Books to Help Understand Sudan

Humbled to see Fighting for Darfur recommended to NYT readers, over a decade after I wrote it. I just wish its lessons weren’t still so painfully relevant: “And for a fair-minded but critical look at the foreign response to the catastrophic war in Darfur at the beginning of this century, I recommend “Fighting for Darfur: Public Action and the Struggle to Stop Genocide,” by Rebecca Hamilton. She skillfully reported from refugee camps and political negotiations where Sudanese citizens struggled to stop a war that posed an existential threat to many of their communities. The book juxtaposes those efforts against the foreign grass-roots campaigns in which activists, well-intentioned but often blind to realities on the ground — and always safely insulated from the consequences of their actions — tried to pressure the international community into halting the violence.”