APCJ_1528_Win2010_00i_122_4 12/30/10 3:22 PM Page 114 114 AFRICA PEACE AND CONFLICT JOURNAL Mamdani traces the genesis of the conflict in Darfur to the so-called Arab-Fur civil war fought between 1987 and 1989, but asserts that at no point has the Darfur conflict been a war between ‘Africans’ and ‘Arabs’. This latter assertion reflects the politically sensitive issues of determining who is an ‘Arab’ and who is an ‘African’ in the province and which ethnic groups are ‘indigenous’ and which are ‘foreigners’. In the Sudanese context, the standard for defining an Arab is derived from the process of Arabization, that is, acculturation through migration and contact. Thus, ‘from this point of view, Arab is a cultural identity’ (p. 106). The historical record identifies the Fur, Massalit, and Baggara as the original inhabitants of Darfur, who were succeeded by waves of foreign immigrants, including the Tungur, Rizeigat, and Zaghawa, starting in the eleventh century (pp. 80–81, 90–92, 103–104). During the Arab-Fur war, Mamdani states, Arab ‘tribes’ in Darfur united under the banner of the Arab Gathering. Government-supported Arab bands, the Janjawid, roamed Fur areas, burning villages and killing indiscriminately while the Fur responded in a similar manner with their own militias, the Malishiyat. By the time Brigadier Omar Hasan al-Bashir took over the government on 30 June 1989 in a military coup d’état, ‘the War in Darfur had turned into a conflict over land driven by two uncompromising ideologies—one Arab supremacist, the other Fur nativist’ (p. 246). Mamdani states that international humanitarian intervention is only justified when genocide—namely, ‘bad’ violence run amok, amoral and evil—has been known to occur (p. 279). The author concludes his analysis with the observation that genocide has been ‘instrumentalized by big powers so as to target those newly independent states that they find unruly and want to discipline’ (p. 281). Mamdani situates the Darfur conflict in its indigenous and colonial historical contexts and then goes on to analyze it from the perspective of nation and state building in Sudan (pp. 171–205) as well as the broader geopolitical settings of the cold war and the post–cold war world dominated by the U.S.-led ‘war on terror’. He concludes that under the guise of international humanitarian intervention, ‘ “the responsibility to protect” is . . . a clarion call for the recolonization of “failed” states in Africa’ (p. 300). Mamdani’s interpretation of the Darfur conflict is highly debatable and controversial, and his analysis and policy recommendations are seriously flawed on a number of counts. First, a reader might ask, what is the author’s rationale or justification for his relentless criticism of the Save Darfur movement? Based on his observation that the movement is an offshoot of the Save Darfur Coalition, jointly created by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the American Jewish World Service (pp. 22–23), one might infer that the Save Darfur movement is a Jewish-Israeli conspiracy that frames U.S. policy and seeks to demonize an essentially internecine Arab conflict as well as the government of Sudan, which is unfairly held responsible for it. Second, Mamdani’s definition and use of the concepts of ‘race’ and ‘tribe’ are highly problematic. He initially observes, ‘Arab is a cultural identity. Whoever speaks Arabic and partakes in “Arab” cultural practices is an Arab—regardless of ethnic origin’ (p. 106), but he inexplicably goes on to state that ‘Arab is, above all, a political identity— one that is tribal, not racial. To be an Arab is to be a member of an Arab tribe’ (p. 108). His assertions leave the reader confused as to whether ‘Arab’ (in the Sudanese context) is a cultural or a political identity. As for the Arabs of the Nile Valley in northern Sudan, as well as some Darfuri Arab tribes, such as the Funj, Mamdani calls them,