When peace kills politics: international intervention and unending wars in the Sudans

Abstract

Despite decades of peacemaking and peacekeeping in Sudan and South Sudan, civilian-led democratic governance remains elusive. In this compelling account, Sharath Srinivasan argues that international peacemaking has counterproductively reinforced logics of violence and political authoritarianism in the Sudans. He does so through a detailed investigation of selected interrelationships between different conflicts and cycles of peacemaking initiatives. Inspired by the work of Hannah Arendt, Srinivasan seeks to go beyond a critique of the orthodoxies of peacemaking to offer a nuanced explanation of why international peacemaking goes wrong (p. 41). The first chapters introduce the book's empirical and theoretical point of departure. Working with Arendt's understanding of politics as something that occurs when humans come together––as distinguished from human work (p. 13)––Srinivasan explores how peacemaking navigates the relationship between violence and politics in civil wars (p. 14). His investigation draws on 15 years of research, over 100 elite interviews and analysis of...