When Peace Kills Politics

International Intervention and Unending Wars in the Sudans

Sharath Srinivasan

• Publisher: Hurst Publishers
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781849048316
• eBook ISBN: 9781787386358
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Why have war and coercion dominated the political realm in the Sudans, a decade after South Sudan’s independence and fifteen years after the Comprehensive Peace Agreement? This book explains the tragic role of international peacemaking in reproducing violence and political authoritarianism in Sudan and South Sudan.

Sharath Srinivasan charts the destructive effects of Sudan’s landmark north–south peace process, from how it fuelled war in Darfur, the Nuba Mountains and the Blue Nile to its contribution to Sudan’s failed political transformation and South Sudan’s rapid descent into civil war. Concluding with the conspicuous absence of ‘peace’ when non-violent revolutionary political change came to Sudan in 2019, Srinivasan examines at close range why outsiders’ peace projects may displace civil politics and raise the political currency of violence.

This is an analysis of the perils of attempting to build a non-violent political realm through neat designs and tools of compulsion, where the end goal of peace becomes caught up in idealised constitutional texts, technocratic templates and deals on sharing spoils. When Peace Kills Politics shows that these methods, ultimately anti-political, will be resisted—often violently—by dissatisfied local actors.

1

RETHINKING

WHAT ARE WE DOING WHEN MAKING PEACE?

The case of Sudan and South Sudan leaves one asking, ‘Is contemporary peacemaking in civil wars a “busted flush”?’ True, most civil wars now end with negotiated settlements, not victory.¹ Yet studies suggest that negotiated settlements are more likely than victory (especially rebel victory) to lead to a return to war, and these renewed wars are often deadlier.² In Sudan and South Sudan, as elsewhere in regions of protracted war, investing in peacemaking risks throwing good money after bad. The peace bill just grows. Amid industry-wide losses, some actors make handsome returns. Take the belligerents in David Keen’s ‘war system’.³ According to Keen, if waging wars can be more profitable than winning them, then outsiders’ peace investments enter into a hard-headed calculation: they may end up incentivising and institutionalising profitable corruption. Charles Tilly argued that war-making and state-making were ‘organised crime’ in European nation-state formation,⁴ and if they are, then contemporary peacemakers might be the new lucrative hostages to the international protection racket of intrastate armed conflict. Any return to war is part of reproducing the profitable ‘war system’ that contemporary peacemaking ploughs money into, for fear of more war. New belligerent factions emerge, and new spoils of peace are in the offing. This is the speculative and inflationary political marketplace of Alex de Waal’s peace ‘mission without end’.⁵

The distribution of benefits from outsiders’ investments in the economy of peace do not just accrue to belligerents or local war industries that make a buck from war–peace cycles. Like it or not, profit is also made in what Séverine Autesserre has called ‘peaceland’.⁶ The ‘peace system’ includes an array of actors: diplomats, conflict and mediation experts, international and non-governmental organisations, humanitarians and security-sector folks, military contractors, logistics and construction companies, accounting and insurance firms, multinationals, development consultancies, and troop-contributing countries. Good intentions or otherwise, organisations reproduce themselves, and individuals benefit from ever larger investments in peace. Meanwhile, wars continue without productive ends. Divesting in peace and ‘giving war a chance’, as the conservative American scholar Edward Luttwak once crudely proposed,⁷ starts to look smart, perhaps even ethical. If civil war ‘is not a stupid thing’, as Christopher Cramer insists when explaining violent transitions to capitalist economies in late modernity,⁸ perhaps hubristic peacemaking is?

Yet perhaps we have grabbed the wrong end of the stick. During the 2000s, armed conflict seemed on the decline worldwide, precisely during a triumphant era of international peacemaking and peacebuilding.⁹ Has peacemaking contributed to a more peaceful world after all? Are we ‘winning the war on war’?¹⁰ Perhaps we focus too much on the difficult cases. Large-scale political violence does occur, and it is often the most intractable of wars, where there is no victory in sight, that foreign peacemakers are called on to solve. Amid such wars, sounds the clarion call, human suffering must be alleviated, state failure and regional contagion averted, collective interests protected, and collective values upheld. Peace deals that bring an end to violence the soonest must be better than ongoing bloody wars.

