Safa Khater
Moderator
Sudan practices all types of civil wars and social tensions since before Independence in almost all the parts of the country. A march of 67 years of civil wars, and more than fifteen peace agreements, travailed in either a catastrophic secession of a part of the country or at best ended with a fragile peace situation. Relapsing into war after peace is achieved is a normal scenery and an expected scenario in Sudan; peace agreement is always a bone of contention. The main objective of this debate paper is to put peace consolidation (not only peace achievement) at the centre of attention for both the decision makers and the researchers in countries at transitional stages of post-conflict situations. A pivotal research question asks if the peace agreements in themselves are theoretically and contextually well structured. Adopting a bottom-up methodology, the paper coined a grounded model of peace for Sudan depending on the regional spatial strategy’s axioms. The model tries to dovetail the UN-Habitat experience of regional planning in Darfur (2017) with the experience of Sudan’s National Urban Policy NUP. The model analyses the main ten peace agreements signed since Independence (1956), against a set of thirty three indicators, distributed over ten peace-pillars comprising three main domains of: peace-making, peace building and peace consolidation. Its main objective is to translate the peace agreement into a social contract serving developmental objectives translated in the regional spatial strategy and accompanied with a societal agenda of capacity building. To safeguard recurrence of violence the model recommends linking peace consolidation with target 16 of the SDGs concerning promotion of peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development.
Its main objective is to translate the peace agreement into a social contract serving developmental objectives translated in the regional spatial strategy and accompanied with a societal agenda of capacity building. To safeguard recurrence of violence the model recommends linking peace consolidation with target 16 of the SDGs concerning promotion of peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development.