Introduction
When the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) between the Sudan government and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) was signed in January 2005, many Sudanese and international observers hoped that it would also positively affect the situation in Darfur and elsewhere, and that peace and stability would finally come to the country.
However, large numbers of people have died since the official ending of the war, and not only in Darfur. Whereas bombs stopped raining on civilian targets in Southern Sudan, and the South–North armies stopped engaging each other in all-out combat, the distinctions between war and peace were blurred by the armed violence resulting from ethnic feuds, the brutalities carried out by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA)1, tensions between the armies of the South and North, and general lawlessness. In Darfur, fatalities from violence have decreased, but the political crisis has become increasingly complex and difficult to solve.
The efforts of the international community to help build peace in Sudan have been an uphill struggle, frustrated not only by the failure to stop violence in Darfur and the continuous setbacks in the implementation of the CPA, but also by increasing divisions within the international community itself, most recently over the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for President Omar al-Bashir (Sørbø 2009).
Assessments that have been made also reveal that aid and peace-building efforts in the country remain segmented, fractured and insufficiently engaged with processes at the root of violence in Sudan (e.g. Lotze et al. 2008). This applies particularly to local conflicts and the ways in which they interlock with national and regional conflicts. Thus, according to a study of reintegration of internally displaced persons (IDPs) and refugees returning to Jonglei State in Southern Sudan, the structure and process of local conflicts and instability have been poorly understood, and ‘one-dimensional negative images of pervasive chaos’ have dissuaded actors to fully engage with the fundamental issues (Pantuliano et al. 2008, p. 76). Similar images appear to prevail in the case of Darfur. It is not always clear, as David Keen writes, ‘whether it is the violence that is mindless, or the analysis’ (Keen 2008, p. 13).
Writing on the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Severine Auteserre has argued that the most powerful peace-builders – diplomats, donors and international organisations such as MONUC (the UN Mission to the DRC) and the World Bank – largely ignored the fact that much of the violence in the DRC was motivated by long-standing grass-roots agendas, whose main instigators were villagers, chiefs, or ethnic leaders. ‘Local manifestations of violence’, Auteserre writes, ‘although often related to national and regional struggles, were also precipitated by distinctly local problems’ (Auteserre 2009, p. 260). Even issues usually presented as regional or national questions had significant local components which fuelled and reinforced the regional and national dimensions. However, international peace-builders failed to address local issues, because of discursive ‘frames’ which authorise and justify which actions and areas are relevant and appropriate for intervention (ibid.).
In the same paper, Auteserre also suggests that international intervention in Sudan presents interesting parallels. In her view, the widespread interpretation of Darfur as an ethnic, Arab vs African war prevented international interveners from understanding the complex local dynamics of violence. International actors ‘based their understanding on a simplified good vs evil framing of the conflict and ended up involuntarily fuelling existing antagonisms’ (ibid., p. 276).
This article further explores this issue and its implications for efforts to build peace.2 Conflict patterns that have emerged in Sudan to a large extent reflect local and regional peculiarities. In fact, inter- and intra-community fighting has become a key source of violence and insecurity in Southern Sudan and in large parts of Darfur and neighbouring Kordofan. Such conflicts currently threaten the implementation of the referendum over the future status of Southern Sudan scheduled for 2011. They also fuel the debate over whether Southern Sudan would be viable as an independent state.
Local conflicts, however, have increasingly become part of a complex interconnected conflict ‘system’ that includes the wider struggles between the North and South, between the Khartoum government and Darfur rebels, and between competing southern interests. As we have seen both in Darfur and Southern Sudan, the system also transcends national boundaries (Tubiana 2008a, Giroux et al. 2009). Local militias ally themselves with regional and national actors and local agendas provide the latter with allies on local levels who are crucial in maintaining military control, continuing resource exploitation, or persecuting political and ethnic enemies. Local and regional conflicts are also continuously being reconfigured. As they evolve, what may appear as original or ‘root’ causes may change over time.
The challenge to peace-builders is to take this complexity into account, not by perceiving local conflict dynamics as a mere manifestation of macro-political cleavages, but as being motivated by top-down causes (regional or national) as well as grass-roots agendas. As Alex de Waal has argued, disorder and crisis in the Sudanese peripheries is part of an overall picture where the dominant elites in Khartoum, despite internal divisions, have used the state as a vehicle for their own economic and political interests, through ‘retail politics’ and processes of bargaining and co-optation (de Waal 2007a). However, the causes of violence vary, within and between Sudanese states, and on different levels, and acts of violence are often perpetrated by local actors accountable to no one but themselves and their followers. As the country is drifting towards increasing fragmentation, an approach to peace-building is required that can address multiple arenas and sources of conflict in a much more integrated way than has been the case so far.
