The down side first: I found the author’s writing style dense and unclear- Prunier assumes a lot of knowledge on the part of the reader, often referencing things and people without explaining them, so this is definitely not recommended as the first thing to pick up if you’re unfamiliar with the conflict. Unfortunately the third edition is not very well-edited and typos abound. It also really annoys me that he gets the year of the Peace of Westphalia wrong towards the end of the book (it should be 1648, as any first year IR student will be able to tell you.)
An area that stands out as lacking in more critical depth is the colonial policy of the British, which did not exclusively amount to benign neglect but was premised on an assumption of Arab supremacy. Prunier also concludes that today, Sudan poses “no global geopolitical threat,” a statement which should be reconsidered after taking into account the importance of Sudan as a major economic investment for China and its strategic value for Washington in terms of intelligence as an ally in the “war on terror.” It’s also believed that Khartoum has a number of connections with influential Islamists in Somalia.
Also, in attempting to make the argument that Darfur is a 21st genocide and therefore different from past genocides, he tries to set it apart from the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, for example, by saying it’s not as straightforward as they were. It’s true that the situation in Darfur is complex, but presenting it this way obscures the fact that genocides of the twentieth century, including the Holocaust, were also complex. It’s a mistake to ignore the moral and political obfuscation and manipulation that were as much a part of the genocides in Europe and Rwanda (and elsewhere), and the international reactions (or lack thereof) to them, as it is in Sudan.
He also says that “there is no ideological commitment” on the part of the current regime “to do away with” those of African descent in Darfur, but rather that they are “seen as a danger, as an inconvenience that has to be dealt with within the framework of an ideology of Arab superiority camouflaged under a pretense of Islamic brotherhood.” But this kind of phenomenon is also not unique to Darfur. Genocides throughout the twentieth century, and some earlier, grew out of the pretense that the target population was a danger, a threat to national security, etc. Even in Nazi Germany, this was how it got started. It is a classic technique, and often necessary for the purpose of rallying fear and hatred of “the Other” among the population.
Prunier’s observations that “Killing Black Africans… is not an ideology, it is not a systematic policy. It is only an inconvenient necessity,” and that it is in part a component of counter-insurgency, while still constituting genocide, is also not a characteristic unique to Darfur; see Europe’s conquest of the Americas or Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor, for example. His empirical demonstration that the killing is seen as necessary, albeit inconvenient, is enough to prove intent. I really think his attempt to make Darfur unique in this way takes away from the fact that it is so similar to other crimes of this nature.
Having said that, Prunier’s analyses of the roles of various international players- from Gaddafi’s geopolitical posturing and the shifting cross-border alliances between Sudanese and Chadian actors, to the reaction of the international news media and the complicity of the international community- are thorough and well documented.
He makes excellent points about the fact that continued reference to the violence and its repercussions as a “humanitarian crisis” exacerbates the lack of an effective response to it, a mistake that has been made over and over again from Biafra in 1967 to the war in the Congo in the 1990s. As former High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata put it, “there are no humanitarian solutions to humanitarian problems… Humanitarian action may create space for political action but on its own can never substitute for it.” He also makes the point that the semantic debate in the West over whether the violence constitutes genocide or not is of little concern to those experiencing it and that it points to issues of compassion fatigue in the West, where genocide is worthy of our attention but other crimes against humanity are not. These are important points and indicative of the challenges that continue to confront organizations that engage in conflict management, peacekeeping, and international justice and jurisprudence.
Prunier points to post-colonial guilt as a particularly significant culprit, combined with a lack of interest in Africa and demands from Khartoum, which resulted in the buck getting passed to the African Union- which has neither the resources to deal with the problem nor, apparently, the political will to pursue al-Bashir. And while highly critical of the UN, Prunier does not fail to point out that Member States often demand action from the UN without providing it with the mandate or resources to do so, making it easy to scapegoat the intergovernmental organization for failure to take effective action. This same point was made by Romeo Dallaire, commander of the peacekeeping mission in Rwanda before and during the genocide, in his excellent memoir Shake Hands With the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda.
The book is worth the read for those who do pick it up, despite some of the history being a bit confusing. The last two chapters are especially good, and is where the bulk of his analyses of international actors are. Notably, he makes an interesting prediction that there is a good chance of the tenuous peace between the north and south falling apart between this year and 2011. From my own extensive research on the civil war and from what I can see of the stories coming from Sudan these days, it seems his prediction is not far-fetched.
My general recommendation would be to skim most of the book, or get the history elsewhere, and read the last two chapters, taking some of his conclusions with a grain of salt.
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