The politics of peace

Alternative accounts have highlighted how peace meetings can entrench the violence of politics by elevating the power of military actors and reducing space for civil actors in politics. Srinivasan has described how competing interests at peace meetings force the simplification of understandings of conflicts and peace, resulting in the exclusion and perspectives of some actors.4 Sharath Srinivasan, When Peace Kills Politics: International Intervention and Unending Wars in the Sudans (Hurst & Company, 2021). In the Sudans, civil actors have repeatedly been left out, meaning that peace-making inadvertently increases a violent logic to politics.5 Ibid.

More Marxian interpretations of comprehensive peace agreements have instead highlighted that the neo-liberal orders created by comprehensive peace agreements produce inequalities that can lead to grievance and rebellion.6 Edward Newman, Roland Paris and Oliver Richmond (eds). New Perspectives on Liberal Peace-building (UN University Press, 2009); Oliver P. Richmond, ‘The Problem of Peace: Understanding the “Liberal Peace”’, Conflict, Security & Development 6:3 (2006): 291–314; Neil Cooper, ‘Review Article: On the Crisis of the Liberal Peace’, Conflict, Security & Development 7:4 (2007), page 605; D. Chandler, Empire in Denial: The Politics of State-Building (Pluto Press, 2006); Toby Dodge, ‘The Ideological Roots of Failure: The Application of Kinetic Neo-Liberalism to Iraq’, International Affairs 86:6 (2010): 1269–1286; Michael Pugh, ‘Local Agency and Political Economies of Peacebuilding’, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 11:2 (2011): 308–320; Peter Uvin, Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda (Kumarian Press, 1998); Carl-Ulrik Schierup (ed.), Scramble for the Balkans: Nationalism, Globalism and the Political Economy of Reconstruction (Macmillan, 1999); Susan Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War (Brookings Institution, 1995); Wayne Nafziger and Juha Auvinen, Economic Development, Inequality, and War: Humanitarian Emergencies in Developing Countries (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Liberal politics and economics can produce destructive nationalisms,7 Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, ‘Toward New Imaginaries: An Introduction’, Public Culture 14:1 (2002): 1–19. such as the militarisation of ethnicity between the Nuer and Dinka in South Sudan.8 Jok Madut Jok and Sharon Hutchinson. ‘Sudan’s Prolonged Second Civil War and the Militarization of Nuer and Dinka Ethnic Identities’, African Studies Review 42:2 (1999): 125–145. As Pugh narrates, the social changes brought by these liberal orders needs new forms of social discipline to control them and this often involves government violence.9 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–79 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Moodie describes how governments can recode such violence after the civil war as ‘common criminality’ even when it marked a continuity with wartime violence, including agents of the state being perpetrators.10 Ellen Moodie, El Salvador in the Aftermath of Peace: Crime, Uncertainty, and the Transition to Democracy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).

Works by Craze, Kinderley, Majok, Thomas and Uchalla have highlighted South Sudanese struggles caused by the increasingly marketised and monetarised nature of the South Sudanese economy as a result of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA).11 Kindersley and Majok, Breaking Out of the Borderlands; Uchalla, Trading Grains in South Sudan; Thomas, South Sudan; Craze, ‘Displaced and Immiserated’; Craze, The Politics of Numbers. These new struggles build on longer patterns of political and economic inequity and change. Successive wars are ‘rooted in long-established patterns of authoritarian, violent, and extractive governance of the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial periods, which concentrated economic and political power at the centre’.12 Øystein Rolandsen and Nicki Kindersley, South Sudan: A Political Economy Analysis (Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, 2017), page 4. Young has repeatedly highlighted how the CPA inevitably failed because it did not address the economic inequities between the centre and periphery that drove the war.13 John Young, The Fate of Sudan: Origins and Consequences of a Flawed Peace Process (Zed Books, 2012); John Young, South Sudan’s Civil War: Violence, Insurgency, and Failed Peacemaking (Zed Books, 2019). He criticises the international community for its refusal to be honest about the SPLA’s inability to be the foundation of a liberal democracy, and blames the failed peace policies of countries such as the USA for the post-2013 violence.14 Ibid. In an important article for African Arguments in 2022, Joshua Craze and Feri Marko start to develop their politico-economic analysis of the 2018 Revitalised Agreement on the Resolution of Conflict in South Sudan (R-ARCSS).15 Joshua Craze and Ferenc David Marko, ‘Death by Peace: How South Sudan’s Peace Agreement Ate the Grassroots’, Debating Ideas (6 January 2022), https://africanarguments.org/2022/01/death-by-peace-how-south-sudans-peace-agreement-ate-the-grassroots, accessed 16 July 2022. They describe how R-ARCSS, like the CPA,16 Pinaud, ‘South Sudan’. facilitated the making of a wealthy class of political leaders.17 Craze and Marko, ‘Death by Peace’. It further centralised power and created a regime in which government officials at all levels were appointed by the centre and lacked ‘almost any popular legitimacy’. Armed conflict in the periphery was a result of political contestations in the centre.

