Firstly, peace itself was a rupture and a reconstituting of political order. Southern Sudanese had fought wars for over two decades. The mediators of the CPA distilled ‘the complexities of Sudan’s wars down to what they supposed was its essence: a conflict between the north (represented by the Government of Sudan and the ruling National Congress Party (NCP)) and the south (represented by the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement and Army (SPLM/A))’.
1 Alex de Waal, ‘Sudan’, in Alpaslan Özerdem and Roger Mac Ginty (eds), Comparing Peace Processes (Routledge, 2019): 303–318, page 304. The CPA saw the war in statist terms; it was a war between the state of Sudan and the ‘state
in potentia’ of Southern Sudan.
2 Joshua Craze, ‘Unclear Lines: State and Non-State Actors in Abyei’, in Christopher Vaughan, Mareike Schomerus and Lotje De Vries (eds), The Borderlands of South Sudan: Authority and Identity in Contemporary and Historical Perspectives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013): 45–66, page 64. The CPA was shaped to respond to these understandings of the war. The South was given the opportunity to vote on a leader of Sudan and then vote on Southern independence, seemingly overcoming the need for war.
For many Southern Sudanese, justifications for mobilisations to war involved a much more complex web of moral imperatives. The 1980s and 1990s had involved significant challenges to moral and cosmological systems (as discussed in Chapter 4). The CPA had provided no resolution to the divisions and confusion over pollution that had been brought by decades of war, nor any explanation to why wartime relationships of vengeance should suddenly become peaceful. This was particularly acute for those who had fought the SPLA itself.
The CPA suddenly remade it so that those who opposed the SPLA were not only enemies of the SPLA but also enemies of peace. The government could now delegitimise as war-making and criminal those who contested its legitimacy. The SPLA could use this internationally backed peace of the CPA to legitimise its sovereign claims and violently suppress opposition.
3 This parallels dynamics in Sri Lanka. See Suthaharan Nadarajah, ‘“Conflict-Sensitive” Aid and Making Liberal Peace’, in Mark Duffield and Vernon Hewitt (eds), Empire, Development & Colonialism: The Past in the Present (James Currey, 2009): 59–73. The post-CPA period was littered with government disarmament campaigns, often supported by international actors.
4 Matthew B. Arnold and Chris Alden, ‘“This Gun is our Food”: Disarming the White Army Militias of South Sudan’, Conflict, Security & Development 7:3 (2007): 361–385. Jairo Munive, ‘Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration in South Sudan: The Limits of Conventional Peace and Security Templates’, DIIS Report 2013:07 (Danish Institute for International Studies, 2013), www.econstor.eu/handle/10419/97057, accessed 17 July 2022; John Young, ‘Sudan People’s Liberation Army Disarmament in Jonglei and its Implications’, Institute for Security Studies Papers no. 137 (2007), https://journals.co.za/doi/abs/10.10520/EJC48795, accessed 17 July 2022. Southern Sudanese often experienced these campaigns as violent.
Secondly, the content of the deal and the agreement projected further rupture and unsettlement. The unsettlement of the CPA was because of the radical rupture and dissonance with reality, and the reconstitution that it projected. Bell, Pospíšil and others working together at the University of Edinburgh have highlighted how many neo-liberal peace agreements do not create political settlement and instead often intentionally create political unsettlement through the issues they fail to resolve in their written content.
5 Christine Bell and Jan Pospisil, ‘Navigating Inclusion in Transitions from Conflict: The Formalised Political Unsettlement’. Journal of International Development 29:5 (2017): 576–593. This unsettlement can either be understood as difficult decisions being punted a few years into the future in order to try to build peace, or an intentional construction of a turbulent political system in which authoritarian elites are able to gain more power. This form of political unsettlement was visible in the CPA: both the right for self-determination in SPLA-controlled areas of the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile
6 Johnson, ‘New Sudan or South Sudan?’. and the status of Abyei
7 Luka Biong Deng Kuol, ‘Political Violence and the Emergence of the Dispute over Abyei, Sudan, 1950–1983’, Journal of Eastern African Studies 8:4 (2014): 573–589. were left unsettled.
At the same time, the rupture of the CPA was not only based on what its content failed to resolve. Instead, its unsettlement was based on the significant unrealised imaginary that it projected, leaving uncertainty about the extent to which this imaginary could be realised. Part of the imagined political reconstitution in the CPA was its projection of an imaginary of SPLA military control in Southern Sudan. Large numbers of Southern forces had fought against the SPLA for two decades, and at the signing of the CPA the SPLA did not clearly control the majority of territory in Southern Sudan. The CPA was very optimistic in assuming that they would accept joining the SPLA or the Sudan army. This was apparent in communities around the Bilnyang. One of the largest anti-SPLA Southern groups, namely the South Sudan Defence Force (SSDF) under the leadership of Paulino Matip, was based in Mayom. The CPA imaginary placed Mayom under SPLA control although this area had never been controlled by SPLA forces. Therefore, the CPA assumed it could reconstitute the divisions between the factions of the hakuma.
John Garang died in a helicopter crash in July 2005. His deputy – Salva Kiir – replaced him as SPLA/M leader and, therefore, President of Southern Sudan. Salva Kiir’s Presidency helped solve some of the difficulties between the CPA’s imaginary and the realities of military control. Kiir was a more palatable political friend for SSDF leader Paulino Matip, and Kiir was able to bring Matip’s forces into the SPLA through monetary reward.
8 Alex de Waal, ‘When Kleptocracy Becomes Insolvent: Brute Causes of the Civil War in South Sudan’, African Affairs 113:452 (2014): 347–369. Yet, the terms of the CPA still left key questions undecided. In this way, it was an example of political
unsettlement.
9 For discussion of unsettlement, see: Jan Pospíšil, Peace in Political Unsettlement: Beyond Solving Conflict (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Bell and Pospisil, ‘Navigating Inclusion in Transitions from Conflict’. For example, Abyei was a contested, oil-rich region near the new Sudan-Southern Sudan border. In the CPA there were ambiguous provisions in the CPA to determine the future of Abyei.
10 de Waal, ‘Sudan’, page 312.