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The Centre for Global Challenges hosted an online webinar on 11 November 2020 to hear more about the Sudanese Peace Process. The speakers included Daniel Fullerton, a member of the Public International Law & Policy Group (PILPG), and Yasir Arman, Deputy Chairperson of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North and Sudan Revolutionary Front, and chair of its Negotiation Team for the Juba Peace Agreement. The speakers provided a unique and hands-on perspective on the negotiations that took place in Juba.

In Sudan, President Omar al-Bashir’s tumultuous 20-year dictatorship was built upon large scale corruption and serious international crimes, including war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide (the International Criminal Court has issued a warrant for his arrest). Following a large-scale popular uprising in December 2018, leading to the end of his regime, a monumental peace agreement was finally reached on 3 October 2020 between a transitional military council and a coalition of civil society, armed opposition and political opposition groups. Prior to this, there had been thirty failed attempts at negotiations.

Juba, located in South Sudan (that was once part of the greater Sudan), served as the forum to negotiate a complex peace process. According to the speakers, the tone of the peace talks was not adversarial, it was facilitative. Strikingly, there was almost no international presence, an anomaly for traditional peace negotiations like this. Mr. Arman said that despite ‘the assistance that we got from the outside world, it was an African mediation and an African solution for an African situation’. So much so that for many days, Mr. Fullerton was one of the only non-Sudanese in the negotiating room.

The proliferation of the coronavirus across the world created new challenges for the negotiations. Suddenly, the negotiations had to be conducted online. With the help of embassies from EU countries, facilities were made available for parties to continue their talks. Despite these difficulties, the agreement marks the beginning of a new step for the country.