This book builds on this rich, recent scholarship on the protracted inequities of South Sudan’s political economy.18 This includes the work discussed above by Craze, Kinderley, Majok, Thomas, Uchalla and Young. Yet, economic forces can conceal moral dynamics,19 Edward Palmer Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Back Act (Breviary Stuff Publications, 2013 [1975]); Tim Allen, ‘Violent and Moral Knowledge: Observing Social Trauma in Sudan and Uganda’, Cambridge Anthropology 13:2 (1988): 45–66; Charles Taylor, ‘Modern Social Imaginaries’, Public Culture 14:1 (2002): 91–124. and there is always a danger of being pulled towards economic determinism at the cost of ignoring the way that institutions are symbolically constituted.20 Sahlins warned of these dangers long ago: Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason. Meaning matters, and meaning is not determined by the material.21 Ibid. see the final chapter. Even the saliency of material and economic forces can themselves be a socio-cultural product.22 Ibid. It is when we pay attention to these stories, symbols, cultural archives and imaginaries that we not only notice their immense institutional force,23 Gaonkar, ‘Toward New Imaginaries’, page 4. but also the space they can create for contestation and refusal.

Class construction is part of the politico-economic dynamics that form the background of the book. Pinaud described the emergence of a ‘military aristocracy’24 Pinaud, ‘South Sudan’. and D’Agoôt the ‘gun class’, partly as a result of the wealth and power given to elites by 2005 CPA.25 Majok D’Agoôt, ‘Taming the Dominant Gun Class in South Sudan’ (2018), https://africacenter.org/spotlight/taming-the-dominant-gun-class-in-south-sudan, accessed 10 December 2017. Pinaud more recently and controversially then claims that the class system became ethnicised resulting in ideologies of ethnic entitlement and genocidal activities.26 Clémence Pinaud, War and Genocide in South Sudan (Cornell University Press, 2021), page 3. Pinaud’s highlighting of class as important to understandings of war and peace in South Sudan was brilliant. Yet, her claims of genocide are wrong on at least three accounts. Firstly, they misrepresent patterns of violence in South Sudan since 2013; intra-ethnic violence has been so incredibly prevalent in South Sudan, including intra-Dinka violence,27 Joshua Craze, ‘“And Everything Became War”: Warrap State Since the Signing of the R-ARCSS’, HSBA Briefing Paper (Small Arms Survey, 2022). that any understanding of the wars must take this seriously. Secondly, the book inaccurately homogenises ‘the Dinka’ and itself carries the danger of contributing to the construction of the ‘Dinka’ identity in a way that could incite anti-Dinka violence. Thirdly, at play in the armed conflicts of South Sudan are much longer-term cultural archives and cosmologies that have shaped violence and been slowly shaped by violence, political economies, empirical experiences and creative refusal over time.

