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.

Things always seem less dire when you're in the country than when you're outside. I don't exactly know why it is, except that people just have to get on with their life, so they do. And you don't have time to do anything other than keep going.

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?

You have to simplify - there is no other way to reach a mass audience. And you have to feed them evidence of their own success to keep them motivated.

No question that the spotlight on Darfur has, for all intents and purposes, disappeared. And that's deeply problematic, because it hasn't disappeared because Darfur has been solved.

What's really interesting, though, is that some people in the Messirya are starting to see Darfuri rebels - so non-Arab, [from the] Justice and Equality Movement - have moved over into Southern Kordofan, which is supposed to be a Messirya stronghold, and started recruiting Messirya to go and fight against the Khartoum government in Darfur. Just another example of how everything in Sudan is interlinked.

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.