Sudan North in the Shadow of the South

This report summarises the four seminars in the series entitled “Sudan: North in the shadow of the South”. The first seminar in our series put the focus on environmental factors and the conflicts in Sudan. Pastoral migration, access to water and harvesting schemes are all influenced by environmental factors. However, as noted during the seminar by the speakers, Dr Gunnar Sørbø and Dr Guma Kunda Komey, the Sudanese crisis is more complex than that: it is above all a crisis of governance and a crisis of livelihood. The second seminar came to be even more topical than expected. The theme of border issues, referring to the border between the North and the South, was on the agenda of global media due to a recent escalation between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. The border regime and the movement of people and goods became one of the main topics of the discussion. The third seminar mapped out the current field of civil society actors within the field of peacebuilding in Sudan. The organisational and structural challenges are many, but at the same time, there is a big potential for bringing the peace process down to grass roots level. The concluding seminar gathered some high level policy-makers, practitioners and experts to discuss the potential and challenges for civil society peacebuilding in Sudan. Besides considering the potential for civil society peacebuilding, the discussion also had a donor perspective, with the aim of exploring the capabilities of the Nordic countries as peacebuilders.