ABSTRACT
On 27 August 2009 the United Nations (UN) military commander in the Sudanese province of Darfur, General Martin Agwai, controversially declared that, to all intents and purposes, the war in the region was ‘over.’ According to Agwai: ‘Banditry, localized issues, people trying to resolve issues over water and land at a local level. But real war as such, I think we are over that.’1 Yet since the conflict in Darfur started in 2003, the international debate on Darfur has focused less on the dynamics driving the violence than on how to name it: should it be termed genocide or not? The debate between the US and the UN over Darfur was over whether to characterize the violence against civilians as genocide or counter-insurgency. The preoccupation with naming follows from the legal implications of how a thing is named: ‘genocide’ goes with an international responsibility to intervene. In the post-Cold War era, that responsibility has been defined as ‘the responsibility to protect’ and broadened to include three crimes in particular: genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Arranged in order of gravity, these crimes are said to justify a ‘humanitarian intervention’ and the jurisdiction of an International Criminal Court (ICC) – the first based on a right to protect and the second on a right to punish – both overriding claims of sovereignty.
