For many Southern Sudanese the CPA was a violent peace as physical violence and armed conflict did not end with the CPA, but instead the CPA often reconfigured and increased violence. Global, scholarly discussions about the problems with comprehensive peace agreements have often focused on the content of the agreement – the legal wording of the documents signed, or the elite deals that are behind these written texts.
1 Mushtaq H. Khan, ‘Political Settlements and the Analysis of Institutions’, African Affairs 117:469 (2018): 636–655; Virginia Page Fortna, Does Peacekeeping Work? Shaping Belligerents’ Choices after Civil War (Princeton University Press, 2008); Jan Pospíšil, Peace in Political Unsettlement: Beyond Solving Conflict (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). There is a need for a more holistic account of peace agreements that includes the international rituals in their making and the hierarchical power this entrenches. For those living in areas close to the Bilnyang and connected rivers, the CPA had an ethereal quality, being formed in distant places and empowering people who were at a significant social distance.
2 Discussions in Gogrial in 2010 and 2011; discussions in Mayendit and Ler in 2013. It was negotiated in lavish, unimaginable hotels, spatially set apart and discrete from Southern Sudanese, and it bestowed on Southern Sudanese leadership international recognition and legitimacy. Moreover, the CPA was made up of a long legal text that was incomprehensible to most people in these communities (and to most non-lawyers wherever they were in the world).
At the same time, the socio-political and spatial distance of the CPA from the people of Southern Sudan, including those near the Bilnyang, did not mean that it was inconsequential. Instead, this distance allowed it to have a divine-like spatial qualities and power, and to convey the authority needed to reconstitute the political order. The political order that was imagined by the CPA was far from the contemporary reality in Southern Sudan, and this created ambiguity and unsettlement over what of this imagined order would and could actually be realised.
The chapter highlights the CPA as another way that the hakuma displayed itself as quasi divine. The hakuma could seemingly arbitrarily demand peace, as it had demanded war. The wording of the CPA also re-entrenched the hakuma’s impunity for the large-scale death and destruction that its wars of the 1980s and 1990s had caused. The CPA also entrenched an elite government class that changed the cattle economies around the Bilnyang. With a system of peace reliant on cattle, this had implications for peace-making.
Finally, the CPA remade government-citizen relations through the remaking of regimes of cattle and land rights. Changing cattle economies complicated the abilities of cattle compensation to make peace. Changing land rights produced new ambiguities and fears, with new incentives for the wealthy to create unending wars to make bounded and static identity groups. This produced incentives for some governing elites to discourage and interrupt intra-Southern Sudanese peace.
3 Joshua Craze, The Politics of Numbers: On Security Sector Reform in South Sudan, 2005–2020 (LSE, 2021), www.lse.ac.uk/africa/assets/Documents/Politics-of-Numbers-Joshua-Craze.pdf, accessed 6 December 2020. The following chapters explore the implications of this in communities around the Bilnyang and connected rivers.