by Don Cheadle & John Prendergast
An Academy Award ® -nominated actor and a renowned human rights activist team up to change the tragic course of history in the Sudan with readers' help.
While Don Cheadle was filming Hotel Rwanda, a new crisis had already erupted in Darfur, in nearby Sudan. In September 2004, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell termed the atrocities being committed there "genocide"—and yet two years later things have only gotten worse. 3.5 million Sudanese are going hungry, 2.5 million have been displaced by violence, and more than 200,000 have died in Darfur to date.
Both shocked and energized by this ongoing tragedy, Cheadle teamed up with leading activist John Prendergast to focus the world's attention. Not on Our Watch, their empowering book, offers six strategies readers themselves can implement: Raise Awareness, Raise Funds, Write a Letter, Call for Divestment, Start an Organization, and Lobby the Government. Each of these small actions can make a huge difference in the fate of a nation, and a people—not only in Darfur, but in other crisis zones such as Somalia, Congo, and northern Uganda.
by Timothy Carney, Victoria Butler, and Michael Freeman
Sudan: The Land and the People presents the whole of Africa's largest country. Nearly one-third the size of the United States, Sudan sprawls over more than one million square miles. Here for more than a thousand years Arabs and Africans have collided and blended to produce people who share a turbulent history and rich cultural heritage. Arab and African alike divide into tribes.
by Francis M. Deng
Deng's taught at Yale and is now at Brookings. After I'd finished the book a friend suggested that, if time is precious, the introduction and last chapter give you the essence—a helpful if, in my case, belated observation. [TB]
The civil war that has raged intermittently in the Sudan since independence in 1956 is a conflict of contrasting and seemingly incompatible identities in the Northern and Southern parts of the country. Identity is seen as a function of how people identify themselves and are identified by others in terms of race, ethnicity, culture, language, and religion. By a Sudanese about Sudan, Francis Deng is currently Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide to the Secretary General of the United Nations.
by William Easterly
No one who attacks the humanitarian aid establishment is going to win any popularity contests, but, neither, it seems, is that establishment winning any contests with the people it is supposed to be helping. Easterly, an NYU economics professor and a former research economist at the World Bank, brazenly contends that the West has failed, and continues to fail, to enact its ill-formed, utopian aid plans because, like the colonialists of old, it assumes it knows what is best for everyone.
by Julie Flint and Alex DeWaal
This book details the history of Darfur, its conflicts, and the designs on the region by the governments in Khartoum and Tripoli. It investigates the identity of the infamous "Janjawiid" militia and the nature of the insurrection, charts the unfolding crisis and the international response, and concludes by asking what the future holds in store.
by Samantha Power
Power, a former journalist for U.S. News and World Report and the Economist and now the executive director of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights, offers an uncompromising and disturbing examination of 20th Century acts of genocide and U.S responses to them. In clean, unadorned prose, Power revisits the Turkish genocide directed at Armenians in 1915-1916, the Holocaust, Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, Iraqi attacks on Kurdish populations, Rwanda, and Bosnian "ethnic cleansing," and in doing so, argues that U.S. intervention has been shamefully inadequate.
by Gerard Prunier
In mid-2004 the Darfur crisis in Western Sudan forced itself onto the center stage of world affairs. Arab Janjaweed militias, who support the Khartoum government, have engaged in a campaign of violence against the residents of Western Sudan. A formerly obscure "tribal conflict" in the heart of Africa has escalated into the first genocide of the twenty-first century.
