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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...
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...
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...
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...