Negotiating violence: Sudan's peacemakers and the war in Darfur

Abstract

A decade ago international peacemakers turned a blind eye when violence in Darfur, Sudan, first escalated into civil war. This article addresses the war’s brutal beginnings, using a close reading of internal communications, interviews, and public statements to deepen our understanding of the predicament that key peacemakers found themselves in, and dug themselves into. For a long first year, when the majority of violent deaths in Darfur occurred, peacemakers employed a set of discursive strategies that intentionally depoliticized Darfur’s conflict. Despite knowledge to the contrary, peacemakers carefully avoided connections between Darfur and the ongoing north–south peace negotiations they were championing to end Sudan’s long second civil war. These ideational moves gave peacemakers a degree of cover for not responding directly to the conflict, but they also shaped the political calculations and opportunities of domestic actors in ways that further enabled armed violence, ultimately leading to policy failure. The problems of peacemaking in Sudan highlight the particular challenges that arise from negotiating peace. Negotiations give words a privileged place in taming the materiality of violence, yet this also leaves peacemakers liable to shaping new trajectories of political violence born out of local dissatisfaction with the prospects for peace. ENDGAMES IN AFRICAN CIVIL WARS predominantly involve detailed negotiated settlements rather than victory or surrender, yet peace agreements often fail to avert renewed conflict. When peace is negotiated, words hold a privileged place in taming the materiality of violence. Peace negotiations frame what the war is, and is not, about, and in turn prefigure possibilities of what peace might tangibly mean. When armed violence recurs during peace negotiations, especially when such violence is to some extent aimed at influencing the ideas of peace at stake, peacemaking plays a significant role in determining its political significance. The achievements of peacemaking may in this way be sullied by their role in generating new and