Mamdani and the Dafur Debate

Alex De Waal on Saviors and Survivors

by Alex de Waal Mahmood Mamdani's Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror is the most ambitious book yet on the Darfur crisis. Unlike the vast majority of other writing on the crisis, which is political science, human rights, or ethnographic narrative, specific to the Darfurian or the Sudanese situation, Mamdani places Darfur in deep and broad world-historical contexts.
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The Darfur diversion: "Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror"

by Muhammad Idrees Ahmad, The Electronic Intifada, 8 June 2009

In Errol Morris's 2004 film The Fog of War, former US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara recalls General Curtis LeMay, the architect of the fire-bombings of Japan during World War II, saying that "if we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." LeMay was merely articulating an unacknowledged truism of international relations: power bestows, among other things, the right to label. So it is that mass slaughter perpetrated by the big powers, from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, is normalized through labels such as "counterinsurgency," "pacification" and "war on terror," while similar acts carried out by states out of favor result in the severest of charges. It is this politics of naming that is the subject of Mahmood Mamdani's explosive new book, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror.

Interview: Mahmood Mamdani on Darfur

Interview by Charlie Kimber, Jun 2009

In his new book Mahmood Mamdani puts the war in Darfur in historical context and challenges the Save Darfur Coalition's characterisation of the conflict and its call for international intervention. He talks to Charlie Kimber

You reject the label genocide and question overblown estimates of how many have died in Darfur. This can seem to trivialise the suffering. Why is this an important question?

Mamdani: Teenage Activists of ‘Save Darfur’ – Child Soldiers of the West

Once again, Mahmood Mamdani provoked a fervid debate among scholars, activists and other people concerned with politics in Africa. After his controversially discussed comments about Zimbabwe, Mamdani (in his book Saviors and Survivors) accuses the ‘Save Darfur’ campaign in the US to act as the ‘humanitarian face’ of the War on Terror. Read the comments of the Professor at the Columbia University in New York in response to my questions.

Your latest book (besides dealing with the political history of Sudan) is an ardent attack on the ‘Save Darfur’-movement in the US. You call it the ‘humanitarian face of the War on Terror’, their high school activists being the ‘child soldiers’ of the West. Why is it attractive for millions of people in the US to engage in the Darfur campaign?

Professor and Provocateur: Factual Inaccuracies Undermine Mamdani’s thesis

"Saviors and Survivors", Making Sense of Darfur:
posted by Rebecca Hamilton

Saviors and Survivors by Mahmood Mamdani is a book that reads as having been written by two different authors. Let’s called them, Mamdani the Professor, and Mamdani the Provocateur. The Professor is nuanced and factual. The Provocateur makes broad assertions, some it seems for the sake of controversy alone, with a distinct disinclination to support these assertions with facts.

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