A new ‘forum’ for human security: South Sudan
In 2008, the late Mohamed Sahnoun, former Algerian diplomat and Special Envoy of the UN Secretary General to different African contets, envisioned a five-year initiative that went under the banner of the ‘Caux Forum for Human Security’. Human Security had been bandied around as a term for some time, then finding some more specific articulation in the UN’s Human Security Now report. Sahnoun was reaching for an approach more genuinely human-centred – in the concept, and in the way the Forum would deal with the concept. He said in his opening remarks of the 2012 Forum:
A distinctive approach of the Caux Forum is the concept of a ‘coalition of conscience’ as a viable approach which can bring together people of integrity and compassion in partnership to overcome the corrupting impact of greed and the struggle for power. We can all play a part in this. We discover the richness of a different culture when we recognise our common humanity and acknowledge our common responsibility to protect it. We strengthen good governance at the top by sustaining it all the way down to its roots in the family, in parenting skills, in local communities. We can challenge our governments to adopt sustainable policies if we first take a hard look at our own lifestyles.
Critiques now extend to the human-centred lens; as too narrow or skewed, when the issue is more clearly a question of the earth, the wider ecology, of which humanity is a part. Bearing in mind this limitation, I hope there is still some value in this reflection on the themes.
Over the course of the Forum’s five years, the framing of the conversation fell under five themes: Healing Memory, Just Governance, Inclusive Economics, Intercultural Dialogue and Living Sustainably (the specific wording varied slightly from year to year). I was engaged academically and professionally with the Forum. In 2012, a feature of the Forum’s final year was the marking of the first anniversary of South Sudan’s independence. Now more than a decade on, I started to reflect on these themes in relation to the dynamics of the Peacebuilding Opportunities Fund’s (POF) work in South Sudan. The point is not that the themes or definitions are correct, but that drawing together these two threads might hold some space for thinking about the current context in South Sudan.
Where does peacebuilding sit in these themes? We will return to that at the end.
Over the coming weeks, we explore the five themes, framing each one with the Caux Forum’s definitions. Unfortunately, Caux seems to have erased most of its publicly available pre-2019 history, so you’ll just have to trust me that these were indeed the definitions. We start with Just Governance.
Part I - Just Governance
Caux Forum framing: Corruption and the abuse of power sow distrust in societies of North and South. They are major causes of conflict. Only governance which is accountable to all citizens, minorities and majorities alike, offers a path to lasting peace.
Discussions often conflate ‘governance’ with ‘government’ and we might assume the main object of this discussion is the latter. But governance is simply the set of constraints that guide, enable, limit, or require certain behaviours. So governance is happening throughout society and institutions. And as Sahnoun said above, ‘[w]e strengthen good governance at the top by sustaining it all the way down to its roots in the family, in parenting skills, in local communities’.
By inviting a qualitative standard of ‘just’ governance, we’re asked to interrogate the character of these constraints. This, in turn, invites a more nuanced inquiry into existing governance and looking for the existing ‘just’ measures that can be built on. Equally, it may entail looking at measures that on their own do not produce ‘just’ results but could, if balanced appropriately by some other measure - ‘justness’ through a good configuration of measures.
Instead, at the national and sub-national level in South Sudan, we often make lazy generalisations. We often talk about ‘governance’ as if it is absent in South Sudan, let alone ‘just’ governance. Even gestures to customary law in South Sudan are generally offered in a tight container. This container is an overarching narrative that the ‘correct’ legal architecture needs to derive from a codified national regime, which in turn needs to derive from road-tested international regimes.
What is less obvious is that these implicitly derive from a subset of these international regimes, specifically the civil law traditions. If the narrative – even with its neo-colonial trappings – instead adopted common law design principles, it would be refreshingly closer to the existing customary model in South Sudan and also considerably closer to a ‘localised’ model of nation building. There are some fancy definitions of ‘localisation’, ironically usually proferred by highly paid international consultants, but a lot boils down to common sense - unless you have the desire and/or means of autocratic rule, then to have any lasting effect, pathways need to be owned and driven by the people who are most affected.
A few paragraphs can’t do justice to the well-intentioned gaslighting of local governance structures that is accepted policy among many external actors. This is not to say that everything about local governance is ‘just’. Far from it, but genuinely localised approaches would anchor in the local and supplement and mitigate where necessary with novel inputs, not the other way around. This is about the power of communities to determine collectively the boundaries, content, shape, language and processes of their law. Law is the agreed set of measures for protecting and defending the livelihood of the community, and their community within the national community. Otherwise, it becomes just another tool of subjugation.
At one exasperated point we fell into this trap by supporting the establishment of a Murle Age-Set Council, a seemingly logical attempt to circumvent the diffuse social structures of Murle society. That initiative failed, and not even spectacularly, more whimperingly.
Attempts to work on Inter-Communal Governance Structures for communities on the fault line between Jonglei and GPAA aim to find this balance more closely. It, too, is beset with challenges. But in moments when it finds its groove, and genuinely respects the distinct roles of different leadership groups across communities, it can build some momentum. Part of that is recognising leadership where it is, even if it’s an inconvenient truth for some that armed youth leaders across the country can be legitimate leaders within their community. And there are leadership qualities that can be drawn on, if they can see that there are alternatives to violence for addressing their communities’ concerns.
This has been the experience with the galweng leaders in Rumbek. When we first created space for that dialogue, they had their mythologies about each other, often only having met amidst violent conflict in the field. Their reputations preceded them. But there was a different perspective available on the other side of a conversation around what the Dinka Agaar dynamics might look like if they deployed their leadership credentials for a common leadership. The collaborative model of the akut de door (grassroots peace committees, led by the galweng) emerged.
This ties to the question of economics, which we turn to next. Yes, livelihoods are essential, but we need to look beyond the financial dimension to find viable solutions, also understanding existing governance and status hierarchies. Asking a youth leader to drop their gun, and with it their status and standing, to pick up a shovel and build dykes temporarily for the equivalent of a few dollars a day – we need a reality check…
