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April and May witnessed intensified diplomatic activity around the conflict in Darfur. This culminated in the US government's announcement of new sanctions on the government of Sudan and a push at the Security Council for targeted sanctions and expansion of the existing arms embargo. The measures are intended to coerce the Sudanese government's acceptance of a 23,000-strong African Union and United Nations peacekeeping force for Darfur. But in the absence of a viable peace process there are serious limitations to what the force could achieve. Indeed, the recent focus on intervention in Darfur obscures the larger issues at stake. Foremost among these is the North-South peace process and its centrepiece, the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA). There is real risk that the CPA could collapse, and along with it, the best chance for a durable settlement to Sudan's wars.(SWP Comments / SWP)

While theoretical models of conflict often treat actors as unitary, most self-determination groups are fragmented into a number of competing internal factions. This article presents a framework for understanding the "dual contests" that self-determination groups engage in—the first with their host state and the second between co-ethnic factions within groups. Using a new data set of the number of factions within a sample of self-determination groups from 1960 to 2008, the authors find that competition between co-ethnic factions is a key determinant of their conflict behavior. More competing factions are associated with higher instances of violence against the state as well as more factional fighting and attacks on co-ethnic civilians. More factions using violence increases the chances that other factions will do so, and the entry of a new faction prompts violence from existing factions in a within-group contest for political relevance. These findings have implications for both theory and policy.

How do we conceptualize the fragmentation of internally divided movements? And how does variation in fragmentation affect the probability and patterns of infighting? The internal politics of non-state groups have received increasing attention, with recent research demonstrating the importance of cohesion and fragmentation for understanding conflict dynamics. Yet there is little consensus on how to conceptualize fragmentation, the concept at the center of this agenda, with authors using different definitions and measures. In this paper we conceptualize fragmentation along three constitutive dimensions: the number of organizations in the movement; the degree of institutionalization across these organizations; and the distribution of power among them. We then show how variation across these dimensions can explain variation in important conflict processes, focusing on infighting.