The Genocide in Darfur

The purpose of this lesson is for students to learn about the genocide in Darfur (Sudan), and to explore the reasons why the world has not interceded when at the end of Holocaust the international community said “never again.” Referring to the Genocide Convention, students debate the obligations of the international community to intervene in Darfur, and discuss the resistance of world governments to respond.

The Darfur referral to the International Criminal Court demonstrates the limits of international criminal justice as an agent of wartime deterrence evident in the experience of the ICTY in Bosnia. First, international tribunals cannot deter criminal violence as long as states and international institutions are unwilling to take enforcement actions against perpetrators. Second, the key to ending impunity in an ongoing war lies less in legal deterrence than in political strategies of diplomacy, coercion, or force.

From the Convention on the Prevention of Genocide (Genocide Convention) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights2 in 1948, to the Responsibility to Protect in 2001, the modern human rights revolution has produced an extraordinary range of international norms that articulate the rights of human beings within and across state boundaries." Human rights assert the radical idea that everyone everywhere shares an equal birthright of dignity that should be recognized in law and politics as matters of principle and practice.

The crisis in Darfur (Sudan), which sparked in February 2003, only caught the United Nations' attention in Spring 2004. Questions emerged as to whether the conflict between the rebels and the government was simply insurgency warfare or, in fact, concealed a genocide carried out by the Arab, Muslim-led government against the Animist and Christian-African population.

In the many considerations of visual culture in geography, there are few works concerned with the visual culture of contemporary geopolitics. In seeking to rectify this lacuna, this paper outlines elements of a research project to consider the way visuality is a pivotal assemblage in the production of contemporary geopolitics.

Save Darfur, arguably the largest international social movement since antiapartheid, has had an important impact in shaping the international response to the Darfur conflict: the world's largest humanitarian operation, alongside one of the largest and most expensive peacekeeping missions and a plethora of special envoys and mediators. For the first time, the US government has declared an ongoing conflict to be genocide and permitted the UN Security Council to refer a case to the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Nearly 400,000 Africans may have been killed in racially motivated, lethally destructive, state supported, and militarily unjustified attacks on the farms and villages of the Darfur region of Sudan. Using victimization survey data collected from Darfurian survivors living in refugee camps in Chad, and drawing on conflict theory, we present evidence that the Sudanese government has directly supported violent killings and rapes in a lethally destructive exercise of power and control.

Darfur is a region set apart, huge, remote and poverty stricken. Its people are today locked in conflict, terrorized by the lawless Arab militia known as janjaweed. As M.W. Daly explains, the roots of the crisis lie deep in Darfur's past. Tracing the story from the origins of the Fur state in the seventeenth century to Darfur's annexation by the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, he shows how years of neglect left the region unprepared for independence. This complex story is told with compassion, insight and a strong sense of place. (ISBN-13: 978-0521699624)