Since Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) was signed,

its border with Uganda has become a hub of activity. Contrasting developments

on the Ugandan side of the border with those on the South Sudanese

side, the paper draws on empirical fieldwork to argue that the CPA has created

new centres of power in the margins of both states. However, in day-today

dealings on either side of the border, South Sudanese military actors

have become dominant. In the particular case of Arua and the South Sudan–

Uganda border, past wartime authority structures determine access to opportunities

in a tightly regulated, inconclusive peace. This means that smallscale

Ugandan traders – although vital to South Sudan – have become more

vulnerable to South Sudan’s assertions of state authority. The experience of

Ugandan traders calls into question the broad consensus that trade across

the border is always beneficial for peace-building. The paper concludes that

trade is not unconditionally helpful to the establishment of a peaceful environment

for everyone

Uganda's army, the Uganda People's Defence Force (UPDF), has been operating on Sudanese territory since the late 1990s. From 2002 to 2006, a bilateral agreement between the governments in Khartoum and Kampala gave the Ugandan soldiers permission to conduct military operations in Southern Sudan to eliminate the Ugandan rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). Instead of conducting a successful operation against Uganda's most persistent rebels – who had withdrawn into Sudanese territory and acted as a proxy force in Sudan's civil war – the UPDF conducted a campaign of abuse against Sudanese civilians. Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted over several years, this article documents local experiences of a foreign army's involvement in the brutal Sudanese civil war. It outlines why continued operations of the UPDF outside their borders recreate the same problem they purport to be fighting: abuses of civilians. Since 2008, US military support for the UPDF mission against the LRA has called into question the viability of continued militarisation through an army that has committed widely documented human rights abuses. The foreign military has not brought peace to the region. Instead, it has made a peaceful environment less likely for residents of South Sudan.

Mareike Schomerus                                                                                                                       

is a researcher, consultant, and teacher, working on violent conflict, peace, human security and small arms. 

She is the Consortium Director of The Justice and Security Research Programme at the London School of Economics and Political Science.