Volume 40 2013 Issue

Review of African Political Economy, 2013 Vol. 40, No. 138, 653–654 BOOK REVIEW The fate of Sudan: the origins and process they eventually came to control. consequences of a flawed peace process, They had their own preconceptions of by John Young, London, Zed Books, what needed to be done and prescriptions 2012, xx + 388 pp., £16.99, ISBN of how to do it. These are prescribed in 9781780323251 the handbooks of peace negotiations as (a) peace-making negotiations aimed to achieve the cessation of hostilities; (b) Peace is more than cessation of military peace-building to create a stable state on hostilities, more than simple political the western liberal democratic model. stability. Peace is the presence of justice, These are seen in a sequential process, and peace-building entails addressing all factors and forces that stand as impedi- and the established procedure is to focus ments to the realization of all human on peace-making first and worry about rights for all human beings. (Bendanã state building afterwards. Critics have 2003) dubbed the first as ‘negative peace’ and the second as ‘positive peace’. The fate of This statement, quoted by John Young at Sudan argues that, in this case at least, the beginning of The fate of Sudan (1), afterwards is already too late for state sets out unambiguously the issue the book building along lines of democratic trans- deals with: the ultimate failure of the formation essential to stability, hence the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) flawed peace process in the subtitle. concluded in Sudan in 2005 to set the foun- The flaws in the CPA story are many, dations of sustainable peace. The failure and the author dissects them chronologi- lies in the CPA’s disregard of the need cally. They follow inexorably from the for democratic transformation in both format adopted for negotiations, which embattled regions of Sudan. The author recognised the two main antagonists – the has followed the peacemaking process National Congress Party (NCP) in the that took over six years to conclude from North and the Sudanese Peoples Liberation the beginning and, so to speak, from the Movement (SPLM) in the South – and inside. He was engaged to monitor its pro- excluded other organisations – military, gress on behalf of international organis- political, civil society – with vital interests ations. His sources are mostly first hand: in Sudan’s future. This was hardly surpris- his own observations and interviews with ing since both the NCP and SPLM are mili- participants from all sides of the negotiation tarist, authoritarian organisations, intolerant table. He is entitled, therefore, to draw the of competition in any form, and prepared to conclusions he expresses without mincing use violence to maintain their stranglehold words. on power in their respective countries. The seeds of ultimate failure according to Both have faced many domestic challenges the author were planted in the heavy in the past, and will continue to do so in the handed involvement of outsiders in a future, since the causes that make for 654 Book review instability were not addressed, let alone caused and fuelled the war... and will resolved, in the so-called Comprehensive almost certainly ensure that peace will Peace Agreement reached in 2005. not be sustainable in the north, in the south, and between north and south. (10) The CPA achieved a cessation of hostilities, i.e., a ‘negative peace’. According to Sadly, events since 2005 have not contra- the author, it failed miserably to set the dicted this prediction. There are many trou- foundations for state building through a blesome issues that concern the relationship democratic transformation that is to of the two Sudans in the future: the sharing achieve ‘positive peace’. While pious state- of oil resources, the failure to delineate ments about popular participation, inclu- boundaries, the unresolved future of the siveness, elections, etc., were included in Nuba and Abyei regions. So far, criticism the agreement, the only concrete result of the CPA has focused on them. John has been the secession of Southern Sudan. Young’s contribution points to a fundamen- Because the SPLM had not created a civil tal flaw in the constitution of the two states administration for the South during the that will determine their respective futures two decades of its existence, state-building as well as their inter-relationship. His was in order in 2005. The foreign sponsors analysis defines the essence of the of the CPA were obliged to sponsor it and problem and explains its origins. More funds flowed in, which the newborn state importantly, however, it sheds light on the was utterly unable to absorb productively. future, and will remain relevant for some They were used instead by the SPLM to time to come. run pacification campaigns in restless areas of the South, to carry out cosmetic Reference political exercises such as the 2010 elec- Bendanã, Alejandro. 