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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 second part, I intend to focus on the ideas, practices and politics of the Save Darfur movement. More specifically, I shall respond to three types of criticisms: (a) that I did not think it necessary to speak to responsible persons from Save Darfur before...
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...
In no less than 24 hours since the much anticipated Mamdani-Prendergast debate on Darfur at Columbia University on April 14, bloggers have run amok with all kinds of biased summaries of the event. Reading the Twitter and blog posts, it really sounded like there wasn’t...
A review posted separately of Mahmood Mamdani’s Saviors and Survivors is long enough without further comment on two positions that, however, misapprehend or exaggerate the role that Darfur played in British administrative thinking during the colonial period. These are...
The debate on Mahmood Mamdani’s Saviors and Survivors, Save Darfur and its advocacy and influence is not asking one of the more important questions of those wanting to understand Western responses to conflicts like Darfur. Large scale violence in Darfur exploded in...
June 2009 In his new book Mahmood Mamdani puts the war in Darfur in historical context and challenges the Save Darfur Coalition's characterisation of the conflict and its call for international intervention. He talks to Charlie Kimber You reject the label genocide and...
The Electronic Intifada, 8 June 2009 In Errol Morris's 2004 film The Fog of War, former US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara recalls General Curtis LeMay, the architect of the fire-bombings of Japan during World War II, saying that "if we'd lost the war, we'd all have...
Mahmood Mamdani's Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror is the most ambitious book yet on the Darfur crisis. Unlike the vast majority of other writing on the crisis, which is political science, human rights, or ethnographic narrative,...