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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 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...
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,...