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E-book Spiritual Contestations – The Violence of Peace in South Sudan

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Penilaian

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It was late morning in May 2014, and I was sitting on the sofa in the lobby of a Radisson Blu Hotel. The sliding doors of the hotel opened onto a typical, international hotel lobby with marbled floors, a series of lifts, a spiralling staircase and clusters of small, hard, colourful square-shaped sofas and arm-chairs. If you could only see the lobby, and not the street outside, you would not have known where we were in the world. The hotel on that June morning was in the centre of Addis Ababa (Ethiopia’s capital city). The hotel was host-ing the negotiating teams of South Sudan’s main warring parties – the South Sudan government and the still nascent Sudan People’s Liberation Army – In Opposition (SPLA-IO). They had been invited by IGAD – an East African intergovernmental regional body – to Addis Ababa to continue peace negotia-tions. These negotiations would eventually result in the signing of the long 2015 Agreement on the Resolution of Conflict in South Sudan (ARCSS) and the 2018 Revitalised-ARCSS.The peace negotiations had been initiated in January 2014 in response to escalating armed conflict in South Sudan. On the 15 December 2013 in Juba (South Sudan’s capital city), fighting erupted between soldiers in the barracks of the Presidential Guard. The next day, soldiers divided largely based on alli-ances and divisions formed during the Sudan Government – Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) conflicts of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s.1 In this 2013 moment of government anxiety, uniformed, president-aligned forces killed civilians based on crude conceptions of ethnicity.2 In almost instantaneous response to the violence in Juba, vast swathes of soldiers in the north-eastern third of South Sudan mutinied and took up arms against the government, with many combatants and supporting communities understanding the conflict as wars of revenge for the killings in Juba.3 Over the following three years, armed conflict would also spread to the Equatorias – the southern third of the country. By 2018, excess mortality from the conflict was over 400,000.4 Between 2013 and 2021, there were over thirty pockets of famine-level hunger impacting hundreds of thousands of people.5 By 2021, 3.7 million South Sudanese had fled their homes to seek safety.6 Throughout these wars, the government and armed opposition carried out extreme and seemingly arbitrary acts of physical violence against civilians, breaking international and local norms.7That late morning in May 2014, as I sat in the Radisson Blu Hotel in Addis, an eclectic combination of South Sudan’s political elite walked through the sliding doors and wandered past me to access the hotel’s lavish buffet lunch. It was hard not to be dazzled by this array of South Sudanese political celebri-ties. The day’s IGAD peace negotiations on South Sudan had not yet started and there was little prospect of any significant progress. In the meantime, the opposing elites of South Sudan’s warring parties could enjoy their internation-ally funded place of rest. The 2014 World Cup was only a couple of weeks away from starting and much time was spent watching football commentary and predicting the footballing outcomes.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

299.675 PEN s

Penerbit

Canada : Boydell & Brewer., 2023

Deskripsi Fisik

323 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781800106574

Klasifikasi

299.675

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Voodooism, Zombiism/Religion in Africa

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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