Local violence in Sudan
Successive Sudanese governments have often argued, as they do now for Darfur, that the violence in the country is largely caused by local-level, ethnic conflicts mainly arising from pressure on a diminishing resource base. On their side, rebel groups in Darfur, as in other parts of Sudan, quote the marginalisation and underdevelopment suffered by all Darfurians, regardless of their ethnic background, as the main reason for taking up arms against the central government.
Many local conflicts in Sudan, particularly in marginal areas, have traditionally been largely unrelated to the state. Sudan is home to the highest concentration of traditional pastoralists in the world and the combination of scarcity, a need for mobility and recurring droughts makes conflict inevitable between different pastoralist groups and between pastoralists and farmers (Markakis 1994, p. 219).
There continue to be a number of essentially local conflicts of this kind in most parts of Sudan, and many people are often killed in clashes between clans, ‘tribes’ or ethnic groups. For example in Equatoria (Southern Sudan), there are innumerable inter-tribal conflicts – between Mundari, Bari and Dinka; between Acholi and Latuka; and between Toposa, Didinga and Murle. Some of them have deep historical roots, while others flare up because of intricacies of revenge and competition over resources (Schomerus 2008). Within ‘tribes’, there may also be severe conflict. Often, the motives for violence are related to local issues such as access to grazing and raiding of cattle. Several groups have traditionally developed socio-political institutions that facilitate ad hoc mobilisation of local personnel for defence and raiding, often on a fairly large scale.
During the last three decades, and particularly after the National Islamic Front (now National Congress Party) came to power in 1989, such conflicts have increasingly become absorbed into, enmeshed with or at least affected by the wider struggles between the North and South or between competing southern interests.
Anthropologists have done much to document such developments. The largely unpublished works by the late Paul Wani Gore on local conflicts in Sudan reveal how the fragmentation of centres of political power, the divide-and-rule strategy of the Khartoum government and the divisions between the elites of different ethnic groups helped weaken local administrative structures and traditional mechanisms of conflict management and resolution, and sharpened ethnic differences and competition over resources. In an analysis of eight conflict areas in Sudan, Wani Gore argued that local conflicts have generally taken on a much wider political dimension, changed their character and, increasingly, a culture of violence has been established in large parts of Southern Sudan, South Kordofan and Darfur (Wani Gore 2003).
Sharon Hutchinson has analysed how the rapid polarisation and militarisation of Nuer and Dinka ethnic identities during civil war in the 1990s led to a deepening of the Nuer/Dinka divide and to a reassessment of women's and children's former status as immune from attack (Hutchinson 2000). She has also described how rival southern military leaders, greatly assisted by the machinations of the Khartoum government, endeavoured to transform earlier patterns of competition between Nuer and Dinka communities over scarce resources into politicised wars of ethnic violence (Hutchinson 2001).
Traditional flashpoints have become more dangerous with the ready supply of weapons, and the jobless youth disaffected by the lack of development in the South. One consequence of arms acquisition in Southern Sudan has been the increasing involvement of youth in broader South–South and North–South conflicts. Thus, in central Upper Nile, cattle camps were transformed into a ‘white army’ that was generally aligned with the Khartoum government after the split within the SPLM in 1991. After the signing of the CPA, the SPLM's need to eliminate competing armed groups set the stage for a struggle of dominance. The white army was destroyed, resulting in the loss of many lives, the destitution of communities and the breakdown of civil order and traditional authority among the Nuer (J. Young 2007). The Upper Nile region continues to suffer from inter- and intra-tribal violence and killings.
As Sara Pantuliano and her colleagues have argued, an assessment of current conflicts in Southern Sudan must begin by making reference to the manner in which Sudan's second civil war was prosecuted (Pantuliano et al. 2008, p. 55). The integration of local grievances and agendas into the freedom struggle bequeathed a difficult legacy as the region witnessed a proliferation of internal divisions and conflicts that have continued until today. Because the livelihood base of civilians was frequently targeted, as in Darfur, local communities were vulnerable to manipulation and easily co-opted by armed groups. As political disagreements developed, including inside the SPLM, civilians were armed to protect themselves and both the spread of small arms and communal conflicts increased (ibid., p. 56).
