From the monthly archives: January 2019

Think the word ‘famine’ and pay attention to what scenes come to mind. The enormous eyes and distended stomach of a suffering child; a parched landscaped; the rush of humanitarian actors, beating back the tide of death? Perhaps, it is a more specific image: from Sudan, Kevin Carter’s infamous image of a bird of prey, […]

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Protestors in Sudan are calling for the resignation of President Bashir. Will he listen? Alex de Waal joins an expert panel for an hour-long discussion on BBC’s, The Real Story.

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The history of twenty-five years of international criminal tribunals suggests that few culprits of starvation crimes would be indicted and fewer still tried and convicted. Even a successful prosecution would be mostly symbolic, as most perpetrators would escape. But this should not discourage us. Criminalizing starvation has many ramifications. It allows us to shift the shame of starvation from the victim to the perpetrator, to explore restorative justice including reparations, and to develop guarantees of non-recurrence.

The ultimate objective isn’t putting a villain in jail, but making the infliction of starvation so morally toxic that it is unthinkable.

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Bridget Conley has a chapter, “Memorial Museums at the Intersection of Politics, Exhibition and Trauma: A study of the Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum,” in the newly published, Museum Activism (eds. Robert R. Janes and Richard Sandell, Routledge, 2019). Below is from the Introduction:

Activism, broadly defined as intentional and public provocation of behaviors […]

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A new occasional paper by Alex de Waal, Pax Africana or Middle East Security Alliance in the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea? examines the peace and security challenges facing the Horn of Africa in the context of assertive military and political engagement from the Arabian Peninsular.

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The only way that a dictatorship has ever been overthrown in Sudan is by non-violent popular protest. The record of two ‘Khartoum Springs’ in 1964 and 1985 inspires people across the country to turn out, day after day, hoping to achieve a third. I personally hope they achieve that goal. The Sudanese people deserve a […]

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