Unfounding

This chapter, ‘Unbounding’, illuminates the opposition between peace as a project of making and the founding or refounding of a political community through civil political action. The chapter examines how peacemaking was implicated in South Sudan’s violent failure as a new political community. Without diminishing domestic elite political responsibility for the destruction of order and civility, the chapter analyses how this collapse was possible within the context of a heavily internationalized peacemaking, statebuilding and peacebuilding effort. By ordaining a government-in-waiting that needed no further legitimacy from its people, and focusing on a technocratic and transactional mode of ‘building’ peace and state in southern Sudan after war, international intervention made a peace without politics in southern Sudan between 2005 and 2011. The new political beginning of independence, the founding of a new political community, became a mirage when overtaken by the memories and wounds of intra-southern violence, rekindled political rivalries and the militarized, corrupted and coercive logic of power to rule that quickly pulled South Sudan down into war.

Triggering the Circle of Societal Death

This chapter highlights four possible triggers that could start the Twelve-Step Circle of Societal Death. The first trigger is the declines in the Mensch cycle. Regular downturns in the life cycles of products produce lasting recessions and depressions that are difficult to overcome. The second trigger is landlessness, which leads to political instability and war. Indeed, the shifting of rural populations from having land to not having land is one of the most potentially destabilizing social changes imaginable. The third is trigger ecological collapse. The warfare, ethnic hostility, and terrorism we see in Yemen, Afghanistan, Southern Sudan, and Northern Nigeria all have their origins in the desert expanding, destroying the semiarid. Finally, the fourth trigger is increased low female status. Some people may be skeptical of the role of low female status. However, high female status is associated with greater female education, greater economic growth from female entrepreneurship, greater women's participation in the economy, and lower fertility creating lower population growth and greater ecological sustainability.

Spathodea campanulata (African tulip tree).

S. campanulata is a medium-size tree up to 35 m tall and 175 cm in diameter. It is indigenous to Africa where it extends along the west coast from Ghana to Angola and inland across the tropical rain forest region to southern Sudan and Uganda. It grows naturally in secondary forests in the high forest zone and in deciduous transition and savanna forests. In Uganda, it is one of the trees that colonizes grasslands. It grows well in areas with an even distribution of rainfall but will tolerate a dry season of up to six months. It grows on a wide variety of sites, from poorly to excessively drained, but prefers fertile, deep and well-drained loams.

The Interlinkage between Understandings of Self-Determination and Understandings of Peace

There are two (not mutually exclusive) understandings of self-determination: a ‘thin’ one and a ‘thick’ one. The thin understanding focuses on secession; the thick understanding focuses on participation within the same state. In the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), the Sudanese government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) used both conceptions of self-determination. This chapter argues that the two understandings of self-determination correspond to two different understandings of peace and that in Sudan’s particular experience only self-determination in its thin sense, which corresponds to negative peace and not positive peace, was implemented in resolving the southern Sudan-northern Sudan conflict, explaining much of what followed. The chapter analyses the CPA and its implementation, as well as the two main constitutions that reflected its provisions, with the objective of examining the different understandings of self-determination that they incorporated, the conceptions of peace that correspond to them and how they were interlinked, and how this determined the degree of success in realizing peace through self-determination.

Religious Humanitarianism and the Evolution of Sudan People’s Liberation Army (1990-2005)

During the Cold War, military and economic tensions between the US and the Soviet Union shaped the process of war in conflict regions in different parts of the world. The end of the Cold War in the early 1990s reshaped the balance of power in global politics, as new actors appeared on the global scene and global foreign policy shifted to mediating and providing humanitarian assistance in conflict regions zones. Humanitarianism became the method of conflict resolution, which provided humanitarian organizations, especially the religious ones among them, with the opportunity to have more influence in the outcomes of sociopolitical events occurring in the world. These dynamics impacted conflicts in Africa, especially within Sudan. This is because that era coincided with Sudan’s Second Civil War (1983-2005) between the Sudan People Liberation Army (SPLA) and the Government of Sudan (GofS). During the Cold War, both the US and Russia intervened in the civil war in Sudan by providing military and economic assistance to different parties, but, again, in the post-Cold War era humanitarianism was used in relation to the civil war. Transnational religious organizations provided humanitarian assistance in the war-torn and drought-afflicted regions in Southern Sudan, and sought to help implement peace initiatives to end the war. The organizations included Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS), a consortium of UN agencies and NGOs1 which was created in 1989. In addition, transnational religious groups based in the United States and Canada such as the Christian Solidarity International (CSI), the Canadian Crossroads, Catholic Relief Service, Mennonite Central Committee and the Lutheran Church got involved in humanitarian relief in Sudan. The global focus on religious humanitarianism extended to Southern Sudan as the New Sudan Council of Churches (NSCC) was founded in 1989-1990 to coordinate the humanitarian assistance. Because SPLA has led the civil war on behalf of Southern Sudan and had suzerainty over territories there, the humanitarian organizations had to build relationships with the SPLA to deliver relief through Southern Sudan and negotiate peace initiatives. This article analyzes how the transnational activities of the religious humanitarian groups shaped the evolution of SPLA from 1990 to 2005, with a particular focus on the US and Canadian organizations. We will see that the organizations influenced SPLA in a manner that impacted the civil war both in positive and negative ways. The organizations were ambivalent as, on one hand, they aggravated the conflict and, on the other hand influenced the development of both Church and non-Church related peace initiatives. Their humanitarian work was intricate as the civil war itself became more complex due to political issues that involved slavery, and oil extraction in Southern Sudan by US and Canadian multinational oil companies. All the parties involved took action to help end the civil war, but they all sought to serve their own interests, which jeopardized the possibility of a lasting peace. Thus, the interpretation of that history provides ways to help solve the current armed conflict in South Sudan.