ABSTRACT
In 2005 Sudan and the insurgent party of South Sudan, the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM), signed the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that ended decades of civil wars between north and south, wars that had cost millions of lives and displaced millions more. It may have been naïve to believe that international negotiations could dictate and even fundamentally alter the dynamics of politics within Sudan and South Sudan. The CPA sought to resolve another difficult issue of great internal sensitivity: whether the province of Abyei should be in the north or south after separation. Everyone familiar with the civil war in Sudan knew that much of the fighting and most of the casualties had been from fighting among southerners, particularly from numerous ethnic-based militia supported by Sudan to fight against the SPLM. Where the offending regime is in power, however, and is determined to remain so, pressures for peace can easily sacrifice the desire for fundamental political reform.
