Making Peace on Paper Only

Abstract

Why did Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005 leave a situation of intensifying conflict, rather than peace along the new international border between Sudan and South Sudan, following South Sudan’s independence in 2011? This chapter tries to answer that question by examining how different understandings of peace affected what was actually done in the CPA negotiations and implementation with reference to border communities, specifically those in Blue Nile State, one of the ‘Three Areas’ treated separately in the peace negotiations and in the final draft of the CPA. I argue that the CPA failed to acknowledge the international dimensions of the Sudanese civil war from 1983 onwards, specifically the politics of shifting relations with Ethiopia. The process of peace-making took place mainly at the elite level of local and international leaders, speaking in very general terms of the Sudanese ‘north’ as a whole, distinct from ‘the south’. The discourse promoted by IGAD itself rested on the assumption that the problem lay between these two entities. The professional peace-makers did not take sufficiently seriously the issues affecting local communities in the transitional zones, especially those who had endured twenty years of living on the shifting front lines of military conflict.