[…] 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 design, it isn’t a comprehensive narration of the entire conflict, but what is lost on that front is more than made up for by the breadth of audience it will reach as a result. […]
Interviewing Vice President Riek Machar while covering the South Sudan referendum for The Washington Post
A backgrounder on how climate cases came before four international courts, with a summary of issues each court has been asked to address, offers a one-stop resource to refer to as opinions are issued in the weeks and months ahead. Read … Read more >>
The silence emanating from the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Karim Khan, is growing louder by the hour. Three full days after Hamas perpetrated atrocities inside Israel and took civilian hostages into Gaza, Khan has … Read more >>
In its public-facing quarterly financial reports, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, labels all countries in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East as the “Rest of World.” Although one-third of Facebook’s … Read more >>
B.C. L. Rev (2022). Online intermediaries are omnipresent. Each day, across the globe, the corporations that run these platforms execute policies and practices that serve their profit model, typically by sustaining user engagement. … Read more >>
Harv. Int'l L. J. (2021). Social media platforms are the public square of our era – a reality that has been entrenched by the widespread closure of physical public spaces in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. And this online space is global … Read more >>
Rebecca Hamilton, User-Generated Evidence, Col. J. Transnat'l L. (2018) Around the world, people are using their smartphones to document atrocities. Smartphone apps designed to allow Users to record material that will meet evidentiary … Read more >>
More on the ‘war is over’ comments
So my mate Rob Crilly has written a post I need to respond to regarding my remarks on General Agwai’s comments. Maybe I’m missing something, but I’m not sure we are substantively in quite as much disagreement as Rob would like to think. He agrees with most of my comments, before concluding “But Bec charmingly then blows it…[when she writes] ‘Bottom line: I wouldn’t say Gen. Agwai’s comments are “wrong” but rather very much beside the point.'”
Rob continues: “The whole problem with the international effort to save Darfur has been this sort of misguided analysis. How you understand the conflict in Darfur is central to devising the right solutions. To continue to believe that this is a genocide or a war means we will continue to focus on no-fly zones, peacekeepers and arresting President Bashir. . . . The crisis in Sudan’s western region is humanitarian, needing humanitarian not military solutions. As General Agwai’s analysis makes clear, banditry, water and local issues need to be tackled if Darfur is to find security.”
I agree you need the right analysis to get to the right solutions. I also agree, that “banditry, water and local issues need to be tackled if Darfur is to find security,” as should be clear from the comments in my original post. However if Rob is actually arguing that the crisis is solely humanitarian (which is what his post reads like, but I’m not sure it’s what he really meant) then that would be a clear point of disagreement between us, because I think the crisis is also very much political.
In addition to humanitarian solutions, what Darfur needs more than anything else is a truly inclusive peace agreement (that includes the Arab groups as independent actors, rather than assuming – incorrectly – that their interests will be taken into account by the government). Humanitarian solutions are a very important stop-gap measure, but a sustainable peace in Darfur will not be achieved just by addressing the humanitarian ‘symptoms’ – underlying causes must be addressed as well.
When I said the General Agwai’s comments on ‘the war is over’ were beside the point, I was not saying that Darfur needs a military solution – in fact I was saying the exact opposite. War or not war (I maintain my point about the difficulty in distinguishing a respite in hostilities from the end of them) there are very real issues on the ground to be resolved, and focusing on the “war” dimension (which has not been “the” issue in Darfur for quite some time now) shifts necessary focus from these key issues.
P.S. Rob has a claim at the bottom of his post about Darfur advocates pursuing an anti-Muslim agenda. Perhaps he is basing his comment on the argument about the relative dearth of advocacy on Palestine compared to Darfur, but I am yet to meet a Darfur activist with an anti-Muslim agenda. As Rob well knows, those on all sides of the conflict in Darfur are Muslim. Anyway – have sought clarification via the comments on his website.