Prospects for a Just and Lasting Peace: The Case of Sudan

Abstract

This paper seeks to answer the following question: why does war emerge so soon after peace? To this end, this paper situates an understudied war – the Second Sudanese Civil War - within the relevant academic and policy debates about negotiated settlement stability in order to glean important lessons about, uncover recurring patterns in, and modify current theories of civil war and conflict resolution. This paper also proposes an integrative model of civil war termination based on the dominant theories of conflict resolution and on the conflict resolution experiences of the Second Sudanese Civil War. Specific to Sudan, this paper evaluates the conflict resolution successes and failures of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. To this end, this paper argues that the focus on Interim period institutional arrangements in the CPA ensured short-term peace whereas the lack of focus on strong post-Interim period pressures to ensure full implementation undermined long-term stability. The CPA was an overwhelming success in civil war termination narrowly speaking but a limited success in conflict resolution broadly speaking. The grievances of the people of the marginalized areas of Sudan – Darfur, South Kordofan, and Blue Nile - were overshadowed by a preoccupation with ending the North-South civil war. The distinction is critical: the CPA formally ended the war between the Government of Sudan and the SPLM/A but the partial implementation and explicit violation of several protocols of the CPA by the Government of Sudan throughout the Interim and post-Interim period render the CPA a limited success in conflict resolution. The tragic irony of the CPA was that by ending the war, the SPLM/A removed the greatest pressure Khartoum ever had to address the national problems of Sudan. The main lesson for the CPA is that the limited pressures - restraints on the SPLA and diminished American pressure - during the Interim and post- Interim period allowed the NCP to partially implement and, in many cases, openly violate the CPA. General to conflict resolution, this paper proposes an integrative model of civil war based on the conflict resolution efforts of the Second Sudanese Civil War. The dominant approaches to conflict resolution are temporally truncated - that is to say they only explain segments of the negotiation process. This model aims to explain the entire process – from war to peace. The integrative model analyzes the interaction between “pressures” and the “constraints” to limit action and behavior, respectively, and to ensure full implementation by all players. Thus, war emerges after peace when we – the international community - relax the pressures that created the conditions for peace in the first place. The “mutually hurting stalemate” conditions that render conflict “ripe for resolution” must thereafter be reconfigured to make settlement “ripe for implementation.”