When Peace Kills Politics w/ Sharath Srinivasan

Join author Sharath Srinivasan for the launch of his book When Peace Kills Politics.

When Peace Kills Politics explains the role of international peacemaking in recent decades in reproducing violence and political authoritarianism in Sudan and South Sudan. Srinivasan explains how Sudan’s landmark north–south peace process that achieved the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement fuelled war in Darfur, the Nuba Mountains and the Blue Nile alongside how it contributed to Sudan’s failed political transformation and newly independent South Sudan’s rapid descent into civil war.

Concluding with the conspicuous absence of ‘peace’ when non-violent revolutionary political change came to Sudan in 2019, Srinivasan examines at close range why outsiders’ peace projects may displace civil politics and raise the political currency of violence. With an original contribution to theorising peace and peacemaking drawing upon the political thought of Hannah Arendt, the book is an analysis of the tragic shortcomings of attempting to build a non-violent political realm through neat designs and tools of compulsion, where the end goal of peace becomes caught up in idealised constitutional texts, technocratic templates and deals on sharing spoils.

When Peace Kills Politics demands a radical rethinking of the project of peace in civil wars, grounded in a more earnest commitment to civil political action.

Sharath Srinivasan is Co-Director of the University of Cambridge’s Centre of Governance and Human Rights, also David and Elaine Potter Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Studies, and Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. He is an interdisciplinary and applied researcher currently working on issues at the intersection of digital technology and politics in Africa, alongside longstanding work on the politics of international interventions in wars in the Sudans. He is a Fellow of the Rift Valley Institute and serves on the Council for the British Institute in Eastern Africa.