During 2009, there was an increase in the occurrence of local violence in several states in Southern Sudan, and large numbers of people lost their lives. This has continued into 2010. Land and natural resources are increasingly contested, including tribal borders. Conflicts relate to the return of IDPs and refugees; urban expansion and increased competition for land and access to natural resources; and limited administrative and political capacity or will to address the issues. This is illustrated by the 33 people killed in tribal clashes between Shilluk and Dinka over the ‘ownership’ of Malakal town (Sudan Tribune 2009). Furthermore, while it was first rumoured that the shooting of the government of Southern Sudan (GOSS) Minister of Agriculture in November 2009 was plotted by Khartoum or enemies of the SPLM, it was probably a result of a wrangle among leaders of a local administrative unit (Wonduruba Payam) regarding whether this particular unit should fall under the administration of one or another (Juba or Lainya) constituency (Juba Post 2009).
Local politicians and strongmen are using such issues in their struggles for power. There also appears to be a general increase in armed robberies, rape and abductions. Some incidents may be attributed to the delay in or complete lack of pay to soldiers from the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), as well as a general increase in military mobilisation within local communities as a consequence of the escalation of violence, including attacks by the LRA and by formally disbanded members of so-called Other Armed Groups. Hostilities between different groups within the SPLA and local populations have also led to violence. The lack of confidence in the state's capability to protect the local population and to deal with perpetrators, combined with people's ability to mobilise for defence and raiding, has also resulted in lawlessness and vigilantism. This explains the village militias (‘arrow boys’) established in order to fend off potential attacks by the LRA. Although established for understandable reasons, such groups may easily become new security risks in large parts of the South (Rolandsen 2009).
While the central government has been blamed for cynically exploiting internal divisions in Southern Sudan, not all the culprits can be traced to Khartoum. Southern politicians and former militia leaders are clearly also involved, using local ethnic and other tensions for their own ends. Recently, there have been signs of splits within the SPLM, as leading figures try to strengthen their fiefdoms ahead of national elections in 2010. Thus, Lam Akol, one of the leading figures in the 1991 split within the SPLM and former Minister of Foreign Affairs, formed a new breakaway faction in June 2009, the SPLM for Democratic Change. Soon afterwards, he was accused of arming fighters from his Shilluk tribe and attacking neighbouring groups – an accusation he has denied.
In Darfur, a major cause of conflict has been a proliferation of local conflicts over land and other resources combined with the unwillingness of the central government to mediate and, more ominously, its manipulation of land issues and concomitant manipulation of administrative subdivisions (Tubiana 2007). As in the South, such divisive policies on local and regional levels have created growing regional subcultures of ethnic violence (this is developed further below).
Livelihoods under siege: development and conflict in Sudan
Livelihoods under Siege is the title of a report on Darfur by a research team from Tufts University and Ahfad University for Women (H. Young et al. 2005), but is an apt description of the situation in many other parts of Sudan as well.
Aside from the Khartoum area, which saw major violence following the death of John Garang (2005) and the attack of the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) on Omdurman (2008), most of the violence in Sudan has taken place in pastoral and agro-pastoral areas. Populations from these areas also constitute the main source of street children, poor female-headed households, displaced persons and refugees. They come from three broad regions: (1) the areas struck by drought and famine during the 1970s and 1980s; (2) the areas that saw an expansion in mechanised farming during the same period; and (3) the former ‘closed districts’ of the colonial period, i.e. South Sudan.
The civil strife that has spread throughout many parts of Sudan since the 1980s should be seen as part of a pattern of violence where the Sudanese state – as a vehicle for special interest groups – has played a major role. In brief, the country suffers from the combined effects of two sets of crises that are closely interrelated: (1) a crisis of governance; and (2) a livelihoods crisis. The conflicts that result from these crises take place on different levels and are also interrelated.
