Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror

By Mahmood Mamdani

(Pantheon, 398 pp., $26.95)

The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and For All

By Gareth Evans

(Brookings, 349 pp., $24.95)

I.

In the summer of 2007 , Mahmood Mamdani found himself at a meeting of activists and politicians, listening to sentiments that had by then become quite common among a certain class of politically active Americans. The speakers were calling on the United Nations to send peacekeepers to Darfur. Fed up with the inability of African Union troops--who were already on the ground in western Sudan--to stop the ongoing bloodshed, they insisted that U.N. forces could do better. The United Nations, explained one politician, echoing a view you could have heard on any number of college campuses at the time, would grant "mercy" to the people of Darfur.