Abdulrazik "Abdu" Mohammed graduated from Eastern Washington University in 2020 with a degree in International Affairs. He was selected as an EWU McNair Scholar in March of 2018 and completed his 2018 summer research The UN Response to Darfur: Aid, Security, and Conflict Resolution with faculty mentor Dr. Dorothy Zeisler-Vralsted. In the fall of 2018, Abdu presented on a panel at the 7th Annual International Symposium on Women and Genocide in the 21st Century: The Case of Darfur and met with congressional representatives on Capitol Hill. Abdu completed a second funded summer of research in 2019 and that fall presented his research Sudanese in Diaspora: Perceptions on the Conflict in Darfur at the Black Doctoral Network Conference among others. Abdu received an honorable mention for this poster presentation.
Abdu was awarded a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship which provides funds to help cover institutional costs and a subsistence allowance at any university! For graduated school, he was accepted into the Master's Program in Global Governance, Politics and Security at American University, the Master's of Peace and Justice Studies Program at San Diego University, the Master's Program in International Affairs at Penn State, and the PhD Program in International Studies at Florida International University, where he began attending in Fall 2020 with full funding.
2019 McNair Faculty Research Mentor: Dr. Dorothy Zeisler-Vralsted - International Relations
Research Title: Sudanese in Diaspora: Perception of the conflict in Darfur, Sudan’s past and the future of Darfur
Abstract: A strong scholarly focus and interested in Sudanese studies has come to life corresponding to Sudan’s past and present conflicts and instability. Many scholars have extensively explored Sudan’s Darfur and present a major literal contribution of otherwise limited Sudanese studies. The main focus of this research is the genocide in Darfur and the international response. While there’s an extensive research on Darfur among a vast number of scholars, there’s limited comparative research that collate Darfur to the past civil wars in Sudan. A major focus on this research is looking Darfur from Alex de Waal’s center-periphery hypothesis in Sudan (2007), assessing how the Government of Sudan used this strategy to displace the peripheries in order to extract resources. The second aspect of this study is to analyze the failed international response to the Darfur genocide from the perspectives of Sudanese in diaspora. While the international response to Darfur is widely acknowledged as failure, this study takes additional step to investigate these sentiments from the perceptions of Sudanese/Darfurians in diaspora with a survey analysis of (N=200) individuals. A combined analysis of current literature on Darfur with the surveys will reveal a perceived nature and solution to the contemporary crisis as well as future of the Darfur at the height of international presence. The perceptions from the survey result would contribution a unique perspectives to the current literature on Darfur, Sudan Studies. Reflecting the voices of Darfurians in diaspora with present literature on Sudanese studies, the goal of this research is to combine the past and present, and predict the future of Darfur under its current circumstances.
2018 McNair Faculty Research Mentor: Dr. Dorothy Zeisler-Vralsted - International Relations
Research Title: Darfur Genocide: History of Conflict and Marginalization in Sudan and the Dereliction of the International Response
Abstract: The Darfur conflict is one of the world’s greatest humanitarian catastrophes of the 21st century, yet the literature behind this issue is not convincing relative to the nature of the conflict. In this proposal, the conflict in Sudan is viewed as connected to previous conflicts between the North and the South. After incorporating the long history of the war in Sudan to current conflicts in Darfur, the history of Darfur will be examined leading up to the conflict through literature and Alex De Waal’s text, Darfur: A new History A Long War. Further studies and analyses of historical conflicts in Sudan will be explored from Douglas Johnson’s text The Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil Wars. The history of Sudan will be explored through the lenses of the government of Sudan and its role in Sudan’s long history of wars—one after another since the independence in 1956. Colonial rule in Sudan created ethnic and geographical divisions in favor of Arabs. This, in turn, led to the early conflicts between the North and South Sudan. Through the analysis of Anders Hastrup’s text The War in Darfur, my research concludes that the war in Darfur was a product of an Arabization ideology constructed by the government of Sudan. Arab Militias supported by the government carried out genocide against Darfur indigenous. An extensive literature review, as well as Mr. Acampo’s own accounts taking the responsibility to bring the Darfur case to justice, are included in my research, revealing how weak the international response was to the genocide in Darfur. In summary, other historical conflicts in Sudan are related to the conflict in Darfur and understanding the past is crucial to comprehending the current Darfur situation.