Since the colonial period, the Sudanese state has owned, managed or effectively controlled the modern economic sector. State resources have been concentrated in the central Nile areas in the North, reflecting the longstanding political dominance of groups from this area. A process of uneven development and economic dislocation began during the colonial period and became acute in the 1970s. The shift from subsistence agriculture to export-oriented, mechanised agricultural schemes had its greatest impact in the so-called ‘Transition Zone’ between North and South – along Southern Kordofan, Southern Darfur, Blue Nile and the Sudan–Ethiopia border region, resulting in the dispossession of smallholder farmers from their customary rights of land, the erosion of land-use rights by pastoralists, and the creation of a large force of agricultural wage-labourers, whose numbers were increased through displacement by drought and war in the 1980s and 1990s. While the transfer of assets, which began before the war, was accelerated after 1989, the development strategy has essentially been the same (Johnson 2003).
A vital factor was the passage of laws undermining the control that local authorities and local people were able to exert over land. The 1970 Unregistered Land Act abolished customary rights of land use and the authority vested in native administration with respect to land allocation, thereby allowing for the leasing of land to large farms by the state.
Land is a central issue for both rural and urban communities in Sudan, as a means for livelihoods and survival, and with profound cultural and socio-political dimensions. It is fundamental to understanding the way in which the Sudanese conflicts and humanitarian crises have evolved, and it has been fought over in many different ways (de Waal 2009a). Land dispossession has been used by successive governments as part of their drive towards modernising agriculture (mechanised rain-fed and irrigated schemes), which has led to impoverishment, to displacement of large populations and to political mobilisation and serious conflict, as among the Beja in eastern Sudan or the Nuba in South Kordofan.
The politics of dispossession has also been applied in the southern region, particularly in the Upper Nile where the first agricultural schemes were introduced in the early 1950s, and more recently after oil was found in the Western Nuer region near Bentiu. This was one of the most populated areas in Southern Sudan, confirmed by the 1955 population census and the number of tribal courts (which were based on population size). The area was to a large extent depopulated through a scorched-earth policy on the part of the Sudan government that saw villages destroyed and unknown numbers of people killed. Those who remained were forced to move to other areas of Sudan. The eviction of local populations and the development of the oil fields in Bentiu were aided by government-supported militias drawn from Baggara Arab pastoralists. After the 1991 split in the SPLM, when groups led by Riak Machar and Lam Akol joined the government, militias recruited from southern groups also assisted in the clearing of the concession areas for oil exploration (Wani Gore 2006, p. 16).
An important government interest has also been to use land as loot, i.e. to reward clients of the government. This strategy, which has become particularly pronounced during the current regime, e.g. in Darfur and more recently in the Gezira Scheme, which is fast becoming privatised. In Darfur, land became a reward to the allies of the government and encouraged them to fight rebels and local villagers as proxy forces (de Waal 2009a, p. 13). In Gezira, which used to be the world's largest irrigated scheme under one management, clients of the regime are being favoured as traditional tenants are losing their tenancies due to changes in cropping patterns, lack of agricultural credit and indebtedness.
From the 1970s onwards, the agricultural growth model adopted in Sudan gave little or no consideration to those who were displaced or otherwise affected. The strategy also caused serious structural problems. While the area of land under mechanised farming increased from around two million feddans at the beginning of the 1970s to some 14 million feddans by 2003 (one feddan equals 1,038 acres), yields were hit by falling fertility, which in turn reflected continuous cropping and the expansion of semi-mechanised farming into increasingly marginal areas (Keen and Lee 2007, p. 513). Since the 1970s, there have been massive population flows out of the ailing traditional sector into urban centres mostly in the North. The Southern Sudanese economy remained basically subsistent, livestock playing a major role, and with a very limited modern sector. Even before the second civil war in 1983, the region was not self-sufficient in cereals and later, war and droughts had devastating effects on production and food security. In the South and, later, in Darfur, the targeting and uprooting of rural populations and their forced displacement became an integral part of the war strategies of rebel and government forces alike.
When the Islamist movement came to power in 1989, the structural foundation of the vast traditional sector had been eroded and the modern sectors had stagnated or declined. Following an aggressive post-coup consolidation involving extreme repression, mass arrest and a strategy of purging the higher and middle ranks of the state bureaucracy and replacing them with loyal party personnel, the Islamists launched the ‘civilisation project’, which advocated self-sufficiency in food production and manufacturing. The drive to self-reliance was dictated largely by international isolation and a severe deficit in the balance of payments, as both exports and remittances declined due to rocketing inflation and the persistent conditions that led to the erosion of profitability in the commodity-producing sectors. Economic policies, therefore, were largely dictated by the regime's political survival agenda (Elnur 2009, p. 83).
