The Atlantic Monthly has published my piece on the links between global warming and Darfur.
April 2007
The Real Roots of Darfur
The violence in Darfur is usually attributed to ethnic hatred. But global warming may be primarily to blame.By Stephan Faris
To truly understand the crisis in Darfur—and it has been profoundly misunderstood—you need to look back to the mid-1980s, before the violence between African and Arab began to simmer. Alex de Waal, now a program director at the Social Science Research Council, was there at that time, as a doctoral candidate doing anthropological fieldwork. Earlier this year, he told me a story that, he says, keeps coming back to him.