Akshaya Kumar is the Sudan and South Sudan Policy Analyst for the Enough Project. Prior to coming to Enough, Akshaya was a Law Fellow at the Public International Law and Policy Group, or PILPG, where she served as a legal adviser to the government of the Republic of South Sudan. While at PILPG, Akshaya also supported the efforts of the Sudan Peoples Liberation Movement -North to secure humanitarian aid access for war-affected populations in South Kordofan and Blue Nile. Akshaya has previously worked in South Sudan as a population based researcher for UNHCR and the ILO and also spent time in Uganda working for a local access to justice organization. While in law school, Akshaya interned with the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, UN Women and the International Committee of the Red Cross's legal delegation to the United Nations.
Akshaya holds a J.D. from Columbia Law School, an LLM with distinction in Human Rights, Conflict, and Justice from the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies and a B.A. from the George Washington University's Elliott School. Akshaya is originally from Chennai in South India and speaks Arabic, Hindi, Tamil, Spanish and French. She's passionate about gender sensitive transitional justice, promoting arts education for children, and collecting passport stamps.
Darfur is suffering its worst humanitarian crisis in years. Since the beginning of 2013, over 200,000 people have been displaced by what the government of Sudan dismisses as “inter-communal” violence. Ten years after the first reports of genocide trickled out of Darfur, an eerie echo of the past is sweeping across the region. The government of Sudan would like the world to believe that Darfur is plagued by intractable inter-tribal hatreds that inevitably lead to violent destabilizing conflict. But in a new report, “Darfur's Gold Rush: State-Sponsored Atrocities 10 Years After the Genocide,” Enough Project Senior Advisor Omer Ismail and I challenge that descriptive framework. Our research shows that government-armed Abbala militias’ recent power play to displace the Beni Hussein people and thereby gain control North Darfur’s gold mines is not the product of inter-tribal rivalries. Instead, the Abbala offensive must be understood as a continuation of Khartoum’s campaign of state-sponsored atrocity and plunder in the region. Read More »
The U.N. reports that every day approximately 338 refugees cross from South Kordofan, Sudan, into newly independent South Sudan. Yida refugee camp now hosts more than 70,000 Sudanese who are fleeing atrocities and starvation warfare in their home country. However, the U.N.'s refugee agency maintains that Yida, which lies mere kilometers from the international border between the two Sudans, is an unsuitable location for an “official” refugee camp. Notwithstanding the fact that the camp has been hosting refugees for almost 20 months, the U.N. classifies the camp as a "transit" facility. The reality on the ground tells a very different story. Read More »
Right now, only the groups who can either buy or bully their way into the discussion are participating in peace talks for eastern Congo. In a policy brief released today, the Enough Project's Aaron Hall and I identify incentives and coercive economic and diplomatic tools that can be used to bring the necessary parties to the negotiation table in a mindset where they are willing to make the difficult decisions necessary to forge a lasting peace. Read More »
While much attention from the U.S. foreign policy establishment is focused on Mali at the moment, Washington’s top diplomat on Africa made a compelling case to a packed auditorium at the Brookings Institution this week for why the Democratic Republic of Congo deserves a higher position on the list of strategic U.S. national priorities. Read More »
Often, our analysis of the fight to eliminate Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army, or LRA, stops with the act of defection. However, as this video from the Grassroots Reconciliation Group vividly demonstrates, for former child soldiers, the struggle for normalcy continues well after escape from the LRA. Read More »
The U.N.’s senior operational coordinator for humanitarian assistance briefed the Security Council on Tuesday on the unfolding travesty in Sudan’s southern states: South Kordofan and Blue Nile. With unusual candor, John Ging, the operational director of the U.N.’s Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs told the Security Council: "So far we have failed, […] we don’t need more process but more access, and we need it urgently and desperately." Read More »
Earlier this month, four bodies were found in one of Wad Madani’s irrigation canals, just miles away from Sudan’s capital. The university town in the country’s breadbasket has been spared the endemic violence that has come to characterize life in Darfur, South Kordofan, and Blue Nile. However, a fight over tuition fees at Wad Madani’s Gezira University and the subsequent murder of four students has put events in the town at the center of Sudan’s political future. Read More »
Tonight, the CW's long running drama on the secret lives of New York's Upper East Siders, Gossip Girl, will air its final episode. Over its six seasons on the air, the cult favorite has never shied away from controversy. Last season, ruthless billionaire Bart Bass came back from the dead. This season, we learned that he went underground to avoid FBI prosecution for violating United States government sanctions prohibiting oil trade with the Sudan. Read More »
Representatives of the March 23 Movement, or M23, and the government of the Congo have been meeting in Kampala this week as a part of an International Conference on the Great Lakes Region, or ICGLR, mediated effort to bring the latest round of fighting to an end. We've seen this political theater many times before. In a report released today, the Enough Project's Senior Policy Analyst Sasha Lezhnev and Co-founder John Prendergast suggest an alternate way forward. Read More »