2003. What Kind of tions, and to nurture an emerging elite Peace is Being Built? Critical Assessments devoted to conspicuous consumption in a from the South. Ottawa: International country with scarcely a sign of modernity. Development Research Centre. The fate of Sudan makes depressing reading. John Markakis Contributing Editor, Review of African The placing of narrow political concerns Political Economy above democratic transformation is symptomatic of a process which refused Email: [email protected] to permit the people of Sudan a role, # 2013, John Markakis failed to address the grievances which http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03056244.2013.797766 Review of African Political Economy, 2013 Vol. 40, No. 138, 647–648 BOOK REVIEW Epistemologies of African conflicts: vio- Influenced by Euro- and ethno-centric con- lence, evolutionism, and the war in ceptions of the racial and moral superiority Sierra Leone, by Zubairu Wai, of the West, along with Enlightenment New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, ideals of modernity and Christian principles xvii + 263 pp., £57.50 (hardback), ISBN of salvation, as Wai discloses, the evol- 9781137280794 utionist epistemology of Africanism has served to justify the imperialism and colo- nialism of Europe, and to produce and For the last 60 years the positivist accounts sustain the mythical representation of of science and an asserted normative separ- Africa as inhabited by backward, savage ation of ‘facts’ from ‘values’ have been and tribal people – ‘as a continent dominant assumptions in international without history’ at the bottom of ‘a tem- relations (IR) and international political poral hierarchy of progress and civilization’ economy (IPE). In contrast to such assump- (46, 48). The second chapter further tions, Zubairu Wai’s Epistemologies of unpacks the ‘epistemological configuration African conflicts unmasks the epistemic and order of knowledge’ (63) in the Euro- violence inherent in the positivist power/ pean imagination about Africa, specifically knowledge regimes and, in particular, focusing on the idea of Sierra Leone. It those concerning Africa, i.e., the pejora- shows how the Sierra Leonean state was tively labelled discipline of Africanism. historically constituted through the visible Wai employs what V.Y. Mudimbe has and invisible forms of violence that termed a ‘transdisciplinary’ perspective accompanied European imperial expansion (xiii) that unites post-positivist IR and IPE and through an evolutionist project pro- approaches with critical studies in the moted under the British colonial exper- fields of history, anthropology and philos- iment and its formalised domination. ophy, as well as political science. Inspired From there Wai turns to the dominant by Mudimbe’s (1988) analysis of the discourses on the decade-long civil war in ways in which Africa has been ‘invented’ Sierra Leone which began in the 1990s as an object of ‘truth’ through the Western and, more broadly, contemporary conflicts order of knowledge, Wai spends five chap- in the African continent. In the third ters deconstructing the Africanist dis- chapter, while expressing the danger of courses on the civil war in Sierra Leone. attempting to produce the definitive His project stems from his frustration with history of the conflict, he briefly, yet care- ‘a fundamental disconnect’ between his fully, maps the contextual backgrounds of lived experience of the conflict and influen- the insurgency in 1991 and subsequent tial accounts purporting to explain it (2). violent movements. Though there is a Reviewing a wide-ranging literature of slight disconnect from the previous discus- the ‘colonial library’, the first chapter sion of the theoretical and historical terrains demonstrates how evolutionist thinking that have driven the development and has persistently characterised dominant persistence of evolutionist epistemology discourses concerning African societies. in Africanism, the chapter’s descriptive 648 Book review analysis makes it easier for readers to navi- Leone differs from dominant interpret- gate through the following investigations of ations. Related to this, another salient ques- complex issues and events in the armed tion left unaddressed is: how is it possible conflict as well as their interpretations. to create alternative historiographies about The fourth chapter deciphers the major social phenomena in Africa, especially in texts written mainly by Western scholars relation to conflicts, by accounting for the who purport to explain the Sierra Leonean lived experiences and struggles of subaltern war, and in so doing exposes their political social groups that are largely neglected in and ideological commitments. These writ- the dominant discourses? Posing these ings explicitly/implicitly attribute the war questions to Wai perhaps involves the in Sierra Leone to an asserted social pathol- danger of academic egoism, which ogy that fails to ascend the unilinear evol- imposes an obligation on the insiders who utionary chain and/or simply reduce the lived through the conflicts to speak about conflict to violent competition over econ- their own experiences for the purposes of omic resources. Wai argues that such knowledge advancement.

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