Making and Breaking Peace in Sudan and South Sudan

Abstract

Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005 ended over two decades of civil war and led to South Sudan’s independence. Peacemaking that brought about the agreement and then sought to sustain it involved, alongside the Sudanese, an array of regional and western states as well as international organisations. This was a landmark effort to create and sustain peace in a war-torn region. Yet in the years that followed, multiple conflicts continued or reignited, both in Sudan and in South Sudan. Peacemaking attempts multiplied. Authored by both practitioners and scholars, this volume grapples with the question of which, and whose, ideas of peace and of peacemaking were pursued in the Sudans and how they fared. From the 2005 agreement and various attempts to make peace in Darfur, to renewed peacemaking attempts in border regions between the two countries and finally efforts to resolve the civil war in South Sudan, understandings of peace have been contested, and different modalities of peacemaking have both gone hand in hand and have competed with each other. Bringing together economic, legal, anthropological and political science perspectives on over a decade of peacemaking attempts in the two countries, it provides insights for peacemaking efforts to come, in the Sudans and elsewhere.