Darfur, then and now: Justice without power isn’t deterrence

In a world defined by overlapping crises, from accelerating climate breakdown to renewed and on-going wars in Sudan, Gaza, and Ukraine, the limits of our global institutions are once again tested.

Against this backdrop, the conviction of Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman (“Ali Kushayb”) by the International Criminal Court (ICC) on 6 October 2025, for crimes committed in 2003-2004, feels both momentous and painfully late. It marks justice delivered, but also justice delayed, a reminder that without real power behind it, justice alone cannot deter. The lesson echoes beyond Darfur: whether in human rights, climate policy, or global finance, institutions built to uphold order struggle to act swiftly or decisively enough to meet the pace of today’s crises.

It is this imbalance, between law and leverage, between moral intent and material power, that defines our age of institutional fragility.

The rise of global emergencies

That lag between violence and accountability is not abstract to me. My life has taken me to places where I’ve seen the best and the worst of human nature. Twenty-two years ago, I joined UNICEF as one of many working on humanitarian response. I got to work with some exceptional people like Director of Emergencies, Dan Toole, brilliant analyst, Erin Tettensor, and Humanitarian Section Chief, Sheldon Yett, to name only a few. Emergencies were swelling, and humanitarian response was consuming roughly a third of the organisation’s budget. Colleagues would say we needed to “bring back the E,” the emergency in UNICEF’s original name, the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, because both natural and man-made disasters were surging.

Interestingly, the fierce public debate over whether climate change is caused by humans did not exist two decades ago.

Already 20 years ago, data showed that the number of people affected by natural disasters had risen sharply since the 1980s, but interestingly, the fierce public debate over whether climate change is caused by humans did not exist. Greta Thunberg had not yet become a public figure, and the idea that human activity was driving global climate change was not widely contested, if at all.

Notwithstanding the US invasion of Afghanistan following 9/11, UNICEF’s focus during my first year at headquarters in New York was on Sudan’s civil war, and, more specifically, a place called Darfur. In early 2003, rebel groups had revolted against Sudan’s government. The government response under its president Omar al-Bashir was to unleash its allied Janjaweed militia, who conducted scorched-earth attacks against civilian populations. A key trigger in this man-made emergency was the rebels’ strike on El-Fasher on 25 Apr 2003.

It is easy to conflate conflicts without analysis, and that is why I believe the UN often refrain from using “civil war” and remain on safe ground with “man-made disasters" and “complex emergencies,” whenever civilian populations become affected at scale.

Real-time atrocities, delayed accountability

As a UN peacekeeper, I had seen suffering in the former Yugoslavia, and the first-hand accounts from Darfur were hard to fathom; they evoked Srebrenica and the testimonies I heard in 1995. By 2004, Darfur killings, mass rape, village burnings, and forced displacement were widespread and systematic, while we and other agencies scrambled to secure humanitarian access for staff and aid. While stopping short of accusing the Government of Sudan of having pursued a “policy of genocide,” a UN Commission of Inquiry reported in January 2005 that crimes against humanity and war crimes had been committed. 

Frustratingly, accountability moved slowly, and while the Security Council referred Darfur to the ICC in 2005, warrants for Minister of State, Ahmad Harun, and Janjaweed militia leader, Ali Kushayb, followed, but were not issued until April 2007.

Then the long stall. For the people of Darfur, “justice delayed” became synonymous with “justice denied.” 

As mentioned, the Janjaweed “fought” as government-backed militias in 2003–2004, but a decade later, Khartoum restructured elements of those militias into the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Today, the RSF is fighting the Sudanese army in a war that erupted in April 2023, pushing Darfur back to the brink of genocide. In the past, to understand how the situation in Darfur was unfolding, UNICEF relied on major newswires, internal UN reporting, and first-hand accounts from colleagues in the field. This was a pre-social media era, when information moved slowly and the internet was only beginning to reach scale.

Today, however, something is very different. Identified members of the RSF have filmed and disseminated evidence of war crimes, including summary executions and other atrocities, within minutes of committing them. The unrestricted violence inflicted on civilians is not new, but the speed and visibility of its documentation are. What was once hidden or denied is now broadcast in real time. In recent years, we have seen this same chilling pattern in Ukraine, in Gaza, and now in Sudan. 

Credible UN reporting has also described widespread RSF abuses. The UN human rights office has recently flagged alarming reports of summary executions and other grave violations. Meanwhile, a UN Panel of Experts assessed allegations that the RSF received external arms support from the UAE as credible (allegations the UAE denies), underscoring the regional entanglements prolonging Sudan’s trauma.

The war has claimed tens of thousands of lives and displaced millions. Alleged foreign support has prolonged and intensified the conflict and undermined efforts to unify Sudan’s security institutions, if not derailed and even killed the entire process toward a unified Sudan.

Can there be peace without justice? 

Louise Arbour, Canadian jurist, served as Chief Prosecutor of the ICTY (and ICTR) from 1996 to 1999. She was a fervent believer in the idea that there can be no peace without justice and in announcing the indictment of Slobodan Milošević in May 1999, she wrote: “No credible, lasting peace can be built upon impunity and injustice.”

In writing my bachelor’s thesis on the Rome treaty and ICTY, I came across thoughtful critics of this principle. Jack Snyder, a leading IR scholar at Columbia University, and Leslie Vinjamuri, professor of international relations at SOAS, did not single out Louise Arbour, but their work challenges the idiom “no peace without justice,” especially during ongoing conflicts.

Snyder and Vinjamuri would later formalize their ideas in “Trials and Errors: Pragmatism in Strategies of International Justice” (published in 2004). They argue that prosecutions can be counterproductive when institutions are weak, and that forgiveness or negotiated settlements may sometimes better stop violence, with justice sequenced later, a position they call “principled pragmatism.”

With the International Criminal Court under massive pressure, the question remains whether the deterrence by international courts such as the ICC or national courts, empowered by universal jurisdiction, is likely to influence top decision-makers, unless such institutions are backed by real power. In other words, does post-conflict institution-building have to precede trials?

With limited investigators and money, the ICC must prioritise gravity and feasibility, and justice slows. Political pushback, including U.S. sanction threats and orders tied to the Gaza and Israel docket, chills cooperation, raises security and legal risks for ICC staff, and diverts resources from investigations to protection and legal defense. The net effect is fewer field missions, longer timelines for gathering evidence, and delayed arrest operations.

History keeps repeating itself. Justice remains slow. On 6 October 2025, the ICC convicted Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman (“Ali Kushayb”) on 27 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity for attacks in West Darfur in 2003–2004.

In the early 2000s, it took the ICC almost four years to issue its first arrest warrants for Darfur, and about 22 years to reach its first judgment.

From thesis to Darfur: Same lesson

From a bachelor's thesis to a UNICEF desk in 2003 and to El Fasher today, I see the same pattern: when law stands alone, perpetrators gamble on time. Peace needs justice, and justice needs leverage. That means money for investigators and, notably, for witness protection; political cover for the courts; and the police power to execute warrants across borders.

Pair sanctions and arms embargoes with real arrests, cut the fuel lines that keep militias alive. Without funding the investigators, shielding the court, and enforcing the warrants, justice merely records but does not restrain, and only arrives after the funerals of the innocent.

The struggle in Darfur is not just about one country’s tragedy; it is a test of whether our global institutions can act with both conscience and capacity in an age of multiple crises. Without institutional justice, justice that is timely, empowered, and enforceable, we risk repeating the same pattern everywhere: accountability without deterrence, compassion without consequence.

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