Social Science Research Council

An obituary by Julie Flint and Alex de Waal.
One of the most disturbing images to have come out of Sudan in the wake of JEM’s attempt to overthrow the government has been that of the tortured body of a lawyer in his forties, Jamali Hassan Jalal al Din, apparently beaten to death by government forces [...]

As more details emerge about JEM’s assault on the national capital at the weekend, it is becoming clear that this was a solo operation by JEM directed by its leader Khalil Ibrahim. Its aim was nothing less than taking power.
The role of Chadian President Idriss Deby is now clearer. For two years, Deby armed [...]

Saturday’s battle in the streets of Omdurman was a defeat for the prospects of peace, democracy and human rights. The calculations of the leadership of the Justice and Equality Movement are puzzling–the attack looks much like an act of reckless military escalation, bold and daring no doubt, but possibly suicidal. But it would be surprising [...]

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 [...]

Posted on behalf of James Morton.
Darfur has suffered more than most from the international community’s attention deficit disorder. It only commands that attention at times of crisis: the sahel drought of the 1968 to 1970, the Band Aid famine of 1984/5 and the current conflict. As each crisis recedes, important lessons are forgotten [...]

April’s issue of African Affairs contains an interesting article by Marielle Debos.
Entitled “Fluid Loyalties in a Regional Crisis: Chadian ‘Ex-Liberators’ in the Central African Republic” it examines a neglected pattern of the regional crisis in Darfur, Chad, and the Central African Republic, namely the cross-border activities of combatants with fluid loyalties. The trajectories [...]

Robert Bates’ When Things Fell Apart: State Failure in Late Century Africa is a seminal contribution to understanding state crises Africa.
Bates’ thesis is that in the late 20th century, sub-Saharan African states suffered a catastrophic lowering of public revenues (brought about by a combination of poverty and fiscal austerity measures), that caused rulers with relatively [...]

Overview
1. The NCP-SPLM partnership for the CPA stands at a critical juncture. The NCP sees the 2009 elections as its route to internal and international legitimacy and is hoping that problems with the census and elections can be pinned on others (the SPLM, the Darfurians). Both parties have failed to find a compromise to the Abyei [...]

This post was contributed by Mark Duffield.
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 [...]

This post was contributed by Asif Faiz.
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 [...]