five and a half years, the government in Khartoum has not wanted to [...]

On September 12, the UN Secretary-General released the UN/EU midterm review of the UN and EU missions in Chad. A key finding of the review was the deterioration of the security situation in eastern Chad in the past six months. While the review notes that EUFOR’s presence was beginning to have a positive effect, the [...]

Yesterday’s meeting of the AU Peace and Security Council, held in New York, confirmed Africa’s push-back against the ICC. As feared by African human rights activists, one result of the indictment against President Omar al Bashir is that Africa has lost confidence in the ICC and is taking rapid steps to become a zone free [...]

Sudan should not count on an Article 16 deferral at the UN Security Council. The diplomatic maneuvers and rumors do not add up to a coherent plan to stop the ICC indictment of President Omar al Bashir from going ahead.
Last week, the text of the ICC Prosecutor’s public application for an arrest warrant against President [...]