The agricultural sector, however, continued to decline, and cotton for export never recovered from the unsuccessful shift to wheat for domestic markets. While profitability in the large irrigated schemes declined, unsustainable policies within rain-fed farming continued as before, development funding being routed through patronage networks and benefiting mostly the Islamist clients of the regime, but sometimes also foreign companies like in North Kordofan, where the Malaysian–African Agricultural Company was allotted 38,000 feddans to develop gum arabic production, lands formerly used by local agro-pastoralists and nomads (Babiker 2008). The National Islamic Front takeover in 1989 in fact witnessed a complete fusion between the Islamist empowered businessmen and the state. According to Elnur, the Sudan economy ‘became their private property as they became the new ruling elite’ (Elnur 2009, p. 76).
Faced with the deepening of the economic crisis and intensification of the civil war, the regime introduced sweeping macro-economic stabilisation and liberalisation policies. Between 1992 and 1998, expenditures were cut by more than 50% relative to GDP, causing considerable reductions in social services and infrastructure development.
When oil exports started in 1999, Sudan became wealthier, but poverty was accentuated by the fact that social services spending remained among the lowest in the world. The poor track record on development spending is paralleled by a very limited capacity at state and local levels to plan and manage projects. According to the Government of National Unity and Government of Southern Sudan's Sudan Household Health Survey (2006) and the World Bank (2007), key indicators of human development in Sudan's disadvantaged regions (including Darfur, the South, the Three Areas, and the East) rank among the lowest in the world, while Khartoum and some northern states along the Nile show performance well above the sub-Saharan average. For example, primary school attendance was 90% in River Nile State, but less than 10% in half the states in South Sudan.
Growth has also been accompanied by rising inequality among regions and among rural and urban dwellers. While per capita public spending was about US$300 in 2007 (World Bank 2007, p. 6), little of this reached the poor and the marginalised regions. Traditional rain-fed agriculture, practised by the rural poor, has seen neither significant levels of investments nor increases in productivity. At the same time, defence expenditures have crowded out poverty-related expenditures, deepening the cycle of poverty (ibid.).
The history of massive forced population displacement in Sudan during the last two and a half decades resulting from agricultural policies, wars, droughts, famine and intertribal disputes is a clear sign of the overall political and socio-economic crisis in Sudan. By the time of the signing of the CPA, roughly 80% of the Southern population were no longer in their usual habitat. A new political, social, economic and cultural map emerged in both Northern and Southern Sudan that was quite different from the pre-war situation (Elnur 2009, p. 94).
Measures aimed at consolidating power through privatisation of the state and manipulation of tribal and ethnic differences ended up with an almost complete state collapse. The regime used the state and its institutions systematically to control the entire population. Administrative re-divisions were introduced at local levels in order to undermine support for the traditional political parties. Federalism, including the establishment of 26 states, was introduced not primarily to decentralise decision-making (which was not implemented anyway), but in order to divide and repress regional movements and rebel groups in the peripheries. However, the regime's totalitarian nature stimulated divisions that helped promote fragmentation.
Darfur: an unfolding crisis
While the grievances of those who have historically been left behind in a dysfunctional process of development are a common feature, the contexts that have affected people's life situations are not the same everywhere. Despite, or rather because of the centrist bias of development strategies in Sudan, ongoing conflicts in places like Darfur, Abyei, Blue Nile, Nuba Mountains or Equatoria may be decisive for the future of the country as a whole. Hence, for example, the failure to agree on the future of Abyei will have implications not only for determining the North–South border, but also for the implementation of any Darfur peace agreement (Johnson 2008). Furthermore, the multiple local conflicts in Southern Sudan, compounded by the murderous activities of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), clearly threaten the sustainability of peace- and state-building in the South. The conflict patterns that emerge in different parts of Sudan reflect continuities of the kind analysed above, but also reflect local and regional particularities and, in several cases, are continuously being reconfigured.
Darfur provides an instructive example. It had a viable political order, first as a Fur-dominated yet multi-ethnic sultanate until 1916, and then as a region that, while prone to local conflict over resources, remained quite stable until the late 1980s. Its stability was based on what has been termed the ‘Darfur consensus’ (Fadul and Tanner 2007). Land was the linchpin of this consensus. The ethnic groups that make up a central majority bloc (Fur, Baggara [cattle holding] Arabs, Masalit, Zaghawa, Tunjur and many smaller ‘African’ tribes) came together in enjoying access to land under the dar and hakura systems. They shared a common view on the legitimacy of the land ownership and management system, in turn based on the native administration system of local government. The largest group that was deprived of land rights was the Abbala (camel herding) Arabs (ibid.).
