Renewed conflict in South Sudan has stalled
regional agreements and postponed the ‘independence dividend’ for
citizens like this girl in Juba.
On 16 December last year, fighting erupted within
the presidential guard of South Sudan. President Salva Kiir quickly
classified this as an attempted coup by former vice-president Riek
Machar, who had been dismissed just a few months earlier. Machar denied
responsibility and the conflict rapidly spread from the capital of Juba
to other states, including Jonglei.
The crisis, which started as a political issue,
has since taken on ethnic undertones between the Dinka and Nuer
communities. This has highlighted a number of longstanding grievances in
the country. Both sides have undertaken mass atrocities and the United
Nations (UN) has reported killings, arbitrary detention, forced
disappearances, sexual violence and widespread destruction of property
during the conflict.
Thousands have been killed, with an estimated 70
000 people seeking protection at UN camps and 30 000 in the two UN
compounds in Juba alone.
The response of the international community has
been largely one of surprise. Closer examination, however, reveals
fundamental flaws in many of their peacebuilding strategies.
In a 1992 report named ‘An Agenda for Peace,’ the
UN defines peacebuilding as ‘actions to identify and support structures
to solidify peace and avoid a relapse to conflict.’
This view, which remains the core of peacebuilding
interventions even today, assumes that if the right kind of state can
be created (most times democratic), this will contribute towards
stability.
Yet this fundamentally ignores problems associated
with statehood in most parts of Africa, such as the politics of power
and ethnicity that are currently manifesting in South Sudan.
These problems need to be overcome if lasting
peace is to be achieved. The fact that peacebuilding and state-building
are closely connected and mutually reinforcing cannot be disputed;
indeed, peace is more likely and sustainable if states function well and
serve their citizens.
Such a state is more likely to provide public
goods that their citizens rightly expect of them when they operate under
peaceful conditions. However, this nexus is not as easy to reach in
fragile states.
As it stands, the focus of peacebuilding has been
to strengthen states and their institutions, which assumes that peace
can be designed.
A recent ISS paper notes that effective
peacebuilding must tackle the tensions between building states and
government on the one hand, while working at grass-roots level on the
other. In South Sudan, community-based programmes such as dialogues did
not sufficiently feed into national level or include those elites with
influence
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