Following a flurry of media reports indicating that some South African civil society organizations want President Zuma to distance himself from last week’s AU decision to oppose the arrest warrant for President al-Bashir, as well as a poll released yesterday indicating that the general public …

Following a series of posts by Tim Nonn and Rob Crilly, today’s contribution comes from Alex Meixner – Senior Director for Policy and Government Relations at Save Darfur. In this quite lengthy post, Meixner deals with the question of how U.S.-based  advocates can maintain political …

Fellow bloggers over at Change.org have been running a couple of posts trying to get at the thorny question of just what the impact of the NGO expulsions has been on the provision of aid in Darfur. It’s been a question of intrigue ever since …

Rob Crilly is a British journalist I met in Nairobi. He has spent the past five years covering Darfur, and has his first book coming out later this year, entitled Saving Darfur: Everyone’s Favourite African War. He and I disagree on several things (the value …

On Saturday, the US Mission to the AU hosted a screening of Obama’s Ghana speech for AU staff, and a friend who works there invited me along. With rain delaying the speech, there was time for an unofficial tour.

To start us off, here is Tim Nonn’s piece – unabashedly focused on the question of what advocates can do to strengthen the movement and increase political will, it does not attempt to come up with policy solutions. Engaging with this within those parameters:

Alex de Waal and Nick Kristof come from relatively different ends of the Darfur advocacy spectrum. Yet last week de Waal’s Making Sense of Darfur piece asked “Can Sudan Activism Transform Itself for the Obama Era?”  and last month Kristof’s On The Ground blog began …

Walking up the stairs to the office of the Acting Head of the AU’s Conflict Management Centre you come across multiple, almost life-size photographs, of AMIS officers proudly standing to attention in El Fasher.

ADDIS ABABA – I spent this afternoon in the Plenary Hall of the African Union, watching Obama’s Ghana speech and listening to the responses it drew from some hundred of the AU and local embassy staff in attendance.