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 [...]

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 [...]

Posted on behalf of Sara Pantuliano
Many thanks to Alex de Waal for posting my briefing on land issues in Sudan on his blog last month and for stimulating so many interesting contributions on such a critical topic. I have just returned from Juba where I have been carrying out research on the reintegration of IDPs [...]

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 [...]

Posted on behalf of AbdouMaliq Simone
The discussion that has taken place on this weblog over the last weeks concerning urbanization in the Sudan has raised many critical points to which I do not take issue. These discussions have provided incisive attention to how the complex and multiple historical trajectories—of movement, political mobilization, and economic [...]

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 [...]

Posted on behalf of James Okuk

To avoid the continuity of conflict over land and its resources in the Sudan, it should be constitutionally and legally confirmed that "land belongs to the community" and that "community land should not be sold." Community land for investment can be leased out and not sold out at all to [...]

Here’s a paradox: the Sudan government and the armed movements–both SLAs and JEM–reached agreement on the land clauses in the Darfur Peace Agreement in the weeks leading up to the conclusion of those talks in May 2006. This should be a cause for optimism–a rare case of actual agreement between Khartoum and the rebels. But [...]

Posted on behalf of Abdal Basit Saeed
In the Sudanese context of prolonged conflict, mobility of pastoral groups into the transitional areas such as South Kordofan and Blue Nile and the drive for compensation for the dispossession of lands where petroleum is found, rural land is being gradually and consistently transformed from communal use to private [...]