Building Peace with Warlords in South Sudan: A Gendered Structure

Abstract

Since the official end of conflict between the Republic of the Sudan and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in 2005 efforts to build peace have proliferated in South Sudan. Although these programs have drawn on considerable resources and gained the rhetorical support of the southern administration they have had little success in demilitarizing the world’s newest state. With the re-emergence of organized armed conflict between factions in South Sudan since December 2013 there is a new need to understand the failure of peacebuilding. This chapter will explore the gendered dynamics of peacebuilding programs in South Sudan, suggesting that they have primarily been focused on the reconstruction of patriarchal authority and the entrenchment of militarized masculinity. The chapter suggests that the peacebuilding agenda in South Sudan has a distinct gendered structure that has been ignored in much of the current analysis. Furthermore, that the peacebuilding efforts in South Sudan should be understood to be a failed attempt to establish order between groups of militarized men and that the failed process of peacebuilding has been structured to further marginalize groups of non-militarized men, women, and non-violent forms of conflict resolution.