Darfur: A Short History of a Long War and Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide

Extract

Darfur: A Short History of a Long War. By Julie Flint and Alex de Waal. New York: Zed Books, 2005. 176p. $60.00 cloth, $19.99 paper.

Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide. By Gérard Prunier. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. 232p. $24.00.

In the last two years, the Darfur region in western Sudan has moved from relative international obscurity to become a symbol of humanitarian crisis and mass violence. Political scientists who research genocide, ethnic conflict, civil war, humanitarianism, and African politics all have taken interest in the region, and Darfur is likely to command scholarly attention in years to come. Yet the academic literature on the region remains thin. To date, scholars have relied primarily on journalistic accounts and human rights reports, which detail the violence but, by their nature, provide only cursory historical background. With the publication of these two short but informative books, Darfur's political history and the path to mass violence are substantially clearer. That said, the books are not designed to build theories of ethnic violence or genocide, nor do the authors explicitly engage in hypotheses testing. The books are useful primarily as detailed, lucid case histories from two sets of well-informed observers.