Our Craving for Kindred Blood

Abstract

At a battlefield in Darfur, a rebel commander inspected the dead, those he and others had killed. All of them are Sudanese, he observed, are black people, they are our brothers. The slaughter in Darfur has caught the world's attention but across the globe, from the Sudan to Sri Lanka to Iraq, a similar violence takes place a violence that is both new and very old: fratricidal bloodletting. Such conflicts characterize the present and recent past. Large-scale invasions of one state by another have become rare. True, the United States invaded Iraq, but it seeks to extricate itself from the violence of Iraqi against Iraqi that now eclipses that of the occupier against occupied. To the extent political observers have noticed, they prefer more neutral terms for such global violence, like civil wars or civil strife. Most wars are now civil wars, runs the first sentence of a World Bank policy review.