The Darfur Crisis and the regional and international response to it

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Topic: Peace and Conflict Studies, Security, grade: 1, Charles University in Prague, 19 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: The conflict in Darfur has been repeatedly described as one of the worst humanitarian crises the world is facing nowadays. With hundreds of thousands killed and millions more displaced it is still ongoing. In this paper I would like to look at the conflict situation from two perspectives. Firstly, in the first segment of my work, I will try to describe the conflict and its roots as well as explain its origins. For a better understanding I divided this chapter into several sub-chapters dealing with: the background to Darfur; historical roots of the conflict and most importantly with the current conflict focusing on patterns of violence, the actual situation, the IDP camps and sexual violence. In the second half of my paper I tried to look at the conflict from a different perspective, from a perspective of international actors, above all the Western democratic countries in the sub-chapter about the question of genocide and the UN and the AU in the two following sub-chapters. For this paper I used a number of sources, both books and journals or newspaper articles. However, Prunier's book 'Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide' proved to be the most useful one, since it still is one of the few books dealing precisely with this subject that is available.