March 29, 2024

Global Advocacy: How useful are #hashtags and “likes”?

I spoke with Amy Costello at Tiny Spark podcasts about global advocacy movements and the challenges of mobilizing the goodwill of volunteers in a way that translates into real change for the people they are advocating on behalf of. You can listen to the podcast here. And more generally I’d encourage folks to check out […]

Parallel processes

Enough has posted an interesting play-by-play of the Doha process that is worth the read. It states that “The African Union-United Nations mediators, the Qataris, and the U.S. special envoy all seem to support the parallel negotiation track.” What Enough is referring to when they talk about a “parallel negotiating track” is that the Doha […]

Four years on, nothing learned

“Hey, I heard on the radio that there’s a peace agreement for Darfur!” was the excited message a non-Darfur-obsessed friend (I do have a few)  greeted me with yesterday. “Hmm” I replied, un-enthused – clearly not the response my friend was expecting. At the time I hadn’t read the actual agreement just signed by the […]

Review of Rob Crilly’s “Saving Darfur”

[This review is cross-posted on Alex de Waal’s blog, Making Sense of Sudan.] Rob Crilly‘s book, Saving Darfur, is unique among the books on Darfur to date for the way he handles the very tough balance between conveying the complexities of the situation, while managing to keep the book accessible to a non-expert audience. By […]

Blog-free month

Hi everyone I’m entering into a blog-free month as I concentrate on book drafting. ln so doing I’ll miss all the commemorations (and commiserations) that have already begun around the fifth anniversary of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. At this time I find myself reflecting on my first trip to South Sudan in 2004, six months […]

Reactions to Darfuristan (II)

Today, a reaction to Darfuristan from Sean Brooks, who works at Save Darfur and also blogs in his personal capacity. Guest post by Sean Brooks Ben Wallace-Wells’ essay on Darfur ends with the message “Khartoum is still Khartoum,” implying that despite all of the international activism surrounding the conflict in Darfur over the past six […]

Reactions to Darfuristan (I)

This response in from journalist Rob Crilly – who has just finished writing his own book on Darfur – regarding the Darfuristan piece in Rolling Stone. Guest post by Rob Crilly This has been a difficult year for the Darfur advocacy movement – an odd mishmash of evangelical Christians, Jews, black liberals and human rights […]

Darfuristan

I’m keen to see the reactions from the advocacy community to “Darfuristan” – a 12-page article by Ben Wallace-Wells in Rolling Stone magazine this month (if you’re interested in sending me a post on it, please email!). The title sums up Wallace-Well’s take on the situation beautifully – Darfur as quagmire. He begins the article […]

We don’t know what is on the list of benchmarks, but we can tell what is not

It has been several weeks since U.S. activists made a concerted effort to get the collapse of SGBV services in Darfur onto the radar of Secretary Clinton, General Gration and Ambassador Rice. Letters were sent, meetings were held, follow-up was provided. I wouldn’t have expected anything to actually shift on the ground within this timeframe, […]

Postscript: Abdalhaleem’s other function

After reading my previous post a Darfur advocate came back to me with a sound point that deserves incorporation. Namely that in addition to distorting the field in terms of U.S.-based advocacy asks, Abdalhaleem’s comments (and those of the same genre) serve another function – trial ballooning for, in particular, a regional audience. In other […]