Category: Blog

Members of the Sudanese diaspora turned out in front of the White House last Friday for a rally to raise awareness about the continued violence in the disputed region. The passionate group, called together by Abyei Solidarity and the Abyei Association in the United States, hoped to encourage the U.S. government to utilize its resources to ensure peace and to support the full implementation of the Abyei Protocol before the Comprehensive Peace Agreement expires in July ...

Tomorrow, Tuesday, March 29, you can be a part of the conversation I have been having with teachers and students in Goz Amer refugee camp in eastern Chad, home to thousands of people who fled Darfur. This is an amazing opportunity to connect and interact with them as they share their stories and talk about their school ...

Three and a half months from now, the world's newest nation will be born: the Republic of Southern Sudan. Heady times for a people who have fought for 50 years for freedom, and won the right to vote in what was a peaceful independence referendum in January. But this road to freedom is filled with danger points, none more so than Abyei, the hotly disputed Connecticut-sized territory wedged within the border between North and South. Mia Farrow and I wrote this post based on our recent trips to Abyei ...

After stalling out last year, peace negotiations on the troubled region of Darfur are set to begin again next month. The A.U.-U.N. mediation team announced that talks between the Sudanese government and various rebel groups would start on April 18, and while timelines have carried little weight in previous rounds of the Doha process, this week saw some encouraging movement by rebel groups to consolidate their positions heading into the talks. The paper commitments don’t necessarily instill much optimism, but some calculations may be shifting along with developments in the wider region ...

The Abyei region, long anticipated to be a trouble spot in post-referendum Sudan, has lived up to the expectations, creating an impasse in high-level political talks and erupting in skirmishes on the ground between various forces loyal to the North and the South. Enough field researcher Mayank Bubna has made numerous trips to the contested region since South Sudan’s vote in January, and he filed a new field dispatch based on interviews there ...

A weekly round-up of must-read stories, posted every Friday ...

In this guest post, filmmakers Michael Pertnoy and Michael Kleiman announce the release of "The Last Survivor," a film that follows the lives of survivors of four different genocides and mass atrocities – the Holocaust, Rwanda, Darfur, and Congo. During Genocide Prevention Month in April, they hope to deploy activists across the United States to organize screenings and mobilize people to join the the movement to prevent genocide and mass atrocities ...

Guest blogger and student activist Ben Brockman discusses his shock at the unacknowledged history of horrors in Congo and how his time studying abroad got him thinking about the complicity of electronics users in today's conflict. Now, Brockman is helping lead the University of Pennsylvania to take a strong stance on conflict minerals ...

Two months since South Sudan’s overwhelming vote for secession, a debate has heated up over the type of political arrangements that will govern the soon-to-be new state. The conversation—largely between the ruling Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, or SPLM, and opposition parties and civil society—has centered around who and what will govern the South during its transitional phase, which lasts from independence on July 9 until new elections are held ...

In this piece, cross posted from Congo Siasa, Jason Stearns describes some campus-based projects aimed at tackling the conflict minerals trade in eastern Congo and what it will take for them to have a positive impact on ending the conflict ...