According to Fadul and Tanner, most Darfurians contend that the current conflict constitutes an assault on the Darfur consensus. To a large extent, the factors that pushed the region over the edge were external and include the blowback from the Chadian wars, Libyan interference, destructive interventions by the central government, and severe drought leading to migrations (ibid.). One of the primary traits of the Darfur crisis can be described as a split between those members of the population with territories (hawakir) and those who have none (Tubiana 2007).
As Tubiana has argued, one of the early warning signs of conflict was a dramatic increase in violent incidents between farmers and herders. One cause for these incidents was the droughts of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, which forced herders to encroach on the lands of farmers. These clashes did not necessarily pit Arab versus non-Arab but they did lead, in 1987–89 to a wide-ranging conflict between the sedentary Fur and a broad coalition of both cattle- and camel-herding Arab tribes. For the first time, nearly all the Arabs of Darfur came together, united by a new pro-Arab ideology that was backed by Libya and successive governments in Khartoum from 1986. It was during these conflicts that the term Janjawiid first appeared (ibid.).
From 1994–95 onward, the Masalit of western Darfur became the next victims of Arab militias seeking access to land. By the time the two new rebel groups, the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), appeared in early 2003, widespread intercommunity violence over land had already begun taking place across Darfur. While they made regional, and even national, claims that aimed to transcend ethnic cleavages with demands for a more equitable distribution of power and wealth for all of Sudan, their base was for the most part non-Arab, with heavy representation from the Zaghawa and the Fur (ibid.).
From 2003, local conflicts in Darfur started spinning out of control and among SLA and JEM, issues of land came to take second place to the overall development of Darfur. Part of the reason for this is that many of the rebel leaders were young urbanites who had lived outside Darfur for long stretches of time.
Over time, the fault-lines of conflict have become increasingly complex and intractable. Political and livelihood landscapes have changed dramatically. The number of rebel movements has proliferated and sends the message that it is less important to have a constituency than taking up arms, if you want to be invited to meetings and peace talks.
Moving down to local levels, there has been a series of violent intra-Arab conflicts between the Baggara and Abbala. Whereas until around 1970, both Baggara and Abbala remained almost separate in their habitats and annual cycles of movement, things started changing when drought hit Darfur for several years, both during the 1970s and 1980s. The Abbala started moving south at a time when others did the same (particularly Zaghawa), and the Baggara Arabs themselves were experiencing difficulties in coping with drought. Because the Zaghawa and others settled to cultivate, Baggara herding routes were blocked, and these changes took place during the absence of an effective native administration (see above).
Material collected by Yusif Takana shows that grazing and water rights have been the main causes of conflict in Darfur. From the early 1990s, the Abbala as well as other groups started to change their strategy. Acquiring lands for settlement could be done by political allegiance and support for the Khartoum government. This strategy worked, and a number of new administrative subdivisions (nazirates and omodiyas) were established at the expense of groups who had recognised traditional rights to lands and authority. Many violent, often intra-Arab, conflicts have accompanied such changes, with great losses of life (Takana 2008).
A recent study of Rizaygat camel nomads in northern Darfur shows that their livelihoods have gone through rapid transition due to restricted access to pastures which, to a large extent, are controlled by the Zaghawa. Some have diversified into ‘maladaptive’ strategies, including rapid militarisation and the use of intimidation and violence as a means of gaining access to natural resources while the majority have been displaced. Nomadic camel-based pastoralism is under threat as a livelihood system as a result of the developments sketched out above, and young men increasingly seek power through militarisation and education rather than through camels and camel herding (H. Young et al. 2009, p. 9).
In the case of the Zaghawa, whose traditional homelands are in northern Darfur, their southward migrations were not uniquely caused by hunger and drought. As Jerome Tubiana has argued, the educated Zaghawa elite, while promoting the development of their region of origin, quickly saw the possibility of massive movements to the South. The massive emigration, which was initially opposed by the traditional leaders, because they knew they would lose power that was tied to their land, helped to weaken the Zaghawa chiefdoms, especially since it also coincided with the decision to abolish the native administration (Tubiana 2008b).
