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.

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."

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.

I feel really uncomfortable writing about Sudan when I'm not there. It always looks different. When you're outside Sudan it's easy to lose sight of how much of what happens is driven by local politics. And when you're in America in particular, there's this sense that what D.C. has to say is the only thing that counts.

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.

The south really wants Abyei; they have a core constituency who reside in the area who believe that Abyei belongs to the south. There are a number of those sons of Abyei in high positions of government in South Sudan, so it's pretty hard for South Sudan to just walk away.

I think people felt like they did everything they had been told they should do to fix the problem, and it still wasn't fixed. Then you have these other parts of Sudan, [which] in actual fact have been left on the back burner for way too long, so there was this scramble, probably a year ago now, to focus on the fact that this peace agreement was basically falling apart.