Overview This essay develops an analysis of the Somali conflict that stands apart from the generally accepted wisdom that the country has fractured along clan lines, because of the inherent incapacity of the clan system of politics to provide the basis for a modern state. There is a contrary argument to be made that, even […]
Latest posts
How Genocides End
Averting Genocide in the Nuba Mountains, Sudan
by Alex De Waal
Introduction The counterinsurgency fought by the Government of Sudan against the rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in the Nuba Mountains of central Sudan during the early 1990s was not only exceptionally violent, but also aimed at depopulating the area of civilians. Not only did the government aim to defeat the SPLA forces […]
How Genocides End
Reflections on How Genocidal Killings are Brought to an End
by Alex De Waal and Bridget Conley-Zilkic
Genocide and the canon of historical tragedy Stepping from 14th Street in Washington, DC into the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the visitor to the main exhibition is immediately placed in the shoes of the soldiers of the U.S. Army as they liberated the concentration camp at Dachau in 1944. The personal recollections of General Eisenhower […]
Understanding Katrina
An Imperfect Storm: Narratives of Calamity in a Liberal-Technocratic Age
by Alex De Waal
Left speechless America is distressed by Hurricane Katrina. Two weeks after the hurricane struck Louisiana and Mississippi, America is just beginning to emerge from the phase of raw bewilderment, in which the crisis is not just a threat to lives and livelihoods but also to the nation’s political imagination. Watching some television footage in an […]
Contemporary Conflicts
Chasing Ghosts: Alex de Waal on the Rise and Fall of Militant Islam in the Horn of Africa
by Alex De Waal
Three of the suspects in the attempted bombings in London on 21 July were born in the Horn of Africa. One, Yasin Hassan Omar, was born in Somalia; a second, Osman Hussein, in Ethiopia; and a third, Muktar Said Ibrahim, in Eritrea. Ten years ago, when Osama bin Laden lived in Khartoum, the Horn of […]
Contemporary Conflicts
Review of Gerard Prunier, Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide, Hurst and Co.
by Alex De Waal
Ahmat Acyl Aghbash is known to few, and then mostly for his grisly end—he stepped backwards into the spinning propellers of his Cessna aeroplane in 1982. His last words can only be guessed. His legacy is the Janjawiid militia, now infamous for genocidal atrocity in Darfur. The plane was a gift from Libya’s Colonel Muammar […]
Contemporary Conflicts
Who are the Darfurians? Arab and African Identities, Violence and External Engagement
by Alex De Waal
This paper is an attempt to explain the processes of identity formation that have taken place in Darfur over the last four centuries. The basic story is of four overlapping processes of identity formation, each of them primarily associated with a different period in the region’s history. The four are the ‘Sudanic identities’ associated with […]