For peacemakers, if peace is not made or built well enough, then it must be made or built better. Such an imperative to act is often accompanied by a claim to an unavoidable duty. If we really care about some modicum of security, justice and a decent life for all in this interdependent world, then opting out is not an option. The ‘realism’ of giving war a chance, so it goes, is not realistic at all. Yes, there have been a litany of peace intervention failures apart from Sudan and South Sudan, but whether we like it or not the ‘disintervention’ that Adam Branch calls for is hopelessly otherworldly.¹¹ The decision to intervene or not is held to be a false one. In this view of contemporary wars across the world, foreign actors start in the thick of it, and that is where they stay. As for the incidental economies of peace profiteers, perhaps it is a price worth paying for an admirable task undertaken in hostile conditions by those who duly serve peace. We need to give peace a better chance.

Which stand one takes in such a debate is beside the point of this book. Rather, the polarities of the debate help us arrive at a thoughtful starting point. International peacemaking in civil wars is neither a selfless higher calling nor mere realpolitik rivalry. It is riddled with the particular interests and value-laden ambitions and hopes of its makers, yet it is not reducible to a branch of parochial foreign policy. In thought and practice, peacemaking exercises a cast of characters seeking to achieve transitions out of violent conflict, whatever other intentions they might bring. They might hope to achieve such a transition through pragmatic bargains between belligerents, liberal democratic constitutional prescriptions, security sector reform, incentivising peace dividends, or ‘local’ peacebuilding programmes. Most often the contemporary pursuit of peace is a mixture of many of such modalities. What that debate makes abundantly clear is that we have little choice but to understand as best we can what can go wrong, and why, when we (or they) attempt to make or build peace. We have, following the first of many injunctions of Hannah Arendt upon which this book will call, to ‘think what we are doing’.

This chapter aims to break new ground in these debates by showing how the political thought of Hannah Arendt offers a different and powerful lens on why peacemaking interventions in civil wars are liable to go wrong. It also aims to secure the foundations of the book’s arguments by justifying the major lines of enquiry from an Arendtian framework for analysing peacemaking.

To do this, I begin with the shortcomings of available assessments of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) in Sudan and explanations for its failure, and then relate these to my own early attempts to explain what went wrong. Following this, I explain why any ‘problem-solving’ approach to peacemaking is at odds with the actual politics of civil wars and also at odds with bringing about non-violent civil politics. I show this by thinking through mainstream peacemaking theories and prescriptions, alongside their prominent alternatives, and the ways in which they explicitly or implicitly risk undermining non-violent civil politics in the name of solving civil wars. From here, the focus of the chapter is on introducing and interpreting Arendt’s thought on politics, violence and war. This offers, I think, a different way of understanding the vexed relationship between peacemaking, the logics of violence, and civil political action. Arendt, we shall see, had nothing to say directly about peacemaking and yet so much to offer to help us rethink the relationship between peace and politics.

Why did Peacemaking Fail in Sudan? Problematic Explanations

Given the significance of the CPA era to the fate of both Sudan and South Sudan, there is insufficient in-depth analysis on why peacemaking failed. Although there are numerous collected volumes providing diverse empirical and normative perspectives on peacemaking in Sudan and South Sudan before and after the CPA, these are at best valuable fragments and episodes in need of more comprehensive and unified analysis.¹²

