Social Science Research Council

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 [...]

A report by Jérôme Tubiana for the Small Arms Survey, “The Chad-Sudan Proxy War and the “Darfurization” of Chad: Myths and Reality,” provides excellent analysis of the Chadian conflict. It is a fine succinct run down of the domestic crisis in Chad and the interstate war by proxy between Chad and Sudan, including a compendium [...]

Posted on behalf of Johan Brosché
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 [...]

Powers of Persuasion, a new publication from Conciliation Resources is a series of essays on the role of sanctions, incentives and conditionalities in peacemaking. Alongside theoretical, historical and comparative essays by leading figures in the field, there are case studies of a number of conflicts from four continents, including an analysis of the Darfur peace [...]

Posted on behalf of Sean O’Fahey
War in Darfur and the Search for Peace is by far the best and most authoritative introduction to the Darfur crisis that I have read. But so fast-moving is the crisis, even since the publication of nthis book last year, that it is increasingly inaccurate to talk of [...]

The current conflict in Chad and Darfur is a reprise of the “thirty years’ war” that embroiled Chad, Libya and Darfur from the mid-1960s until the early 1990s. This was not only an important sideshow in the Cold War–the CIA’s biggest covert operation in Africa in the 1980s–but has had a profound and lasting impact on the whole region. Millard Burr and Robert Collins’ book, Darfur: The Long Road to Disaster, tells the story–but needs a new edition.

Two new scholarly books help us understand how people in Sudan’s peripheries survive—or don’t—and place the frontierland governance in a deep historical context. One is Wendy James’s ethnography of the Uduk people of Blue Nile during the last two decades of war and flight, and the other is Martin Daly’s history of Darfur.
Wendy James’s three [...]

Munzoul Assal and a small group of Sudanese collaborators have compiled the most extensive bibliography of social science research on Darfur available to date. An Annotated Bibliography of Social Research on Darfur is the outcome of cooperation between the University of Bergen and the researchers at the University of Khartoum. This is an essential resource [...]