Wunlit was based on the assumption that peace would be made through mediation and conciliation. This ignored previous models of peace-making based on law and, therefore, Wunlit renegotiated the logics and meanings of peace, and the power in peace including the relations between rulers and the ruled.
The substantive meeting discussions at Wunlit highlighted the chiefs’ willingness to return to legal order. People explicitly compared the conference to Fangak conferences. The Fangak conferences had been convened every five years by the government from the 1940s until President Nimeiri abolished the Native Administration in 1973.
1 Bradbury et al., Local Peace Processes in Sudan, page 39. The Wunlit meeting also concluded with reinstating the chiefs’ role in the judiciary and renewing the regular review of the customary law. The resolutions of Wunlit included the promise to reinstate Nuer-Dinka border courts. However, this never took place.
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Figure 3. The army looks on to provide security while people participate in a UN-funded, local authority-organised ‘local’ peace meeting, Lakes State, May 2012 (Naomi Ruth Pendle).
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Figure 4. Soldiers look on as people discuss in groups the details of the peace meeting’s resolution, Lakes State, May 2012 (Naomi Ruth Pendle).
Wunlit opened the door for international donor funding in Southern Sudan for NGO-led people-to-people peace-building programmes and local peace conferences. Within seven years of the Wunlit meeting, another fifty NGO-backed local peace meetings had been held, and an uncounted number have happened since.
2 Ibid., page 18. Wunlit is still often referenced in discussions about how to build peace. These processes relied on donor funding to cover the significant expenses of moving people around Southern Sudan.
3 Judith McCallum, ‘Wunlit Conference (1999)’, in John Akec et al. (eds), We Have Lived Too Long to Be Deceived: South Sudanese Discuss the Lessons of Historic Peace Agreements (Rift Valley Institute, 2014): 29–30, page 29. As donor funding cycles were short, the focus often became the short-term conference instead of the longer-term process of bringing people together. Agreements repeatedly focused on a negotiated, signed agreement and presented peace meetings as a one-off-event, and not a long-term pattern.