Longer narrative accounts, especially by diplomats closely involved in the negotiations, can also be partial: they mostly laud the CPA’s successes or take issue with the argument that it was peacemaking that failed.¹³ What else could have been done? The CPA was, after all, signed. Peacemaking ended Sudan’s ‘north–south’ war and delivered the exercise of self-determination through a referendum on independence for southern Sudanese. For some, this was a towering achievement after over 50 years of on-and-off civil war since Sudan’s independence in 1956. Many argue that this was the best deal possible. It was the dominant belligerent parties to the conflict who were calling the shots. The al-Bashir regime and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) had both long shown their authoritarian and coercive colours; neither was willing to loosen their grip on political control. The provisions for political reform in the CPA were the best chance of changing these regimes. This perspective finds scholarly support, such as from Rolandsen who argues that in the early 2000s the prospects for any agreement were low and that a better agreement than the CPA was unlikely.¹⁴

The most probing critical analyses of peacemaking in Sudan have focused on how it exemplifies the follies of peace interventions in a liberal era. Yet whether the CPA was the product of uniquely ‘liberal’ peacemaking is not entirely clear. With time, the liberal peace and its critique seems a distraction from a full explanation of interventional peacemaking. John Young’s expansive and insightful book-length analysis of the CPA era, The Fate of Sudan,¹⁵ epitomises the false dilemma about whether or not the liberal peace was salient in Sudan. Young takes aim at liberal peacemaking and peacebuilding in Sudan as the cause of the CPA’s failure. Yet he also faults a deeply illiberal process that focused on only two belligerent elite groups, and even more narrowly, two individuals from those groups. He carefully unravels the priorities of end-to-war and stability encouraged by foreign peacemakers. This echoes a liberal critique of realism-inspired approaches to conflict management. However, he concludes that ‘the approach employed in the Sudan mediation was consistent with liberal peacemaking theory which places peace above structural and democratic transformation of the state’.¹⁶

Did peacemaking in Sudan follow a ‘liberal’ script? Chapter 2 examines how many types, or objectives, of ‘peace’ were at play in Sudan. It is how they interacted and accommodated each other that matters in explaining the shape that the negotiations took and the political effects. For now, we can note the inconsistencies between the text of the peace agreement and the actual politics endorsed and brought into being. On the one hand, the chapeau to the CPA claimed that the negotiated settlement was based on a ‘democratic system of governance … founded on the values of justice, democracy, good governance, respect for fundamental rights and freedoms of the individual’. The CPA’s power-sharing protocol talked up principles of decentralisation, of ‘good governance, accountability, transparency, democracy, and the rule of law’, and of ‘fair electoral laws … including the free establishment of political parties’. The protocol enshrined rights and liberties associated with core liberal values.¹⁷ The conduct of democratic elections was carefully laid out, as were the separation of powers. So much for the text of peace. Most of this language was, literally, foreign to the ideas, and certainly the behaviours, of both parties. Some of it may have been conjured by the parties themselves, tilting towards international actors who endorsed and resourced the peace being made. Much of it, though, certainly came directly from foreign peacemakers and the experts they brought to bear.

On the other hand, melodious language does not make a liberal peace. The text of peace was a world away from the real politics. Young is correct that in reality the CPA was an exclusive and elite deal that reinforced a militarised status quo, rather than transformed the structural problems of the country. It could have been otherwise, he argues, if peacemakers had only shown more will to pursue transformation rather than stability at each crucial turn. Young advances three arguments that are hard to sustain all at once: Sudan’s CPA woes were due to a poorly conceived and implemented liberal peace; liberal peacemaking inevitably has illiberal outcomes, in Sudan as elsewhere, and radical alternatives are required; or that this was an illiberal peace from the outset, perhaps dressed up as liberal but fundamentally and finally an exclusivist elite bargain.

