Sudan, Darfur and the Failure of an African State

This book is about one of the greatest humanitarian and political disasters of our age: Sudan. Why it came about, and how it became so bad. And why, despite the prolonged involvement of almost every major country and humanitarian agency in the world, conflict still rages across most of the country.

The scale of suffering in Sudan, a country of about 40 million people, is daunting. The killing and destruction in Sudan’s western province of Darfur, which has been described by some analysts as ‘genocide’, have become synonymous with Sudan in the eyes of many Westerners. Yet Darfur constitutes only a small proportion of the total suffering and misery in Africa’s largest country.

An on-off fifty-year civil war in the southern part of the country that ended in 2005 left thousands of people dead or homeless. In the east of the country, a low-grade insurgency in the 1990s left still more dead people and homeless. It seems to be the fate of Sudan to produce big statistics, commensurate with the level of violence there. In proportion to its population, for instance, Sudan has produced the largest number of refugees and internally displaced people in the world.