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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...
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...
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...
In the last chapter of Saviors and Survivors, Mahmood Mamdani brings up the war in northern Uganda as a point of comparison with Darfur. Brief as the comparison is, it caught several reviewers’ attention, as well as my own, since the war in northern Uganda has been my...
Several contributors to this blog have disputed Mahmood Mamdani’s arguments about the links between ‘Save Darfur’ (in the wider sense of the mass movement) and the George W. Bush Administration’s ‘global war on terror,’ or conversely supported them. I think there is...
Mahmood Mamdani makes many interesting and persuasive points, but he does nonetheless take a strong position that seems a bit like an apologetic. At the level of macro-political economy of the region, Mamdani has it right. Thus, I now am forced to view my own very...
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...
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...