Clumsy ethnography : how genocide lawyers re-racialized Darfur
| dc.contributor.author | THOMAS, Edward | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2025-04-23T07:14:29Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2025-04-23T07:14:29Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2025 | |
| dc.description.abstract | International criminal justice is a dominant form of transitional justice, but it sometimes faces difficulties in coming to terms with the way that racial categories get imposed on societies, and how processes of racialization are intensified by conflict. These difficulties are aggravated when the question of genocide is at issue. This paper looks at how four different authorities – the United Nations, the United States, the Sudanese government, and the International Criminal Court – addressed questions of racism and racialization when investigating a period of extreme violence in Darfur, Sudan, at the start of the twenty-first century. Each sought to determine whether groups enduring extreme racist violence belonged to the groups protected by the Genocide Convention. These authorities avoided the terms race/racial and nationality, and some avoided the term ethnicity too, preferring the word ‘tribe’, which all used with more or less precision. Presenting Darfur’s wars as tribal has several pitfalls, however. The term ‘tribe’, and its Arabic equivalents, emerged out of Sudanese histories of racialization. Part of the racialization process was to link the violence in marginal areas to tribal belonging – just as those producers from tribalized margins were being swept up towards global markets. Market forces helped to foist privatized militias onto societies in Darfur, and these militias exploited language and cultural difference to manage recruitment and extract surpluses. International lawyers sometimes represented these processes as wars between irreconcilable tribal adversaries, missing out processes of racialization which need to be reversed in order to address legacies of abuse. | en |
| dc.format.mimetype | application/pdf | en |
| dc.identifier.issn | 1831-4066 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1814/78303 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | en |
| dc.orcid.upload | true | * |
| dc.publisher | European University Institute | en |
| dc.relation.ispartofseries | EUI | en |
| dc.relation.ispartofseries | LAW | en |
| dc.relation.ispartofseries | AEL | en |
| dc.relation.ispartofseries | Working Paper | en |
| dc.relation.ispartofseries | 2025/02 | en |
| dc.rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess | en |
| dc.rights.license | Attribution 4.0 International | * |
| dc.rights.uri | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ | * |
| dc.subject | Darfur | en |
| dc.subject | Sudan | en |
| dc.subject | Genocide | en |
| dc.subject | Race | en |
| dc.subject | Tribe | en |
| dc.title | Clumsy ethnography : how genocide lawyers re-racialized Darfur | en |
| dc.type | Working Paper | en |
| dspace.entity.type | Publication |
