Chapter 4 ‘Local peace’ and the Silencing of the Dead: The 1999 Wunlit Peace Meeting

The 1999 Wunlit Peace Meeting is repeatedly remembered as ‘the most successful peace meeting in the history of the Sudans’.1 John Ryle, Douglas Johnson, Alier Makuer Gol, Chirrilo Madut Anei, Elizabeth Nyibol Malou, James Gatkuoth Mut Gai, Jedeit Jal, Margan Riek, John Khalid Mamun, Machot Amuom Malou, Malek Henry Chuor, Mawal Marko Gatkuoth and Loes Lijnders, ‘What Happened at Wunlit?: An oral history of the 1999 Wunlit Peace Conference’, page 6, https://riftvalley.net/sites/default/files/publication-documents/RVI%202021.06.28%20What%20Happened%20at%20Wunlit__Pre-print.pdf, accessed September 2021. Plus, it provides an archetypal example of the ‘local turn’ in peace-making whereby international actors champion ‘local’ forms of peace-making when national efforts are failing (see Introduction). Wunlit’s fame has meant that it was both an agreement that sought to elevate the peace-making power of local leaders, and a model for the proliferation of local peace efforts across South Sudan over the following decades.2 Mark Bradbury, John Ryle, Michael Medley, and Kwesi Sansculotte-Greenidge, Local Peace Processes in Sudan: A Baseline Study (London: Rift Valley Institute, 2006). The Wunlit Peace Meeting did clearly reduce armed conflict between communities and achieve cooperation on a scale that was previously thought impossible. It was a remarkable achievement. At the same time, in reality, Wunlit also pushed against some of the existing logics of peace-making and re-crafted ‘customs’ in order to reshape political hierarchies, social identities and possibilities of peace. The peace was supported by powerful sections of the SPLA and was visibly backed by military might. Simultaneously, the language of the ‘customary’ helped naturalise and perform continuity despite significant changes to the logics of peace. Wunlit made priests sacred and not divine in the peace-making process (in Graeber’s and Sahlins’ terms) by hedging them inside remade customs. Wunlit also shifted the logics of peace away from a judicial peace towards one of negotiation, and this, in turn, entrenched the divine-like power of the hakuma. In this way the peace of Wunlit can be seen as violent in that it amounted to a militarily enforced restructuring of cosmic politics and the norms of peace-making. At the same time, Wunlit’s rejection of compensation, and an associated push against the demands of the dead, arguably did encourage more inclusive ideas of community that had the potential to bring a less violent peace if implemented.