However, this proliferation of peace-making has not resulted in ‘peace’. Globally and in South Sudan, armed conflict has not stopped, with many polities apparently at ‘peace’ experiencing violent deaths at rates that exceed those in wartime.32 Rachel Kleinfield and Robert Muggah, ‘No War, No Peace: Healing the World’s Violent Societies’, in Edward de Waal (ed.), Think Peace: Essays for an Age of Disorder (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2019) https://carnegieendowment.org/files/Think_Peace_final.pdf, accessed 17 October 2021; Claire McEvoy and Gergely Hideg, ‘Global Violent Deaths 2017: Time to Decide’ (Small Arms Survey, 2017). A big part of this ‘peace-time’ violence results from governments imposing mass violence and excessive force against their own people.33 Kleinfield and Muggah, ‘No War, No Peace’; McEvoy and Hideg, ‘Global Violent Deaths 2017’. For decades in South Sudan, peace agreements have not stopped protracted armed conflicts being part of life. In addition, they have not stopped physical or arbitrary violence by governing authorities whether in times of peace or war. Instead, peace has often been synonymous with increased physical violence and impunity.

Furthermore, international actors have also tried to limit governments’ abilities to kill with impunity in South Sudan in times of war and peace. The international community’s failure to prevent the 1994 Rwanda genocide prompted global moral outrage and panic. Since the 1990s, and the global rise of the protection agenda, international powers have been active in making state sovereignty limited or conditional, including through new norms such as the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) and ‘Protection of Civilians’.34 See United Nations, ‘Responsibility to Protect’, United Nations, www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/about-responsibility-to-protect.shtml, accessed 1 January 2022. South Sudanese lives have been saved from government violence by the inception of protection practices such as the UN Protection of Civilians sites.35 Caelin Briggs, ‘Protection of Civilians Sites: Lessons from South Sudan for Future Operations’ (Norwegian Refugee Council, 2017). However, despite this rise in an agenda of human security and humanitarian protection, civilians have still been killed and the global agenda has still been primarily shaped by the focus on the building and supporting of state sovereignty.36 Autesserre, Peaceland; Charles T. Hunt, ‘Analyzing the Co-Evolution of the Responsibility to Protect and the Protection of Civilians in UN Peace Operations’, International Peacekeeping 26:5 (2019): 630–659; Alex J. Bellamy and Charles T. Hunt, ‘Twenty-First Century UN Peace Operations: Protection, Force and the Changing Security Environment’, International Affairs 91:6 (2015): 1,277–1,298.

A ‘local turn’ in peace-making in the 1990s partly followed from failures in more international efforts.37 Roger Mac Ginty and Oliver Richmond, ‘The Local Turn in Peace Building: A Critical Agenda for Peace’, Third World Quarterly 34:5 (2013): 763–783. With ongoing international policy support for local conflict prevention, debates about the meaning and value of the ‘local’ continue. Scholars like Mac Ginty and Richmond see the problem in local agency in its capture by the international and its subservience, in practice, to Western, neo-liberal logics. They have highlighted the standardisation of local conflict prevention through international support, and the lack of structural space in reality for alternative approaches.38 Roger Mac Ginty, ‘Indigenous Peace-Making versus the Liberal Peace’, Cooperation and Conflict 43:2 (2008): 139–163; Portia Roelofs ‘Contesting Localisation in Interfaith Peacebuilding in Northern Nigeria’, Oxford Development Studies 48:4 (2020): 373–386. The ‘local turn’ has captured the local for international ends, mimicking the use of local peace in colonial periods. Others, however, see more fundamental flaws in confidence in the local for conflict prevention. They highlight the dangers of romanticising the local,39 N. Džuverović, ‘To Romanticise or Not to Romanticise the Local’, Conflict, Security & Development 21:1 (2021): 21–24; T. Paffenholz, ‘Unpacking the Local Turn in Peacebuilding’, Third World Quarterly 36:5 (2015): 857–874. and highlight how the local itself can be ‘contested, oppressive and even violent’.40 Allen, ‘The Violence of Healing’. Support for the local is criticised for falsely perpetuating a binary, reified and essentialist understandings of local and international.41 Paffenholz, ‘Unpacking the Local Turn in Peacebuilding’.

This book is instead focused on the politics of peace-making however it is categorised. The book avoids making ontological distinctions between comprehensive peace agreements made in foreign capital cities and local peace-making made in South Sudan, instead focusing on how both are actually experienced and contested in specific communities. Many of the divine authorities discussed in this book would also not only claim local authority but would also claim power over different peoples and the state itself.