For a good while, I came up short in trying to make sense of why peacemaking failed in Sudan. Like Young and many others, I shared in the critique of this period of peacemaking in Sudan and the sense there was something deeply wrong, perhaps rotten, about it. But my diagnosis seemed equally off target. My own first-hand experience observing entanglements of violence, elite politics and international intervention in Sudan 2003 and 2004, during that messy period when peacemakers dithered over Darfur, initially led me to examine what went wrong with the CPA and whether war and civilian deaths in Darfur were fuelled by peacemaking. The ‘north–south’ peace negotiations had mischaracterised the Sudanese conflict and missed its ‘centre–periphery’ nature. This provoked conflict in Sudan’s north. Peacemakers sought to solve Sudan’s ‘Southern problem’ first, taking a sequenced approach to solving other separate problems, but this underplayed the interconnections between conflicts across the country that had common causes, and this approach backfired violently in Darfur. The problem, then, was one of an erroneous diagnosis of the problem and a bad design.

In turn, the failure to find this better solution might have been due to foreign interests: peacemakers had their own priorities, whether related to their domestic constituencies, oil, counter-terrorism or regional claims. Or perhaps personality politics and chance mattered. John Garang had managed to charm a range of powerful backers into believing he could deliver peace in Sudan writ large. They ended up backing a dead horse. These arguments all assumed that better solutions or decisions were available but not taken. Peacemaking failure risks being characterised by an assumed yet underdeveloped idea of success.

I subsequently shifted attention to understanding why peacemakers made the choices they did. A broader examination of the CPA negotiations, involving over 100 elite interviews and analysis of hundreds of documents, probed the reasons why a sequenced and exclusive peacemaking approach was taken, why specific decisions were made along the way, and how peacemakers dealt with the consequences of shutting out regions and local actors from outside of the neat ‘north–south’ binary. Three reasons for peacemaking choices stood out. One motivation was expediency: simplifying the conflict to strike a neat bargain between the primary belligerents seemed the best available alternative to an ongoing and expensive war. The objective was conflict termination. Another was idealism: the belief that a peace agreement and peacebuilding plan doused in the best liberal peace thought and experience from elsewhere in the world would bring about the desired political change in good time. Finally, privilege was given to technocratic solutions, on wealth-sharing, power-sharing, constitutional reform, security reform and the like, as a way of making peace through statebuilding. Rather than conflicting with each other, these explanations blended together in actual practice. They were starkly different yet had in common a kind of disregard or dismissal of Sudanese politics in all of its contemporary dynamism and historical complexity. Importantly, these reasons also chimed with the current orthodoxies that shape contemporary peacemaking.

Problems with Problem-Solving for Peace: Three Orthodoxies and their Alternatives

It is how we understand the relationship between war and politics that matters to how we think about peacemaking. Contemporary international peacemaking in civil wars follows three ‘problem–solution’ ideal types,¹⁸ each with a deeper heritage in how we think about politics and how politics differs from and relates to war.

The first ideal type solution is the belligerents’ bargain. And the ideal problem here is the abstract neatness of an inter-state conflict between territorially bound, mutually exclusive unitary political actors, deploying institutionalised armed force. In realist and strategic approaches to civil war termination, overwhelming attention is placed on the balance of coercive force and materialist assumptions on belligerents’ state-like interests.¹⁹ Work is done to secure rational bargains on assets such as territory, security, wealth and power-to-rule. In complex civil wars, even if animated by painful historical memory and vexed issues of identity and belonging, the warring parties come to be treated like businessmen. In Sudan, British diplomats were given Getting to Yes, a popular business school text on negotiations by one of their seniors.²⁰ Binaries lend ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Map of Sudan and South Sudan
• Introduction
• 1. Rethinking: What Are We Doing When Making Peace?
• 2. Making: Competing Designs on Peace in Sudan
• 3. Simplifying: The Means of Making a ‘North–South’ Peace
• 4. Resisting: ‘Peace’ in Sudan by Means of War in Darfur
• 5. Lying: International Duplicity and Complicity in Darfur
• 6. Hollowing: Sudan’s Destitute Politics After Peace
• 7. Unfounding: The Violence in South Sudan’s Failed Political Beginning
• 8. Unending: Cycles of War, Intervention and Making and Breaking Peace
• Postscript: Sudan’s 2019 Revolution, Beginning Anew
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover