Negotiation around these two broad elements will encompass the cluster of issues that this volume deals with, which includes addressing gender-based violence and the disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration of former fghters. This chapter examines these two important contributors to a sustainable ending of the confict in South Sudan insofar as they led to rival parties reaching agreeable terms of peace while at the same time addressing human rights violations.
First, the need for parties to reach agreeable terms of peace and for the negotiations to incorporate the fundamental issues of justice and human rights are crucial to a sustainable termination of confict. Failure in this regard would lead society to teeter on the abyss of relapsing into confict. Agreeable terms of peace were at the centre of negotiations in the termination of classical wars. In today’s wars, especially civil wars, failures habitually recur because crucial issues of "give-and-take" are not given proper attention, partly due to multiple interests, including those of mediators. To explain this phenomenon, the chapter refects on the writings of classical strategic military theorists such as Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Machiavelli, and others.
Second, issues of human rights abuses infuence the stability of post-confict societies. The failure of parties to the confict in South Sudan to respect the sanctity of human rights is one of the weakest links in the entire peace process. This poses a major challenge to the country’s strategic (long-term) peace. By situating the terms of peace and the sanctity of human rights at the core of negotiating peace agreements, South Sudan’s long-raging (cyclic) civil war would be reduced to a less lethal one, or at best terminate sustain ably. For this to happen, though, the parties have to address these issues exhaustively during peace negotiations to prevent society from relapsing into confict or mutating into fssures of a new confict altogether.