When Peace Kills Politics

When Peace Kills Politics explains the role of international peacemaking in reproducing violence and political authoritarianism in Sudan and South Sudan in recent decades. Srinivasan explains how Sudan’s landmark north–south peace process that achieved the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement fueled war in Darfur, the Nuba Mountains and the Blue Nile alongside how it contributed to Sudan’s failed political transformation and newly independent 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. With an original contribution to theorizing peace and peacemaking drawing upon the political thought of Hannah Arendt, the book is an analysis of the tragic shortcomings 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 idealized constitutional texts, technocratic templates and deals on sharing spoils. When Peace Kills Politics demands a radical rethinking of the project of peace in civil wars, grounded in a more earnest commitment to civil political action.

Making

This chapter, ‘Making’, analyses the genesis of Sudan’s 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement in order to answer the question, what does it mean to ‘make’ peace? Making necessitates having ends in mind, but not only ones that textbook theories propose. The chapter examines how in Sudan a messy and contingent multiplicity of divergent and conflicting foreign states and organizations jockeyed to shape the end of ‘peace’. The many ends of ‘peace’ pursued in actual practice have limited concern for non-violent civil politics. The chapter explains how the prevailing logic for making peace in Sudan was pragmatism and feasibility for achieving a ‘make-do’ outcome, for which the Western-backed regional IGAD peace initiative emerged as the most efficacious. The chapter then explores the means used to achieve make-do peacemaking ends: tools of design and compulsion. With these means, peacemakers productively work on structuring, compelling and coercing the civil war towards an end. Yet this making mindset tends to deny or debilitate war’s unruly political dimensions in ways that risk backfiring violently.

Introduction

The book’s Introduction situates the reader in recent decades of recurrent wars and failed peacemaking attempts in the Sudans, giving central focus to the reproduction of armed conflict during and after the negotiation of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement. The chapter introduces its central aims to prize open how contemporary peacemaking works and how it may go wrong, to understand why this might be inherent in peacemaking, and to open up ways to rethink peacemaking. The book’s touchstone for assessing peacemaking, ‘non-violent civil politics’, is explained and the book’s grounding in the political thought of Hannah Arendt is summarized. The book’s central arguments are introduced, notably that, tragically, the ends and means of making peace in civil wars often risks debilitating not fostering non-violent civil politics, in turn motivating violence and reinforcing its currency. Following this is a detailed chapter-by-chapter summary of the book, explaining its thematic, episodic and chronological structure. The chapter ends with a brief history, and foundational position, on war, politics and international intervention in the Sudans, helpful to those with less familiarity with these countries as well as accounting for the author’s interpretation of that history as an anchor to the study.

Hollowing

This chapter, ‘Hollowing’, examines how means-end peacemaking may have withering effects on post-agreement political change. Examining politics in northern Sudan after the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, the chapter explains the role of peacemaking in the institutionalization of authoritarian rule and the constraining of plural civil politics that in turn contributed to Sudan’s ‘unending wars’. Rejecting explanations of contingent events or poor implementation, the chapter argues that this failure may be written into the means of making peace. Foreign-led peacemaking initiatives can become a damaging site of ‘extroverted’ domestic politics that exert a pull on civil political actors yet rebuff them in favor of elite belligerent deals, leaving civil actors enfeebled and cynical right when they are expected to pluralize post-agreement politics. By paying attention to matters of constitutional review, security sector reform, civic space and the elections, this chapter unravels the manner in which the edifice for politics championed by Sudan’s CPA order proved to be a hollow façade.

Descriptive and Injunctive Incivility Norms in Political Campaigns: Differences Across Behavior Type, Candidate Gender, and Candidate Party Position

Despite evidence that a majority of people in the United States say that they want more civil politics, candidates still use incivility strategically during campaigns. Distinguishing between descriptive and injunctive norms may help explain this apparent contradiction. This study presents an experiment conducted with participants recruited at 2020 Democratic Iowa Caucus rallies that tested whether (a) individuals differ in their descriptive and injunctive normative beliefs about a variety of uncivil behaviors and (b) candidate characteristics such as gender and insider/outsider status in a party influence respondents’ normative beliefs. Findings suggest that, while descriptive and injunctive norms align for some campaign behaviors, they do not for all behaviors, such as sharing false information and using insults. Additionally, men and women candidates, as well as political insider and outsider candidates, are expected to behave differently but are held to the same injunctively normative standard when uncivil behaviors are attributed to them. Future incivility researchers should continue investigating descriptive and injunctive norms to investigate whether voters dismiss descriptively common behaviors during campaigns, even if they perceive those behaviors as inappropriate and uncivil.

Shils and the Intellectuals

This chapter traces Edward Shils' distinctive conception of the intellectual—as indispensable to, but all too often an opponent of, social order. Shils’ aversion to intellectual disloyalty was a constant throughout his adult life, though his specifically ‘Shilsian’ take on the intellectual and his society would only cohere, in a sophisticated, original, and consistent way, in the late 1950s. The chapter reconstructs Shils’ encounter with the downcast intellectual, first as a precocious reader of Gustave Flaubert, Hippolyte Taine, and, above all, Georges Sorel. It was Sorel’s chiliastic politics of heroic violence which, in its purist clarity, helped disclose the transcendent moral impulse that, to varying degrees, leads intellectuals to judge their societies harshly. When, after World War II, the moral ideal seemed spent even within socialist movements, Shils observed its traces in the complaints of ex-radicals. Society’s loose consensus depends on public belief, he argued, which in turn depends on the social picture put forward by intellectuals. These ‘persons with an unusual sensitivity to the sacred’ could help support the fragile achievements of civil politics, but Shils was not optimistic.

Beauty for Harmony

Beauty can be a source of self-making within a political community, and that self can display moral autonomy via publicly visible and invisible practices while still adhering to a community. At a time of transition during the early 2000s from militarized resistance to urban civil politics, radical democracy, and gender ideals, older militarized notions of the Kurdish self, body, and beauty were changing. In a context of heightened visibility within the movement, women active in the Kurdish movement responded by recrafting their femininities, using beautification practices as a modern, urban, and empowering political tool. But beautification of the new self also entailed often sticky negotiations over the moral boundaries between the self and the movement, producing anxieties over what and who should constitute the moral. As women's actions, public roles, and visibilities became important indicators of the Kurdish movement's political success, their beauty practices and beautiful visibilities came to be viewed through the urgent need for moral unity. Central to Kurdish women activists' experience of and response to the political and social transformations going on around them, the integration of beauty practices into their politics placed moral autonomy at the center of the construction of new models of Kurdish femininity.

A New Sion? Reform, Rebellion, and Colonization c. 1625–1640

This chapter studies how, in the aftermath of his failure to subdue the Scottish insurgency by military means, Charles I authorized the election of two new parliaments. Its policies were so at odds with Charles I's understanding of monarchy and the true church that the outcome was civil war in England between supporters of the king and supporters of Parliament. Explaining this sequence of events tests every historian of 1630s and 1640s Britain. The puzzles are many. In the context of this book, the most significant of these is the relationship between civil politics and the politics of religion. Intertwined throughout the history of the English and Scottish reformations, their relationship tightened in the practice and rhetoric of Charles I and the party he favored, here known as the Laudians. Like his immediate predecessors, the young king took for granted that opposition to his version of true religion was equivalent to challenging his authority as king. At once, the religious and the political become inseparable. Before 1640, the political and the religious in Scotland had also become intertwined, but in a quite different manner. There, it was being argued that a monarch's policies were corrupting a perfect church. And there a unique event in British history unfolded.