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The Challenges of Famine Relief: Emergency Operations in the Sudan by Francis M. Deng and Larry Minear. Review by Jeff Crisp in UNHCR: Refugee Abstracts, vol. 11, number 4, December 1992. This is not the first book to be written on the subject of famine in Sudan. And it is unlikely to be the last. As authors Francis Deng and Larry Minear observe at the outset of their new study, ‘the Sudan has seemed to offer, with tragic regularity, the proverbial worst-case scenario’. The Challenges of Famine Relief provides an incisive and hard-hitting analysis of that scenario, and draws upon the Sudanese experience to explore a wide range of generic issues relating to emergency prevention and preparedness, the organization of international relief operations, as well as the nature and principles of humanitarian action. The normative thrust of the book is established in the dedication, which starkly honours ‘the tragic victims of famine who, neglected, dispossessed, and abandoned by their own government and leaders, starved to death’. As the authors demonstrate in their opening chapter, Sudan’s current susceptibility to acute and widespread food scarcity has deep historical roots: the political and economic legacies of colonialism and the Cold War: development policies which favoured the urban population at the expense of the poorer rural masses; and the introduction of agricultural and marketing systems which have entailed a movement away from sustainable food production and an erosion of traditional survival mechanisms. These historical developments, coupled with more immediate factors–the drought which afflicted northern Sudan in the early 1980s, and the armed conflict which ravaged the south of the country in the latter half of the decade–were necessary, but not sufficient causes of two major famines which are thought to have killed more than half a million people, and which forced hundreds of thousands more to abandon their homes and to seek a fragile refuge elsewhere. Ultimate responsibility for these tragic developments, Deng and Minear argue emphatically, is to be found in a ‘vacuum of moral responsibility’, which was manifested in both the authorities’ persistent reluctance to provide relief to affected populations, and in the rebel movement’s preoccupation with strictly military objectives. Recognizing the widespread prevalence and deadly consequences of such circumstances, the authors raise the crucial issue of state sovereignty and its relationship to humanitarian action. Their conclusion is unequivocal. The international community must, they suggest, appreciate the sensitivities of countries which are affected by potential or actual famines. Efforts should also be made to minimize the external nature of humanitarian intervention by fostering a more open discussion between donor and recipient governments, and by building upon the capabilities of local people and indigenous organizations. But when such approaches fail, the world has an obligation to intervene. ‘When leaders are unwilling to accept responsibility for the survival and general welfare of a part of their own people, the international community must step forward as advocates of the people, even assuming direct, if temporary, responsibility for them’. For such situations, they conclude, ‘criteria and mechanisms should be devised that put greater, but also carefully circumscribed power in the service of humanitarian interests’. Recent experience in places such as northern Iraq, Bosnia and Somalia provides ample confirmation of the fact that a decisive change of international opinion has already taken place on this issue–a change which is deftly characterized by Deng and Minear as a shift in the balance between sovereignty and suffering. However, the international community’s current willingness to intervene in humanitarian emergencies, and to support such intervention with the use of military, force, raises as many questions as it answers. As a recent Refugee Policy Group publication has suggested, the new emphasis on the rights of uprooted and starving people has a potentially dark side. Is that interest rooted in humanitarian concern, or is it a veiled excuse for the intervention of certain powers into the affairs of others ? And is the current support for collective action and the increased use of the UN system an indication of an increased will to tackle pressing human problems? Or does it reveal, as the Refugee Policy Group suggests, ‘a withdrawal by governments who are pushing issues onto collective bodies that they do not have the interest to address?’ The Challenges of Famine Relief alludes to these questions but does not examine them in detail, maintaining instead an essentially optimistic appraisal of the potential for establishing mechanisms that will place effective pressure on governments which violate human rights and disregard humanitarian norms. The authors are less sanguine, however, in their assessment of the international community’s ability to launch effective emergency relief operations–an assessment derived from the authors’ evaluation of two initiatives in Sudan: the 1984-86 famine relief effort, coordinated by the UN Office for Emergency Operations in Africa: and Operation Lifeline, established in 1989 to assist war-affected populations in the south of the country. According to Deng and Minear, the Sudanese experience indicates that wide-ranging improvements could be made to the way in which complex relief operations are conceived, financed, organized, coordinated and implemented. Humanitarian emergencies, they suggest, are detected and acknowledged too slowly. The international relief operations which are mounted to respond to such emergencies are launched with insufficient planning and foresight, inadequate funding, and an absence of operational preparedness. Despite all the rhetoric within the UN system about a ‘continuum from relief to development’, emergency operations tend to reinforce dependency and give inadequate attention to the fundamental challenge of reviving agricultural production amongst the affected communities. While experience has shown that the United Nations is the most appropriate organization for the coordination of international relief efforts, its effectiveness is constrained by a governmental bias, by the interests and activities of the major donor states, and by the in-fighting which occurs amongst different UN agencies and senior officials. Deng and Minear explore all of these issues with a great degree of understanding and objectivity, drawing a wealth of lessons–both positive and negative–from their detailed examination of the two relief operations in Sudan. Indeed, the authors’ willingness to state (and explain) what went right, as well as apportioning responsibility for what went wrong during the two famine relief operations, is one of the most attractive characteristics of the book. An impressive amount of information, analysis and reflection is packed into the book’s 165 pages, and so the amount of space devoted to any specific issue is inevitably limited. And, as Deng and Minear themselves point out, the evaluative nature of the text robs the book of any human dimension or drama –something of a loss considering the authors’ evident concern and compassion for the people of Sudan. These quibbles apart, The Challenges of Famine Relief is an important and potentially influential work, addressing some of the most crucial issues now confronting the international community. As recent developments in Somalia suggest (not to mention Afghanistan, Iraq, the former Soviet republics and Yugoslavia), if there is a ‘new international order’, then intense and complex humanitarian emergencies may prove to be one of its defining characteristics.