This publication appears at a highly sensitive time in Sudanese affairs, and is a most welcome stimulant to current debate – in fact a breath of fresh air in the somewhat stifling atmosphere of guarded half-truths on Darfur that we get from politicians, activists and the official spokesmen of UN agencies and NGOs. Academic voices speaking from local knowledge can be more candid, and critical. Darfur and the Crisis of Governance in the Sudan arises from a conference held in Addis Ababa in 2008. Its two parts, including several dozen full-page colour photographs, amount to a massive 528 pages – heavy to carry around, but a book which surely will become a standard reference work. The first part consists of nineteen chapters of which the great majority are by Sudanese academics, based both inside the country and in the diaspora. The second part, itself about 130 pages long, consists of Appendices providing essential background to recent history. Here we find, for example, English translations and commentaries by Abdullahi Osman El-Tom of Arabic-language documents which have led a partially clandestine existence in the Sudan – in particular ‘The Black Book: imbalance of power and wealth in Sudan’, circulating in Khartoum from 2000 and helping fuel the spread of insurgency from the South into Darfur; and various unpublished documents and letters which throw light on the rise of the ‘Arab Congregation’ in the late 1980s, and what are here claimed as its genocidal aims. Other vital documents include founding charters and declarations of political parties and resistance movements, especially those concerning Darfur, and relevant resolutions and laws emanating from the UN and the ICC.

The chapters in Part One all seek, often very acutely, to situate the Darfur problem in the context of the history and on-going social, religious and political struggles of the Sudan as a whole. Too much on Darfur has been written from a distance – and been too concerned with events from 2003 onwards as a problem essentially for American foreign policy. There is a different political energy here, which by contrast is directed mainly against successive Khartoum regimes for their neglect of the marginalised regions and underprivileged people of the country as a whole. The veteran voice of Mansour Khalid's piece sets the tone, and further chapters extend a broadly sympathetic analysis to Darfur (Atta El-Battahani, Abdullahi Osman El-Tom, Ali B. Ali-Dinar, Mahmood Mamdani, Salah M. Hassan); to the deep structural connections between the decades of civil war in the South and the Darfur patterns of insurgency/counterinsurgency, along with the rise of atrocities against women in both regions (Beniah Yongo-Bure, Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf); and to the contradictions of external involvement in Sudanese issues – as often as not exacerbating division and conflict (Alex de Waal, Carina Ray on Darfur in the African Press, Munzoul A. M. Assal). Chapters based on the intensive study of localities or local events, but which place these in the broader context of the nature of Sudanese national and civil society, include those by Karin Willemse (on the intensifying emphasis on masculinity in public situations), by Fahima A. Hashim (on the efforts of Sudanese civil society to end sexual violence against women), by Musa Adam Abdul-Jalil (on North Darfur schoolteachers in conflict management), by Grant Farred, and by Al-Tayib Zain Al-Abdin (on civil society approaches and their value in general). Chapters focusing on the limitations to the effectiveness of law and/or official political negotiations in dealing with the problems of Darfur include those by Kamal El-Gizuli, Adrienne L. Fricke with Amira Khair, and finally by Abaker Mohamed Abuelbashar, who analyses, from the point of view of the SPLM/A, the reasons for the failure of the 2006 Abuja peace talks on Darfur.

This volume is a vital resource for those concerned internationally with Sudanese matters, including the urgent questions of support for the forthcoming referenda to be held in the South and in Abyei (January 2011), and those concerned with diplomacy or humanitarian assistance. As academics, the voices here can provide political insight and critical opinion in a way that agency reports cannot, but at the same time can speak from long experience and personal as well as professional knowledge of the country and its people. The conflict in Darfur is not only still going on, but intensifying in the immediate aftermath of the April 2010 elections (which could not even be held or monitored in many parts of Darfur). As yet, the possible repercussions of the Southern referendum vote on Darfur (let alone other marginalised regions where there was considerable support for the SPLM/A from the mid 1980s on, especially Southern Kordofan and the Blue Nile) have scarcely been considered by commentators, but will surely rise to the top of the agenda in the coming couple of years. Darfur is not an island, as this volume makes clear.

The photos here presented as a ‘visual essay’ by Issam A. Abdel Hafiez are mainly from Bindisi in Darfur, including some horrific shots when parts of the settlement were burned to the ground; and from Kalmah camp for IDPs. A final, surprising but very effective, group of pictures were taken in Damazin, Blue Nile State, in 2007 (pp. 356–61). The people here are demonstrating their solidarity with those of Darfur; waving flags of the SPLM/A, they are addressing the microphone and proudly sporting Arabic slogans on T-shirts and headbands. These people too have experienced something of the longer struggle against a succession of regimes in Khartoum, and today share the Darfur people's uncertainty about the future.

The only criticism I have of this book is that the page numbers are tucked away near the inside edge of the pages, and difficult to use. Otherwise, the editors and the publishers are to be congratulated on a timely and important book which deserves the widest possible readership.