Paper short abstract:

The Peace process in South Sudan has been largely elite-led and managed with an 'inclusive element' of civil society. This paper interrogates the nature and impact of the inclusion of South Sudanese civil societies since the outbreak of the civil war in South Sudan.

Paper long abstract:

This paper interrogates bottom-up/ peace-from-below peacebuilding and peace-making strategies used in South Sudan. Since the outbreak of the war in South Sudan, the peace process has been arguably been inclusive. The Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), East Africa's peace and security organization, and the African Union made provisions and invited independent South Sudanese actors to form a "multi-stakeholders" approach meant to initiate an inclusive phase of IGAD-led peace talks in Addis Ababa. However, the inclusion of civil society in efforts to defuse the South Sudan crisis has so far been fraught.

Joining the conversation of local turn and local ownership narrative, the paper argues that the inclusiveness of civil societies in peace process in South Sudan only enjoys rhetorical acceptance and proves to be difficult to operationalise. Although there has been a notable increase in civil society in official peace processes, they have mostly been assigned a sub-contractual role. Given the mainstream Liberal Peacebuilding framework and the 'local turn' as manifested in the strategies adopted by peacebuilding organizations in Africa, the paper will interrogate not only the nature of inclusivity of civil society organization but provide an interrogating critique of the subcontracting nature that is assigned to them.

Through the case of South Sudan, the article exposes the reproduction of top-down processes through arguably inclusive processes. This is presented in critically interrogating the nature and impact of the inclusive peace process.