It's really difficult to get good information, and there's a reason for that. They're not letting journalists in. Whenever something really bad is happening, we always are dealing with uncertain information. Certainly what is happening there is qualitatively different from what happening in Abyei.

I think fundamentally the bigger question is, what are we expecting peacekeepers to do? Are they actually, as the traditional conception would have it, keeping peace, in which case they're not there to actively intervene and stop violence? When we send them into these places, do we expect they will respond forcefully?

There's a bigger question again about how to do prevention. It's not simply about putting out the early warning. The early warning was put out on Abyei; everybody knew that this was coming. This was intentional, and still it happened. So this idea that we fail to stop these things because there's not awareness about them, or that we need better early warning information, I'm increasingly skeptical of. I think it's about how you move that information into the policy process.

When you are dealing with a mass movement, as opposed to a quote-unquote "elite," you are talking to people who don't have time to read long research papers. You have to communicate with them in sound bites, around every other thing they are doing. So it takes a long time to shift people from one message to the next, especially if your foundational narrative was, "The only one thing in the entire world you should be paying attention to is Darfur."

For sure I see so much in Sudan that is wonderful, normal life - young entrepreneurs starting up NGO projects, kids mucking around and being kids. Everything else that happens in normal life in any part of the world, and we never get that in our media coverage. We only talk about Sudan once it's in crisis, so we end up with a distorted sense of what daily life is like for a lot of people.

Southern Kordofan is not a disputed territory. It is, and will remain, in the north, where the Nuba Mountains are. People believe there was a genocide there in 1990s. The Nuba, who are northerners, fought with the south in the north-south war. But they have their own individual interests, and they will remain in the north after the south splits.

o this idea that we fail to stop these things because there's not awareness about them, or that we need better early warning information, I'm increasingly skeptical of.