Departmentseminar: Sharon E. Hutchinson

Perilous Outcomes: International Monitoring and the Perpetuation of Violence in Sudan.

Professor Sharon E. Hutchinson,University of Wisconsin-Madison

Abstract:

When allegations of genocidal violence become so forceful that they can no longer be ignored, the international community’s first “response” is often to call for the rapid deployment of an international observer mission to monitor the violence. The guiding hope is that the very presence of an international monitoring team—roaming the countryside, asking difficult questions and issuing critical reports—will succeed where more conventional appeals to distant international agencies so often fail.]  Yet even when such missions prove ineffective in quelling the violence, the default assumption would seem to be that they are benign.   This paper sets out to challenge this naïve assumption by demonstrating how and why well-intentioned international monitoring missions sometimes produce perverse effects.  Concentrating on recent developments in Sudan—one of the most politically precarious and militarily self-destructive states in the world today—this paper explores some of the unintended consequences of a US-led, international human rights monitoring mission that operated in Sudan during the final years of  Sudan’s “Second [North/South] Civil War” (1983-2005).

Profile

Sharon E. Hutchinson joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1990, where she is now Professor of Anthropology and Director of the African Studies Program. She has been conducting periodic ethnographic research in war-battered Sudan for more than a quarter century.  For much of this period, her research has concentrated on war-provoked processes of social and cultural change among Sudanese Nuer. Her current research interests include the anthropology of civil warfare and post-war reconstruction, international humanitarianism and human rights, war-provoked population movements and post-conflict returns, and the local impacts of expanding international oil development activities in Sudan.