APCJ_1528_Win2010_00i_122_4 12/30/10 3:22 PM Page 113 BOOKSHELF Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror, by Mahmood Mamdani New York: Pantheon Books, 2009. xii ⫹ 398 pages. Select bibliography to p. 373. Index to p. 398. ISBN 978-0-307-37723-4 (hbk). Reviewed by Guy Martin FOR THE LAST TWENTY YEARS, a brutal civil war involving Arabs and Muslims has been raging in the western Sudanese province of Darfur, mostly off the radar of the international media and in the shadow of the fifty-year-old civil war pitting Muslims against Christians in the south. Mahmood Mamdani, a Ugandan political scientist at Columbia University, New York, offers his very personal interpretation of the Darfur conflict in Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror, the outcome of his five-year experience as a consultant for the African Union under the auspices of Darfur–Darfur Dialogue and Consultation (DDDC). Following the studies of Julie Flint and Alex de Waal in Darfur: A Short History of A Long War (2005) and Gérard Prunier in Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide (2005), Mamdani begins his work with a pointed criticism of the U.S.-based Save Darfur movement, an offshoot of the Save Darfur Coalition (SDC). According to him, the Save Darfur movement ‘is not a peace movement: it calls for a military intervention rather than political reconciliation, punishment rather than peace’ (p. 16). Indeed, the movement’s active lobbying eventually led to the adoption on 22 July 2004 of concurrent resolutions in both houses of the U.S. Congress declaring that a genocide was taking place in Darfur (pp. 23–24). This triggered a heated ‘numbers debate’. The U.S. government and the United Nations estimated the number of victims since February 2003 to be 400,000—a figure consistently repeated by the U.S. media—while the World Health Organization calculated 70,000 deaths (pp. 25–39). Mamdani argues that the ‘tenacity with which Save Darfur advertisements clung to the figure of 400,000 is explained by the need to justify the claim of genocide and because ‘the Save Darfur Coalition is determined that there is only one way to save Darfur—that is, to occupy it through a military intervention’ (p. 47). Guy Martin is a professor of political science at Winston-Salem State University, North Carolina, United States. He is the author of Africa in World Politics: A Pan-African Perspective (2002) and co-author, with Mueni wa Muiu, of A New Paradigm of the African State: Fundi wa Afrika (2009). Africa Peace and Conflict Journal, 3:2 (2010), 113–16. © 2010 University for Peace Africa Programme. All rights reserved. ISSN 1659–3944.