ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the UK government’s response to the armed conflict in Darfur, Sudan from the beginning of the war until the end of 2007. Especially after the spring of 2004, Darfur featured quite prominently in debates about UK foreign policy, not least because several government ministers regularly referred to it as ‘the most serious humanitarian emergency in the world’.3 By the spring of 2005 the UK’s International Development Committee placed the figure of deaths ‘somewhere around 300,000’.4 Although the Department for International Development (DFID) emphasized that ‘we are unlikely ever to get a full picture of deaths from this conflict’, it did not depart from the Committee’s estimate.5 Despite being one of the principal advocates for a legal and moral right of unilateral humanitarian intervention during the 1990s and a significant supporter of the ‘responsibility to protect’ idea in the twenty-first century, the UK decided not to make the case for intervention in Darfur.6 Instead, the response of Tony Blair’s government can be characterized as one of constructive engagement with the Government of Sudan (GoS) with an admixture of (failed) coercive diplomacy.
