[1] Collins authored many background papers on Sudan and the Middle East aimed at policymakers and, in 1981, he testified before the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs.
In 2007, to avoid a libel suit from the Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz, Cambridge University Press agreed to remove Alms for Jihad from circulation in British libraries and to destroy existing copies.
Robert's elder brother, Jack Gore Collins (1930–2010), was Assistant Attorney for the United States Department of Justice in Portland, Oregon.
[7] In 1954, he completed his senior history thesis, Emin Pasha in Equatoria, 1876–1889, and won a Marshall Scholarship for study at Oxford University.
[8] In 1955, while a Masters student at Balliol College, Oxford, he obtained a research grant from the Ford Foundation, which enabled him to undertake work on his thesis on the Equatoria Province.
[1] Robert and Janyce were forced to remain several weeks in Malakal by an outbreak of Ebola haemorrhagic fever in the Nzara cotton factory, which spread to other parts of southern Sudan.
[14] Collins co-authored Alms for Jihad: Charity and Terrorism in the Islamic World (Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2006) with J. Millard Burr, a former State Department Officer who worked as a logistics coordinator for Operation Lifeline Sudan and, later, as a consultant for the U.S. Committee for Refugees (USCR).
[16] In 2007, to avoid a libel suit from the Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz, Cambridge University Press agreed to remove Alms for Jihad from circulation in British libraries and to destroy existing copies.
[17][19] Many scholars have criticized the book for relying on tenuous evidence and an overly-broad and deeply political definition of "terrorism", which portrayed the entire Islamic charitable sector as a conduit or "golden chain"[20] for terrorist financing.
[8] Contemporary scholars, who have turned their attention to South Sudan's interconnected regional histories, ordinary people, and the political-economic structures within which their lives unfold,[25][26] often place Collins in the tradition of slightly older historians and authors like A.J.
[2] In [Egypt and the Sudan (1967)] and the countless others on Sudanese history, great men (though few women) determined the outcome of events, almost always as they wanted, usually in the face of daunting odds.