The current conflicts extend into Chad. Efforts by the Chadian government to avoid taking sides were shattered in 2003–4 by the arrival of some 200,000 Sudanese refugees across the border and the establishment of rear bases in eastern Chad by Darfurian rebel groups. The rebels were strengthened by their membership of cross-border ethnic groups, including the Zaghawa, to which the Chadian president Idriss Deby belongs. Violence similar to that in Darfur began emerging in eastern Chad and some of the perpetrators have links with Darfur. As a result, several crises are now increasingly interlinked, including the long-standing conflict in Chad between the Chadian government and a divided political opposition, and the proxy war in which Chad and Sudan are engaged through rebel groups and militias (Tubiana 2008a).
These snapshots clearly indicate that events and developments in Darfur must be understood in the context of a number of factors at different levels. On the micro level, as Gunnar Haaland has argued, processes that affect the formation of social identities and access to resources are of crucial importance. On the regional level, there are processes that change the scope for political leadership and mobilisation of groups – changes that have stimulated formation of alliances between traditional enemies (Fur, Masalit, Zaghawa). These alliances are vulnerable and may shift over time (Haaland 2005). On the macro level of state politics, Darfur has always played an important role and, more recently, the Sudan government has been clever in playing on differences between the different groups. But then there is also the larger international context, which affects the behaviour and decisions of local and national actors. This includes regional and cross-border dynamics (Chad, Libya, Central African Republic) as well as humanitarian aid and the increasing divisions within the international community regarding issues such as the ICC arrest warrant, Darfur and oil.
Implications for peace-building
Severine Auteserre has argued that addressing local issues was key to ending violence in the DRC, but that diplomats and UN agencies almost never got involved in local conflict resolution. The main reason, she writes, is that the peace-building discourse, or what she terms the ‘post-conflict peace-building frame’, shaped the international understanding of violence and intervention in such a way that only macro-political cleavages were addressed. Thus international actors saw the holding of elections, as opposed to local conflict resolution, as an appropriate and effective tool for state- and peace-building, and they believed that local violence was innate and therefore acceptable even in peacetime. The ‘frame’ authorised and justified specific practices and policies while precluding others, ‘ultimately dooming the peace-building efforts’ (Auteserre 2009, p. 249).
Peace-building in Sudan presents some interesting parallels. As in the DRC, the international engagement has focused on the macro-political divisions between the NCP and the SPLM, mainly concerning the implementation of the CPA, and between the Khartoum regime and an increasing number of rebel movements in Darfur. This implies, inter alia, giving priority to the forthcoming elections which are seen as an important step towards political reform and sustainable peace. In this perspective, local conflict, particularly in South Sudan but also in Darfur and South Kordofan, is regarded as an ‘inconvenience’ that needs to be worked around, rather than embracing a proactive and more holistic engagement and commitment to enhancing security for vulnerable local populations (Pantuliano et al. 2008).
Regarding Darfur, there is hardly a complex political emergency in the world where so much is known of the local political dynamics, the links to external actors and factors as well as issues related to livelihoods, land and access to resources (e.g. H. Young et al. 2005, 2009, de Waal et al. 2007b, Flint and de Waal 2008, Tubiana 2008a). Yet the low-energy mediation led by the African Union, the UN and other international actors has largely failed to move beyond macro-political divisions, despite rhetoric to the contrary (‘Darfur–Darfur dialogue’). One implication has been that rebel groups without constituencies are invited to join peace talks, thereby contributing to ‘a ceaseless carousel of fighting and talking’ (de Waal 2009b); another that the civilian population, including most Arab groups and constituencies (frequently demonised as Janjawiid), have largely been sidelined in the process.
The intractability of conflicts in Sudan derives from their complex local dynamics and the often-changing inter-linkages with national politics and developments within the larger region. In this paper, the role that land issues have played both in poverty generation and in driving and sustaining protracted conflict has been particularly highlighted. Conflicts over land may be communal and strictly local, but they have increasingly become entwined with political rivalries on a larger scale that include even neighbouring countries. As Sara Pantuliano argues, they are also ‘ripe for political manipulation, as unresolved land disputes have consistently underscored wider conflict’ (Pantuliano 2009, p. 167).
It follows that an approach to peace-building is required that can address multiple arenas and sources of conflict in a more integrated way, including a concern with poverty, land issues and livelihood support. This has been slow to emerge in the post-war reconstruction of Sudan for different reasons.
