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5 Stories You May Have Missed This Week

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5 Stories You May Have Missed This Week

Posted by Mollie Zapata on April 27, 2013

5 Stories You May Have Missed This Week

Here at Enough, we often swap emails with interesting articles and feature stories that we come across in our favorite publications and on our favorite websites. We wanted to share some of these stories with you as part of our effort to keep you up to date on what you need to know in the world of anti-genocide and crimes against humanity work.

There Is a Country, a new book now available for pre-order at the McSweeney’s store, is a collection of eight stories by South Sudanese authors.  This is the first collection of stories from the new country. “In vivid, gripping prose, There Is a Country’s stories explore youth and love, life and death: a first glimpse of what South Sudanese literature has to offer.”

Elephant poaching levels are currently at their worst in a decade, and seizures of illegal ivory are at their highest level in years. In an article titled “Ivory Worship,” National Geographic Magazine explores the importance of ivory worldwide, focusing on its use in various religious icons made and traded primarily in the Philippines,  Thailand, and China, but sourced from poachers in Africa.

Dylan Kissane, Professor of International Politics at CEFAM in Lyon, France, uses the wars in the Congo as a central case study to illustrate the silencing of women in international discourse. She shows her students two videos: ‘Rape as a Weapon of War in Congo‘ and ‘Congo Soldiers Explain Why They Rape’ to encourage discussion on rape as a war crime and explore why women’s experiences in war are silenced.

In “The Stuff of Hope,” Mediar emergency relief worker explores life and the meaning of possessions in the Mina Camp, a “transit” point along the Sudan-South Sudan border.

Yet the returnees are like refugees twice over. They fled to Khartoum and other northern cities for safety when the war between the north and the south was at its peak several years ago. They built a new life for themselves there. And now they are no longer welcome, finding themselves on the wrong side of the brand new international border…. A recent article in the New York Times  encourages people to live with less. Minimalism in the West is something we aspire to but struggle to realise. Here in chronically underdeveloped South Sudan, minimalism is a goal that no one aspires to but most people realise. You won’t hear the mantra of ‘less is more’ uttered by any self-respecting new citizen of this nascent nation. Most are already succeeding at living on remarkably little, already proof of the astonishing capacity for survival of human beings. 

Neal Conan of NPR’s Talk of the Nation interviewed Patrick Symmes, author of Outside magazine’s April article on South Sudan’s development and potential (or lack thereof) as a tourist destination. They cover a range of topics including Sudan’s natural beauty, history of war, development potential, oil exports, poaching, and resilient people.