Darfur's Sorrow: A History of Destruction and Genocide by M. W. Daly; Sudan: The ElusiveQuest for Peace by Ruth Iyob; Gilbert M. KhadiagalaReview by: Nicolas Van De WalleForeign Affairs, Vol. 87, No. 1 (Jan. - Feb., 2008), p. 197Published by: Council on Foreign RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20020322 .

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Recent Books

Asian firms are no less negatively affected by them than European and American firms. The only weakness of this otherwise highly informative book is the absence of any kind of explanation for the trends it describes. Indian economic interests in the region seem piecemeal and merely the decentralized results of the independent decisions of many small, family-owned firms, some of which have had interests in Africa for decades. On the other hand, it seems clear that Chinese imports from and investments in the region are part of a fairly recent and well-integrated geopolitical strategy, which cannot be fully understood by a narrow focus on

market trends.

Darfrs' Sorrow:A History ofDestruction and Genocide. BY M. W. DALY. Cambridge University Press, 2007, 388 pp. $75.oo (paper, $22.99).

Sudan: The Elusive Questfor Peace. BY RUTH IYOB AND GILBERT M.

KHADIAGALA. Lynne Rienner, 2007,

224 pp. $6o.oo. Daly's excellent history of Darfur can be added to the list of recent fine works pro viding background on the current crisis there. It starts with the Fur Sultanate in the middle of the seventeenth century and traces the relationship of the region to a succession of political authorities in

Cairo and then Khartoum through to the present day. Daly shows that the current isolation, environmental precariousness,

and political and economic marginalization are in fact constants in Darfur's history. Since Sudan's independence, the central government has mostly ignored the region's needs, failing to invest in its infrastructure,

education, or health. This neglect has not been benign: it has been accompanied by

conscious policies to favor some of the region's ethnic groups at the expense of others, serving to exacerbate the region's complex ethnic divisions, already stressed by poverty and environmental degrada tion. Daly's patient disentangling of the history underscores the extent to which the government's support of the Janjaweed's

murderous predations in the present era is not some temporary aberration but the logical continuation of a long-standing pol icy. Moreover, Darfur's incorporation into the Sudanese nation has always been viewed as a one-way process of acculturation.

Jyob and Khadiagala have produced a succinct introduction to Sudan's different conflicts. Here the focus is only briefly on history; the bulk of the text focuses on recent conflicts and policy issues associ ated with their resolution. Much of the analysis is of the long-standing conflict in southern Sudan and the talks that took over a decade but ended in the precarious peace deal between the Khartoum gov ernment and the rebels in 2005. The au thors' analysis of the peace negotiations and the role of international mediation is first-rate; as is often the case with this kind of policy work, the material on domestic politics and factionalism within the government is more perfunctory.

One leaves both of these works with the despairing sense that Sudan's many conflicts are unlikely to be resolved any time soon.

African Guerrillas: RagingAgainst the Machine. EDITED BY MORTEN BOAS

AND KEVIN C. DUNN. Lynne Rienner,

2007, 275 pp. $58.oo (paper, $23.50).

Recent analyses of civil conflict in Africa have focused on the microdynamics of violence. According to the "greed model,"

FORE IGN AFFAI RS January/February2008 [197]

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