South Sudan: Negotiating Peace - Democracy, Politics and Armed Movements

In less than three years since South Sudan voted in a referendum for secession, the new republic has become engulfed in what is its most serious political crisis since independence.

What started off as an exchange between soldiers in the military barracks in Juba has since engulfed the whole country. The death toll is estimated to be in the thousands.

The media and many political analysts have framed the crisis as a conflict between two men, Salva Kiir, the current President of South Sudan, and Riek Machar, his former deputy. Worse yet, many have reduced the political crisis to a tribal conflict. The formulation of both problems, one between political adversaries and the other tribal, obscures the deeper issues affecting the ruling political party, the army, and the nation-building process.

In the next section we will highlight the deeper issues fueling violence, the fragmentation within the army, and the way forward out of the current crisis.

The limited context behind some of the current analysis available ignores the historical and political factors that have contributed to the situation, and instead creates an analysis that portrays the conflict in a vacuum. A durable solution is premised on the problem being correctly diagnosed.

Putting the crisis in context

The Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) of 2005 created an opportunity for South Sudan to finally begin building a governance infrastructure made up of representatives of the South Sudanese people, a governance practice that had been inhibited since the beginning of colonialism.

While a national government was created, it did not develop into a strong democracy that adequately meets the needs of its citizens, nor did it allow for democratic practices such as diversity of opinion and political allegiance to flourish.

Initial promises for a decentralized approach to allow for the representation of South Sudanese citizens in all parts of the country soon gave away to a centralization of power in the hands of legislators based in the capital, Juba.

The nature and origin of the current conflict has been debated. Mahmood Mamdani, Professor and Executive Director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research, Kampala, dismissed the framing of the issue by the government as an "attempted coup." In his analysis on Al Jazeera he wrote^[1] that it: "is neither an attempted coup nor a rebel attempt to take over government.

References

1. ^{^} he wrote (tinyurl.com)