Context for Those Who Would Demonize

Hardly any academic journal that I know of would knowingly invite an employee of an organization under critical scrutiny in a book to be its sole reviewer. Not surprisingly, Sean Brooks's review turns out to be a sophisticated apology for Save Darfur Coalition, the organization he works for. It is both inconsistent and misleading.

In a nut-shell, Sean Brooks's argument is two-fold: (a) Save Darfur is a well-meaning organization that faced a steep learning curve during which it may have made some mistakes (such as exaggerating the numbers of victims), but it corrected these soon enough (actually from the summer of 2006) and is now fit to function as the Obama government's 'political and human rights watchdog' on Sudanese affairs; (b) the merits of Saviors and Survivorsare primarily academic and are by and large confined to the historical analysis of Darfur. When it comes to the present, however, its author relies mainly on secondary sources and has little to say that is new. But the real damage of the book is political, for in confining the scholarly analysis to history and context, Mamdani ends up—"wittingly or not"—promoting the Sudanese government's central narrative.

Brooks begins with a narrative of Save Darfur's learning process. In this narrative, he chooses to single out my 2007 essay in the London Review of Booksas "one of the first major rebukes" received by Save Darfur. The complement aside, the fact is that the very first public rebuke that Save Darfur received was in 2006 from a U.S. government agency, the Government Accountability Office, which sent to the Department of State, Congress, and the media—and released on its website—the report of an expert group mandated to evaluate the reliability of six different estimates of mortality in Darfur, including some by those working closely with Save Darfur. The experts unanimously faulted Save Darfur-affiliated researchers for both highly inflated estimates and faulty methodology. This rap on its knuckles not withstanding, Save Darfur continued to use the same figures in expensive public campaigns globally for years to come. Any researcher aware of this would be reluctant to take what Brooks calls "the coalition's past misuse of mortality figures" as just part of an inevitable learning process, and look for a more compelling reason to explain this stubborn refusal to acknowledge the changing reality on the ground.

Brooks's narrative claims that Save Darfur took its lead from an International Crisis Group report of June 2006, which called for an expanded UN military presence, "unhindered access for humanitarian workers to reach those in need," and further diplomacy to craft a workable peace deal. Brooks is surprised that any one in their right mind would seek to question any of these pursuits. I am surprised that Brooks is so innocently unreflective about his organization's conduct. Let me take the most seemingly innocent of these pursuits. In every African emergency I know of since the 1960s, be it the result of famine or internal conflict, there has been an inevitable standoff between international NGOs claiming to represent 'victims' and the government of the country in question. Under dispute has been the question of accountability. The international NGOs demand "unhindered access" to the "victims," whose representatives—or at least benefactors—they claim to be. In plainer language, they claim freedom from accountability. They demand of African governments freedoms they would not think of demanding from their own governments and know would not get from governments in other parts of the non-Western world. I am no apologist of sovereign governments, but so long as we live in a world constituted by sovereign powers, I insist that any attempt to qualify or restrict sovereignty be applied across the board to all powers. If we are unwilling to do this, we must respect the sovereign rights of every state.

Brooks, unfortunately, chooses to focus on...