Sudan and American Imperialism

Richard Just, The New Republic's deputy editor, has an important review essay in the latest issue in which he uses Gerard Prunier's Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide and Julie Flint & Alex de Waal's Darfur: A Short History of a Long War to explore the crisis in Darfur and American inaction. Having just finished my own review essay in which Flint and de Waal's book features prominently, I was especially interested to see what just had to say. You'll want to read just's piece, in which he makes an intriguing but problematic argument that our inaction actually reveals a form of imperialism. I think he goes too far with this -- to my mind he is correct in asserting that imperialism carried with it a great deal of indifferendce for the colonized, both in britain's settler colonies and in those it ruled indirectly. But the first step toward this indifference still is a level of engagement. The Brits had to colonize before their indifference matters, at least in Just's conception.

His call for greater action, and implication that the action will have to come from America and will have to be in the form of military engagement will also raise some hackles. It would be nice if those nations that have chosen not to engage in Iraq but with whom we maintain alliances would get behind action in Darfur, but that does not look set to happen. easier, I suppose, to tsk tsk the United States than to confront the fact that there are times whgen force may be necessary, and that those circumstances do not change just because you happen to find one particular example of the use of force to be wrongheaded. But absent European intervention, just may be right -- if we want change in Sudan, we may have to bring it through the imposition of troops. in the current climate, however, that simply is not going to happen

TNR online also has the second installment of its slideshow on Darfur. Photographer Jerry Fowler provides this collection of arresting images.