Saviours and Survivors

"What I like about his book in regards to Darfur and Sudan generally is that he is one of the few critics to boldly step forward to examine the complexity of what’s going on. He examines its history rather than portraying the conflict in simple and morally charged terms. He shows a more complicated picture – that it is a real political conflict with different outlooks on the future of the state, the nature of the political order, and the relationship between the regions and various ethnicities and tribes. The Western media reports the situation in terms of aggressors and victims. He comes from a leftist political outlook and he is certainly a humanist. Those who support humanitarian intervention always claim they are the humanists when actually it is an anti-humanist perspective in many ways. Their outlook on human history is that it’s nothing but genocide and ethnic cleansing and that people are powerless and dependent on the benevolence of outside institutions such as the UN, America or Western countries. It is a very grim picture of societies always being in danger of crumbling into chaos and anarchy."