In which Bwog staffer Armin Rosen sits in on a peaceful disagreement over peace.

If you thought Ahmadinemania offered Columbians the best oratorical fireworks of the year, then you, dear reader, clearly weren't at the Satow room for today's Peace in Darfur conference. A mid-afternoon speech by anthro professor Mahmood Mamdani (whose Major Debates in the Study of Africa is building a well-deserved reputation as one of the best undergraduate classes out there--even though it's only been offered twice) managed to overshadow an early-morning showdown between UN Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and Econ professor-to-the-stars Jeffery Sachs. Disagreeing over whether to put $2.6 billion into peacekeepers or sustainable development projects is one thing. Inflicting a disbelieving sense of shock upon a room of Save Darfur activists, Darfuri expats and human rights scholars...well that's why you come to Columbia, right?

Of the many provocative claims the African studies czar made during a 20-minute, almost totally extemporaneous speech, two would prove particularly contentious. Firstly, he argued that the security situation had stabilized in Darfur and that advocacy groups like Save Darfur were spreading a "fiction" of an increasingly intense genocide. "Why was this fiction continuing?" he asked. "Did these groups want more donations...was it part of a political agenda? I don't know."

And secondly, he argued that the international legal framework presented an illegitimate form of prosecuting war crimes in Africa, and that the international community's concept of "justice as retribution" prioritized revenge over peace. For Paul Van Zyl, the one-time executive secretary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa (a country whose justice-free model of conflict resolution Mamdani had just held up as an example for Darfur) and speaker on an earlier panel, this postulation of a peace-justice binary couldn't be allowed to slide. In the popular parlance, shit was about to escalate.

Columbia divested from Sudan on Friday by pledging to not invest in 18 oil and gas companies with business ties to the country. This comes after a Wednesday New York Times article pointing out that Yale, Harvard, Brown and other universities had already cleaned their hands of that dirty genocide business. Even our social justice is unoriginal!

Those looking for genocide information instead of genocide jokes, should check out www.sudanreeves.org.