Adoption of regional spatial strategy for peace consolidation in post conflict areas – Experience of Sudan

Sudan practices all types of civil wars and social tensions since before Independence in almost all the ‎parts of the country. A march of 67 years of civil wars, and more than fifteen peace agreements, travailed in either a catastrophic secession of a part of the country or at best ended with a fragile peace situation. Relapsing into war after peace is achieved is a normal scenery and an expected scenario in Sudan; peace agreement is always a bone of contention. The main objective of this debate paper is to put peace consolidation (not only peace achievement) at the centre of attention ‎for both the decision makers and the researchers in countries at transitional stages of post-conflict situations. A pivotal research question asks if the peace agreements in themselves are theoretically and contextually well structured‎. Adopting a bottom-up methodology,‎ the paper coined a grounded model of peace for Sudan depending on the regional spatial strategy’s axioms. The model tries to dovetail the UN-Habitat experience of regional planning in Darfur (2017) with the experience of Sudan’s National Urban Policy NUP. The model analyses the main ten peace ‎agreements signed since Independence (1956), against a set of thirty three indicators, distributed over ‎ten peace-pillars comprising three main domains of: peace-making, peace building and peace ‎consolidation. Its main objective is to translate the peace agreement into a social contract serving developmental objectives translated in the regional spatial strategy and accompanied ‎with a societal agenda of capacity building. To safeguard recurrence of violence the model ‎recommends linking peace consolidation with target 16 of the SDGs concerning promotion of peaceful and inclusive societies for ‎sustainable ‎development.‎