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Paper short abstract:

What are the Lessons learnt from Wartime Governance structures and practices and how they can inform Peacetime state-building? A case -study of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement in South Sudan.

Paper long abstract:

This contribution would focus on highlighting alternatives to 'external' models of state-building and governance in a post conflict situation using the SPLM's attempts in South Sudan to prepare itself as a government. As a revolutionary liberation movement the SPLM created complex governing structures in its liberated areas, it drafted laws, created development schemes, and separated institutions in order to fulfill its aim to reform the political and socio-economic order of Sudan. While the field of guerilla governance is growing, the link between what lessons can transpire from structures born during wartime and the political vision and institutional experience of rebel-movements turned government can represent for improving systems of governance in Africa is still missing. The objective here is to shed light on the possibility that guerilla movements and their 'parallel states' may be important vehicles for reform, where local and sub-national social modes can serve as a basis for reconstruction. Identifying the areas where institutions were created and functional, and governance achieved during wartime can potentially assist in designing new ideas on post-conflict nation and state-building. The interesting and perhaps contradictory element here is that the institutions that came out of the CPA peace agreement in 2005 (that were internationally molded) actually came to disrupt this internal and embryonic process of state- building. An opportunity was missed in South Sudan to begin rethinking entirely new approaches to governance post-conflict.