Darfur and the Crime of Genocide

John Hagan · Wenona Rymond-Richmond

Oct 2008 · Cambridge University Press

About this ebook

In 2004, the State Department gathered more than a thousand interviews from refugees in Chad that verified Colin Powell's UN 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 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.

About the author

John Hagan is John D. MacArthur Professor of Sociology and Law at Northwestern University and Senior Research Fellow at the American Bar Foundation. He served as President of the American Society of Criminology and received its Edwin Sutherland and Michael J. Hindelang awards. He received the C. Wright Mills Award for Mean Streets: Youth Crime and Homelessness (with Bill McCarthy, Cambridge, 1997) and a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Albert J. Reiss Award for Northern Passage: American Vietnam War Resisters in Canada (2001). He is also the author of Justice in the Balkans (2003) and co-author of several articles on the Darfur genocide published in the American Sociological Review, Criminology, the Annual Review of Sociology, and Science. In 2015, he received the Cesare Beccaria Medal in Gold, a lifetime achievement award, from the German Criminological Society.

Wenona Rymond-Richmond is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She was research assistant at the American Bar Foundation and a pre-doctoral Fellow with the National Consortium on Violence Research. She has contributed to The Many Colors of Crime: Inequalities of Race, Ethnicity, and Crime in America (2006) and co-authored articles about the Darfur genocide in Criminology and the American Sociological Review.