CIAO DATE: 04/2012
March 2012
United States Institute of Peace
On the surface, the 2011 referendum on the secession of southern Sudan was an unusually clear case of successful conflict prevention and thus is worth examining for general lessons. Attention to preventing violent conflict, rather than just managing and ending it, has grown substantially around the globe in recent decades. Despite this focus, relatively few instances of prevention have been thoroughly documented. This is understandable, given that proving conflict prevention success requires demonstrating that a series of actions prevented something that never happened from taking place. Sudan has suffered from violent conflict for most of its five-plus decades as an independent state. The second civil war between its north and south lasted more than twenty years and claimed approximately two million lives, ending in the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), a complicated series of protocols that detailed an implementation process extending through 2011. The critical event in the late stages was a referendum in southern Sudan on self-determination—whether to remain part of a unified Sudan, or to become independent.1 As implementation limped along, with increasing certainty that the south would choose independence but scant progress in resolving difficult postreferendum issues including border demarcation, oil wealth sharing, and the status of the disputed Abyei territory, fears grew that the referendum would spark a return to full-scale civil war.
Resource link: Learning from Sudan's 2011 Referendum [PDF] - 220K