Friday, March 20, 2009

Hagan & Rymond-Richmond: Darfur and the Crime of Genocide

John Hagan (Northwestern Univ. - Sociology) & Wenona Rymond-Richmond (Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst - Sociology) have published Darfur and the Crime of Genocide (Cambridge Univ. Press 2009). Here's the abstract:
In 2004, the State Department gathered more than a thousand interviews from refugees in Chad that verified Colin Powell’s U.N. and congressional testimonies about the Darfur genocide. The survey cost nearly a million dollars to conduct and yet it languished in the archives as the killing continued, claiming hundreds of thousands of murder and rape victims and restricting several million survivors to camps. This book for the first time fully examines that survey and its heartbreaking accounts. It documents the Sudanese government’s enlistment of Arab Janjaweed militias in destroying black African communities. The central questions are: Why is the United States so ambivalent to genocide? Why do so many scholars deemphasize racial aspects of genocide? How can the science of criminology advance understanding and protection against genocide? This book gives a vivid firsthand account and voice to the survivors of genocide in Darfur.