Description
The Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) has been engaging in a mediation process aimed at finding a resolution to the violent conflict in South Sudan since 2013. IGAD’s involvement in South Sudan is anchored on its founding principle of peaceful settlement of regional conflicts and the principle of subsidiarity under the Africa Peace and Security Architecture (APSA). It is puzzling that violence continued unabated even as parties to the conflict in South Sudan sat around the negotiation table and signed numerous agreements which they violated in near-equal measure. The parties to conflict seem unwilling to implement the 2018 IGAD-brokered peace agreement, with some experts arguing that the agreement is un-implementable and others claiming that IGAD mediators were privy to this situation all along. This raises a question as to why IGAD would continue engaging in a mediation process that neither ends violence nor offers a promise of a peaceful conflict resolution? Drawing out on qualitative data obtained through interviews and document reviews, this article argues that IGAD’s organisational structure and functionality are key to understanding and explaining the South Sudan phenomenon within broader discourses on peace and security regionalism in Africa. The article makes a case for the need to pay close attention to regional power dynamics as key to rethinking and reorienting structural and functional aspects of Regional Economic Communities (RECs), such is IGAD, within the APSA in view of the continent’s evolving peace and security agenda in pursuit of ‘African solutions to African problems.’
