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When Mohamed al Dabi, retired general, was sent as Presidential Representative to Geneina in January 1999 he insisted that he be allowed to don his army uniform. ‘The people will only respect me if I wear khaki,’ al Dabi said. Khaki was the color of the British...
I was lucky enough to have benefited from the many astute reviews of Saviors and Survivors before I read it, which provided me with a caution to its weaknesses. Yet by the end of the book I was convinced that these weaknesses were less relevant than is strengths, and...
Mahmood Mamdani, May 4, 2009 Never having been the focus of blog attention, I could not have realized what a privilege it would be to have such an extended focus on my book. I can only thank all those who have spent hours, in a few cases may be even days, poring over...
In his post to open the debate on Mahmood Mamdani’s Saviors and Survivors, Alex de Waal mentioned the common theoretical threads that link Mamdani’s books. In addition to this neat theoretical project, a consistent methodological claim has marked Mamdani’s oeuvre. In...
My aim in this piece is to focus on Mamdani’s major thesis, examining several of his supporting arguments in turn. I will thus try to avoid contesting Mamdani’s facts unto themselves (as many other contributors have already done this already), except where they are...
I am sceptical as to how useful these kinds of exchanges are, but let me just comment on two issues, raise a few general questions and end with a mea culpa and some praise. Professor Mamdani questions my understanding of “Arabization”, proposing the definition, “the...
In this final section of what has been a three-part response, I would like to address three issues. The first concerns that of the suffering of the victims. One critic says that I “seem to overlook the daily suffering of the Darfurians” [Abd al-Wahab Abdalla]; another...
Someday – if this has not been done already – someone will add up the number of works on Darfur published since, say, 2003 and compare it with the number published in the thousand years before then. The result is unlikely to surprise Mahmood Mamdani, one of whose...
I have long been a fan of Mahmood Mamdani. His new book Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror is very critical of the Western approach to Darfur. In brief, he accuses advocacy campaigns like Save Darfur of making the achievement of peace in...