When the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) was signed on January 9, 2005, in a packed stadium in Nairobi, crowds cheered the end of more than two decades of civil war in Sudan. Under the auspices of international observers, the Government of Sudan and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) agreed to six years of power sharing followed by a referendum on self-determination for the South. Peace was precarious from the start, however, and although the CPA formally ended the conflict between the government and the SPLM/A and the South was able to vote for succession in 2011, both Sudan and South Sudan remain entrenched in wars and militarized authoritarian rule. Why did the much-anticipated agreement fail to yield peace?

When Peace Kill Politics: International Intervention and Unending Wars in the Sudans provides important insights into the flawed logic of peacemaking. In this exceptionally well-written and detailed analysis of the peace process in the Sudans, Sharath Srinivasan considers why peacemaking efforts ultimately resulted in renewed outbreaks and expansions of war. Srinivasan contributes to our understanding not only of why the CPA failed but also of the challenges of conflict management and peacebuilding more broadly. He argues that the logic of international peacemaking in civil wars is flawed from the very start because it has more in common with the logic of violence than with that of nonviolent civil politics. He unravels the enterprise of peacemaking to ask what it is we are doing when we are making peace. His answer: for international interventions to end civil wars, they must be aimed not just at addressing armed violence but also at increasing nonviolent civil politics.

Srinivasan engages with the literature on peacemaking and peacebuilding to reframe notions of how international interventions should be carried out. The purpose of his book is threefold: (1) to assess why internationally led peace processes often fail, (2) to evaluate why this failure may be inherent in various forms of contemporary peacemaking, and (3) to consider how the very notion of international peacemaking could be reconceptualized. Divided into eight chapters with titles such as “Rethinking,” “Simplifying,” “Hallowing,” and “Unending,” the book achieves its goal of offering a novel approach to why peacemaking failed in the Sudans. Srinivasan grounds much of his analysis in Hannah Arendt’s ideas on war and politics to argue that when peacemaking reinforces coercion and bypasses civil politics, it makes possible new forms of violence that can undermine peace. For Srinivasan, a peace process that does not originate in civil society and instead is imposed by regional and international actors risks motivating and reinforcing violence.

As Srinivasan explains, what was unique about the peace process in the Sudans was the partnership that was forged between regional and international parties. The subregional organization, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), supported by the United States, the United Kingdom, Norway, and to some extent Italy, took the lead in brokering peace between the Government of Sudan and the SPLM/A. The peace process had been started decades earlier but gained momentum when the belligerents reached, in the words of I. William Zartman (“Ripeness: The Hurting Stalemate and Beyond,” in International Conflict Resolution after the Cold War, 2000), “a hurting stalemate”; in addition, the conflict was ripe for mediation in the aftermath of 9/11. The IGAD process succeeded in yielding a negotiated settlement in part because it had a regional and international legitimacy that previous attempts at peacemaking had lacked and in part because it was able to leverage political resources to apply pressure on the SPLM/A and the Government of Sudan to make necessary concessions. Motivated by the desire to mitigate the devasting impacts of the civil war not only on Sudan but also on the entire region, the CPA was pushed through against the backdrop of the genocide in Darfur. Although the CPA brought a formal end to the civil war, the division of material and political assets between the government and SPLM/A deepened the marginalization of groups who were outside the North–South nexus.

Indeed, as Srinivasan makes clear in his analysis, the exclusion of these groups from the peace process undermined its long-term success. Although an argument could be made for the need to include only the two major parties in the initial negotiations to frame the basic agreement, the process should have moved fairly quickly to the next stage where civil society is not only invited to the table but also encouraged to take the lead. The CPA negotiations were essentially hidden from the Sudanese public who, in the absence of an independent media in the country, had no access to information about how resources were being divided and shared. In the book’s postscript, Srinivasan contrasts the CPA negotiations with the civilian-led uprising against Syrian president al-Bashir in 2019. Because it was nonviolent and locally rooted, it resulted in the triumphant return of civil politics. The lesson is clear: a peacemaking process that excludes civil society and is imposed from the top down will not lead to long-term peace. The CPA process failed to change perceptions from the bottom up; what resulted was a civilian population that was threatened by the terms of a peace process from which it was excluded. Without a mechanism for the broader inclusion of civil society, peacemaking in the Sudans was a divisive, violent, and authoritarian endeavor.

Srinivasan asserts that his intention is not to provide a perspective on how peacemaking can be designed to be more local and inclusive. Nor does he offer a toolbox of best practices for international actors about how their intervention can promote long-term peace. Instead, he encourages us to rethink what peacemaking is doing before we can move on to a discussion of how to be doing it. Part of that rethinking should include a reconsideration of the very nature of peacemaking. If we follow Johan Galtung’s insight that peace is a sequence of processes comprised of peacekeeping (aimed at the belligerents), peacemaking (aimed at political and military leaders), and peacebuilding (aimed at civil society), Srinivasan’s thesis can be interpreted as calling for the conflict and peace studies community to assign a primary position to the last of these stages. In violent and protracted civil wars like those in the Sudans, it can be difficult to determine who should have a seat at the negotiating table and how to design an agreement that will address the varied grievances. Negotiations at the elite level (“peacemaking”) are therefore often seen as a necessary step before incorporating civil society in peacebuilding efforts. Srinivasan shows that the exclusion of the public from the process had consequences: the CPA failed to provide human security and reassurance that peace dividends would be shared. International intervention succeeded in getting the parties to the table and brokering a peace that was spearheaded by subregional actors, but it failed to effectively implement peace because the process did not lead to the next stage of inclusive, locally owned “peacebuilding” in civil society. An important extension of Srinivasan’s research could include ideas about how to translate our rethinking of peacemaking into practice.

Srinivasan’s analysis reminds us that lasting peace can never be imposed. To enact nonviolent civil politics, a peace process must spring from and provide space for civil society. His book is essential reading for scholars and practitioners alike who are eager to get beyond cycles of unending war and failed peace.