Save Darfur: A Movement and its Discontents

‘Save Darfur’, arguably the largest international social movement since anti-apartheid, has had an important impact in shaping the international response to the Darfur conflict: the world's largest humanitarian operation, alongside one of the largest and most expensive peacekeeping missions and a plethora of special envoys and mediators. For the first time, the US government has declared an ongoing conflict to be genocide and permitted the UN Security Council to refer a case to the International Criminal Court (ICC). In spite of these achievements (and indeed because of them), the Save Darfur movement has been widely criticized, most publicly by Mahmood Mamdani in his recent Saviours and Survivors.1 This commentary reviews the factors that led to the emergence of the Save Darfur movement2 before considering its achievements, and assessing critiques including Mamdani's claim that Save Darfur constitutes the ‘humanitarian face of the War on Terror’ and is therefore ‘a slogan that masks a big power agenda to recolonize Africa’.3 While pointing to some of the blind spots of advocacy efforts, Mamdani's grandstanding arguments about the nature of the movement are not fully convincing. Rather than a neo-colonial project, Save Darfur is better understood as a platform through which norm entrepreneurs have promoted their ideas of global governance, revealing the perils of blindly projecting liberal norms on a complicated world.