Social Science Research Council

With 13,000 humanitarian workers and a hundred relief agencies, Darfur hosts the largest humanitarian operation in the world. The aid apparatus started to be deployed in Western Sudan in mid-2004 in a context of acutely high mortality among civilian displaced living in camps and those remaining in rural areas. Since that time – thanks to [...]

First of all, I would like the thank Zoe Marriage, Michael Barnett and Angela Raven-Roberts for taking the trouble to read the book, and for their insightful, critical and sympathetic comments.
A large part of what I am trying to get across in the Complex Emergencies book, as Michael Barnett correctly perceives, is that the aims [...]

Jim Lewis has a fascinating article in today’s New York Times–in the Architecture section. It’s called “The Exigent City” and poses the question, why are refugee camps and IDP camps designed how they are? According to the most recent estimates, refugees stay in camps for an average of seventeen years–so that camps are far from [...]

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 equally correct statement that Khartoum is [...]

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 the same trends in terms of [...]

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 Mark Duffield

Munzoul Assal has provided an useful and provocative analysis of urbanisation in Sudan and its social and political implications. In response, Asif Faiz has provided a different inflection. Taken together, they usefully mark out what is at stake in this discussion. In developing this idea, I want to begin by adding to the views of Munzoul.

Posted on behalf of Munzoul Assal
Sudan is one of the fastest urbanizing countries in the world. Population figures show that the country was already 40% urbanized in 2005—and that figure excludes the displaced of Darfur and the large numbers of unregistered migrants and squatters in Khartoum. Darfur today is approximately one third urban, one third [...]