Chapter 5 The 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement

The CPA was an archetypal example of an internationally backed neo-liberal peace agreement.1 John Young, The Fate of Sudan: The Origins and Consequences of a Flawed Peace Process (Zed Books, 2012). Since the 1990s, internationally backed, national peace agreements have gone beyond demanding a cessation of hostilities and have repeatedly linked economic and politically liberal conditions to stability.2 Mark Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security (Zed Books, 2014). If the end of the Cold War was an ‘end of history’, the ideological battle had been won in favour of political and economic liberalism.3 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Hamish Hamilton, 1992). Peace could be used to imagine, perform and create this liberal order. Some claim this liberalism was itself necessary for peace, while other scholars were already highlighting how these liberal reforms could be deeply violent and inequitable.4 Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars.

This chapter considers the CPA from the perspective of people in the communities around the Bilnyang and connected rivers. For people living in the communities of the Bilnyang and connected rivers, the CPA was experienced as an increase in violence and armed conflict. Having experienced a period of relative decline in conflict after the Wunlit Peace Agreement, the CPA brought a new period of armed violence. This chapter introduces the CPA, its imagined reconstitution of the political order and the performative nature of this peace. In later chapters, I go on to explore how armed conflict increased after the CPA.

The unsettlement of the CPA came from the shifts it envisaged and the uncertainty about their realisation. The CPA demanded two massive shifts for the people of Southern Sudan: firstly, it demanded a shift from war to peace; secondly, it asserted constitutional reforms in that it remade relationships of power. The CPA was not just a cessation of hostilities, but a package of politically and economically liberal constitutional reform. In this way, the CPA remade the relationship between different parts of the hakuma and between Southern Sudanese people and the hakuma. The chapter starts by outlining the changes imagined and projected by the CPA.

To make a new political order, it is necessary for those making it to step outside of it, and for them to be seen as legitimate in doing this. Graeber and Sahlins argue that ‘in order to become the constitutive principle of society, a sovereign has to stand outside it … the various “exploits” or acts of transgression by which a king marks his break with ordinary morality are normally seen to make him not immoral, but a creature beyond morality’.5 David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins, On Kings (HAU Books, 2017), page 74. The CPA was a massive rupture and remaking of the political order; the parties to the agreement, as well as the process itself, had to establish their legitimacy to do this. The chapter progresses to discuss how the parties to the agreement set themselves apart as legitimate to reconstitute the political order. Political leaders and diplomats drew on national and international cultural archives of peace and state making. Cultural archives include norms that are habitual and unremembered, alongside histories that are retold, that can be a basis for validation and ‘constitutes the foundations of a moral world’.6 Wendy James, The Listening Ebony: Moral Knowledge, Religion and Power among the Uduk of Sudan (Clarendon, 1988), page 6. Firstly, they performed rituals that affirmed their own and the peace agreement’s social distinction from Southern Sudanese people. The peace agreement took on an ethereal quality. Secondly, the legal document of the peace agreement, made it directly inaccessible and incomprehensible to most Southern Sudanese. A lack of sense can be the very expression of authority as accepting it involves accepting that there is someone wiser than you.7 Graeber and Sahlins, On Kings, page 463. The lack of sense was not just a result of the contradictions in the ideas of ‘popular sovereignty’,8 Ibid. but also because the CPA was recorded in a non-sensical form for most Southern Sudanese. Thirdly, the parties set themselves apart by declaring their own impunity for the arbitrary violence they had committed.

The CPA was also an expression of the god-like nature of the SPLA and new Southern Sudan government as it arbitrarily reined ‘favour’ to the extent that it demanded peace and the suspension of war. When governments and states rain favour, or destruction, or when they demand war or peace, with arbitrariness and impunity, they are setting themselves ‘outside the confines of the human’ and acting as if they were gods.9 Graeber and Sahlins, On Kings. For many in Southern Sudan, the peace of the CPA ended very recent experiences of killing and lethal violence. It pivoted the hakuma’s demands, often framed in moral language, from that of war to that of peace. While Southern Sudanese welcomed peace, it was often not clear if the moral and spiritual dilemmas that had driven them to war had been settled. The cosmic polity was not clearly stabilised. The CPA’s vision of post-conflict ‘purity’ was acceptance of the CPA-created Government of Southern Sudan, but for many Southern Sudanese this did not satisfy the wartime pollution they felt.

The chapter ends by reflecting on the ways that the CPA reformed power and peace-making. The CPA reasserted the hakuma’s power over peace, and also modelled this arbitrary, asserted, not judicial, peace. It also created a new Southern Sudanese elite enriched with petro-dollars. Their investment of these dollars in cattle had implications for the cattle-based peace-making systems around the Bilnyang. Changes to land, labour, resource and property rights also newly incentivised politico-economic elites to try to forge static, bounded territorial communities including through the making of unending wars and the impossibilities of peace.