First, there has been a lack of a joint diplomatic and developmental approach. This division between politics and aid derives from the traditional separation of the two areas within ministry structures but also from the difficulty of merging and harmonising donor countries’ political relationships with Sudan. In Southern Sudan, it means that there has been a failure to engage with fundamental political issues, particularly on local levels, and to design aid programmes that help to mitigate rather than exacerbate conflict (Lotze et al. 2008). This applies particularly to conflicts related to land and natural resources. There is a notable absence of an overall framework to deal with such problems.
Second, an overall strategic plan for recovery and development has been very late in coming, despite the fact that a number of assessments were made in advance of and after the signing of the CPA (e.g. the Joint Assessment Mission), and that the UN has been drawing up annual work plans since 2006. This is particularly apparent in Southern Sudan (which receives most of the aid funds), where the government has been working to a budget-sector planning approach, strongly supported by the international community, resulting in some ten budget-sector plans for 2008 to 2010. As government institutions struggle to fulfil a wide range of obligations, decision-making is more aligned to operational planning concerns than overarching strategic ones (Murphy 2007) and there is a sense that everything is needed which means that nothing may be particularly prioritised.
Third, given the complexity of the Sudan crisis, one might expect planning processes and assistance organisations to incorporate conflict-sensitive approaches regardless of whether they are directly addressing conflict issues in their work. This seems not generally to have been the case so far (e.g. Pantuliano et al. 2008). Despite the existence of a mandate authorising UN peacekeeping troops in Southern Sudan ‘to protect civilians under imminent threat of physical violence’, a narrow interpretation and a paucity of troops have combined to confine the blue helmets to monitoring the implementation of the military aspect of the CPA only. As one consequence, local communities remain largely unprotected.
It should be added that the international community, as Thomas has argued, was led into engaging on the details of the flailing implementation of the CPA, rather than trying to reframe the political process. For a considerable time, attention then drifted away from the CPA to questions about peacekeeping structures and logistics, ‘as if helicopters or blue helmets alone could deal with the regional politics of ethnicity and marginalisation and the stalled progress on democratisation’ (Thomas 2009, p. 32). The CPA has also been turned into one of a string of bilateral deals with the centre.3 Each bilateral deal undermined the possibility of a comprehensive approach to Sudan's problems, entrenching the dominance of the centre, aggravating its imbalance with the periphery, and preventing an inclusive approach to peace-building (ibid.).
To argue in favour of more emphasis on local-level efforts and of rebuilding state–society relations through bottom-up processes rather than overly relying on a top-down approach does not mean that it would be advisable to deal with each micro-conflict in Sudan at its particular level only. Local peace initiatives are taking place in different parts of Sudan, including Darfur (H. Young et al. 2009) and deserve more support than they currently receive, but many such initiatives are also being undermined by external forces, including the government. The point to remember is that in countries where patronage and ‘retail politics’ are dominant principles for how they function, loyalties may be bought and sold in volatile client systems, which makes local interventions often unsustainable unless linked to macro-political processes (de Waal 2009b, p. 22).
Conclusions
War and conflict in Sudan have in large part been the result of a destructive process of development that is in danger of being reinvented.4 As Alex de Waal has argued, the combination of instability at the centre and centre–periphery inequity creates a state of perpetual turbulence, in which it is almost impossible to obtain the configuration necessary to resolve conflicts (de Waal 2007a). While the main route to stability lies through Khartoum, a growing number of serious local conflicts deserve more attention than they currently deserve. They often concern access to natural resources, with such resources often used for political manipulation, and they can establish pockets of discontent, enhance food insecurity, flare up into greater conflicts or be linked to other, larger-scale conflicts and macro-political cleavages. In a situation where there is a particular need to keep in mind the less visible drift towards the fragmentation of Sudan (Thomas 2009), there must be a more proactive shift from working around the ‘inconveniences’ of local conflicts to embrace a more holistic commitment to peace and public security. This is a tall order, as it must also include a critical review of a development process that has so far been both violent and dysfunctional.
Note on contributor
Gunnar M. Sørbø has just retired as Director and is now Senior Researcher at Chr Michelsen Institute. A social anthropologist by training, he has done research in Sudan on and off since 1970, and currently co-directs a Sudanese–Norwegian research and capacity-building programme, Micro–macro issues in peace-building.