Concluding Reflections

This chapter draws upon the contributions to this volume and adds additional reflections on peacemaking in Sudan and South Sudan, to draw out some patterns and general conclusions. It frames the analysis within the theories of change implicit in international and domestic Sudanese approaches to peacemaking. The principal argument is that peace processes should be seen as an extension of politics, characterized by strategic ambiguity, pursuing parallel tracks, and positioning for future opportunities that cannot be identified in advance. By contrast, international peacemakers’ theories of change are structured to achieve a singular unified settlement, or to pursue external interests. Sudanese/South Sudanese civic actors’ strategies go beyond ‘inclusion’ to agenda setting and generating coalitions for change. These differences are illustrated with reference to how the Comprehensive Peace Agreement managed its core issues (economy and security) and its marginal or excluded issues (Abyei, the ‘two areas’ and Darfur).

A Flawed Formula for Peacemaking and Continued Violence in Darfur

This article seeks to contribute to understandings of peacemaking failure in Darfur, during the negotiations in Abuja from 2004-2006 that led to the 2006 Darfur Peace Agreement. It argues that a key factor in explaining peacemaking failure, was the reliance on a standard formula for peace negotiations used across the world. Peacemakers, in and around Abuja, worked by assuming the existence of a limited number of cohesive warring parties, enabling a comprehensive agreement and consensus between these groups, and ensuring that this result could be enshrined in a logical written document. The use of this formula, although seemingly logical, entrenched pathologies in the Abuja negotiations – exclusion of certain constituencies, the use of simplistic narratives to frame the conflict, coercive diplomacy, an overactive mediation – that in turn contributed to the continuation and even escalation of violent conflict in Darfur. The article concludes by suggesting potential pathways to decentering this dominant formula for conducting peace negotiations.

Fiscal Policy and Sudan’s 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement

Sudan’s 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) came at a time when oil revenues had transformed Sudan’s economy, and it recognized that regional inequalities in development needed to be redressed for peace to be sustainable. The government used fiscal policy to address these inequalities, transferring significant amounts of the central government’s oil rents to state governments. It was mostly spent on wages for government officials, and the evidence reviewed here suggests that it did little to redress Sudan’s stark regional inequalities. This chapter argues that the CPA’s fiscal arrangements alone could not address the land crises that underlie the violence and stagnation in the Sudan’s deeply polarized peripheral states: that would require ambitious plans to draw the productive energies of the periphery into the national economy, centred on Khartoum.

Abyei, the Comprehensive Peace Agreement and the War in Sudan’s New South

The Comprehensive Peace Agreement succeeded in resolving Sudan’s oldest political question regarding the future of South Sudan, but its most obvious failure was the immediate resumption of war inside Sudan’s ‘New South’ along its border with South Sudan before the latter’s formal independence in July 2011. By focusing on resolving ‘the Southern Problem’ only, the international mediators failed to recognize the common political, economic, and cultural issues of marginalisation that linked large parts of the border region to the wider war. Conflict in Abyei preceded the outbreak of the second civil war in 1983, but the Abyei Protocol was largely an afterthought that inadequately addressed the main issues confronting the peoples of the area. The CPA as a whole failed to include robust monitoring instruments to enforce compliance, enabling Khartoum to refuse to accept any resolution to the Abyei conflict on anything but its own terms.

Strategic Peacebuilding and the Sudanese Peace Process

A strategic approach to peacebuilding seeks to achieve stable peace through an inclusive, comprehensive, and sustained peace process that complements a political settlement with other cooperative and mutually supportive activities. Such a process, grounded in recognition of the complex causation of violent conflict and a ‘positive peace’ concept, remains an ideal type rarely if ever found in the real world. This chapter compares the process leading to and following the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) in Sudan with this ideal, focusing particularly on external intervention. It briefly examines the historical background and causes of the conflict before considering which ‘ideal’ elements were present and which were missing in the peace process, the reasons why this was so and the material and ideational constraints that prevented the ‘Naivasha Process’ from achieving the perhaps unattainable ideal. The chapter thus seeks to develop constructive lessons for those planning for or conducting peace processes.

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.

How Mediators Conceive of Peace

Both contemporary and retrospective analyses of the 2013-15 regionally-led Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) mediation for South Sudan tend to overlook or oversimplify the multiple, overlapping, and competing conceptions of peace as held by the mediators who led the process until they stepped down after a peace deal was signed in August 2015. Far from an undifferentiated, homogenous entity, the mediation comprised multiple institutions, states, and officials, each with different values, goals, and understandings of peace, which also varied over time. This article identifies six conceptions of peace as held by the mediators, to help explain why the mediators were motivated and acted as they did. Such understandings and conceptions were often contradictory. To fully assess the 2013-15 process’s effectiveness such understandings can unpeel the layers of IGAD’s differentiated institutional structure and can supplement and better contextualise common critiques about the poor execution and implementation of mediation strategy, internecine regional politics, and a generalised lack of political will to resolve the conflict.

Introduction

Opening Making and Breaking Peace in Sudan and South Sudan, this chapter introduces the book’s key concepts: peace and peacemaking. The contributions in this volume show that ideas of peace have been contested in the Sudans, and that different modalities of peacemaking have both gone together and have competed with each other. This chapter draws on these contributions in order critically to interrogate diverse ideas of peace and practices of peacemaking that have been prevalent in the Sudans. It connects them to their roots in major traditions in political thought and sets out why they are often problematic when applied to complex conflicts such as in the Sudans. Rather than arguing for one specific understanding of peace or modality of peacemaking, this chapter explains why the volume has taken a perspectival approach. Adopting the vantage points of multiple different actors, a perspectival approach foregrounds on-the-ground contestations over different ideas of peace and modes of peacemaking. Understanding what peacemaking has come to mean in the Sudans – how different understandings of peace have been deployed, but also contested, in the processes of ‘making’, and with what effects – allows scholars and practitioners to reconsider prospects for peace in the region, and well beyond.

Natural Resources, Conflict and Peacebuilding in Darfur

The natural resources and conflict discourse has been instrumentalised by commentators on Darfur as a means of disputing the relative significance of conflict at national and local levels. The significance of natural resources is played down by those wishing to focus on government culpability for violence but emphasised by those focussing on local peacebuilding and a strategy of constructive engagement with the government. Mindful of this disputed context, we review an institutional perspective on natural resources and peacebuilding. We find that Darfur is undergoing a contested and traumatised institutional bricolage relating to natural resources, livelihoods and ethnicity. Institutional bricolage therefore provides a frame in which peacebuilding relating to the environment can be analysed. A comparative neglect of these issues by international actors is aligned with conflict framings which focus on national conflict dynamics and international relations at the expense of Darfur’s own protracted political contest.

Peacemaking in Darfur and the Doha Process

This chapter provides a practitioner’s perspective on the negotiations leading to the 2011 Doha Document for Peace in Darfur (DDPD) and its aftermath. It explains how international actors constrained peace in Darfur by framing Sudan’s conflicts on a north/south axis; by repeating past mistakes in mediation; and by focusing too much on clashes between government and rebel forces when the main threat to civilians came increasingly from government forces and proxy militias. It argues that international actors often pursued approaches that were at odds with each other and should have put more weight behind democratisation. It shows how the Bashir regime used the DDPD to provide cover for its pursuit of a military solution and manipulated implementation to strengthen its grip in Darfur. It also shows how some lessons from past experience are still valid as a new phase in Sudan’s peace process gets underway.