Peace is more than cessation of military hostilities, more than simple political stability. Peace is the presence of justice, and peace-building entails addressing all factors and forces that stand as impediments to the realization of all human rights for all human beings. (Bendaña 2003)
The seeds of ultimate failure according to the author were planted in the heavy handed involvement of outsiders in a process they eventually came to control. They had their own preconceptions of what needed to be done and prescriptions of how to do it. These are prescribed in the handbooks of peace negotiations as (a) peace-making negotiations aimed to achieve the cessation of hostilities; (b) peace-building to create a stable state on the western liberal democratic model. These are seen in a sequential process, and the established procedure is to focus on peace-making first and worry about state building afterwards. Critics have dubbed the first as ‘negative peace’ and the second as ‘positive peace’. The fate of Sudan argues that, in this case at least, afterwards is already too late for state building along lines of democratic transformation essential to stability, hence the flawed peace process in the subtitle.
The flaws in the CPA story are many, and the author dissects them chronologically. They follow inexorably from the format adopted for negotiations, which recognised the two main antagonists – the National Congress Party (NCP) in the North and the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Movement (SPLM) in the South – and excluded other organisations – military, political, civil society – with vital interests in Sudan's future. This was hardly surprising since both the NCP and SPLM are militarist, authoritarian organisations, intolerant of competition in any form, and prepared to use violence to maintain their stranglehold on power in their respective countries. Both have faced many domestic challenges in the past, and will continue to do so in the future, since the causes that make for instability were not addressed, let alone resolved, in the so-called Comprehensive Peace Agreement reached in 2005.
The CPA achieved a cessation of hostilities, i.e., a ‘negative peace’. According to the author, it failed miserably to set the foundations for state building through a democratic transformation that is to achieve ‘positive peace’. While pious statements about popular participation, inclusiveness, elections, etc., were included in the agreement, the only concrete result has been the secession of Southern Sudan. Because the SPLM had not created a civil administration for the South during the two decades of its existence, state-building was in order in 2005. The foreign sponsors of the CPA were obliged to sponsor it and funds flowed in, which the newborn state was utterly unable to absorb productively. They were used instead by the SPLM to run pacification campaigns in restless areas of the South, to carry out cosmetic political exercises such as the 2010 elections, and to nurture an emerging elite devoted to conspicuous consumption in a country with scarcely a sign of modernity.
The fate of Sudan makes depressing reading.
The placing of narrow political concerns above democratic transformation is symptomatic of a process which refused to permit the people of Sudan a role, failed to address the grievances which caused and fuelled the war… and will almost certainly ensure that peace will not be sustainable in the north, in the south, and between north and south. (10)