Strategy Paper

Lord’s Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony’s failure to sign a peace deal in April drove a nail into the coffin of the Juba peace process—a process that is grinding to an unsuccessful end.^[1] The talks have certainly contributed to northern Uganda’s current state of relative peace and created a mechanism to address tensions between the people in the North and the southern-dominated government in Kampala.

It has been almost 15 years since Somali militias shot down two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters over the capital Mogadishu and killed 18 American servicemen in a battle that also killed more than 1,000 Somalis.

It's bad enough that the international community has failed, five years in, to end the genocide in Darfur, and worse still that it reacted with no urgency when the Darfur crisis bled into neighboring Chad. With the root causes of conflict in each country still untended, this regional crisis is poised to deepen.

In the 10 weeks since ENOUGH issued its report “Abyei: Sudan’s “Kashmir” the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, or CPA, Sudan’s unique, ground-breaking political deal that formally ended 21 years of war between the Khartoum government and the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Movement, or SPLM, has lurched toward breakdown. There are many reasons for this, despite the fact that both sides show clear signs of wishing to avoid outright military confrontation.

Ending the catastrophe in Darfur requires international protection for civilians, a peace agreement that resolves the underlying political issues, and accountability for human rights abuses. Complete humanitarian access must also be assured. To achieve any of these goals, there must be meaningful consequences for individuals who impede efforts at protection, peacemaking, and humanitarian access.

U.S.-led efforts in recent weeks to end the crisis in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo—the epicenter of the deadliest war since World War II with 5.4 million dead and counting—have yielded a ceasefire, but the conflict is not over. The international community must follow through on recent progress with a comprehensive peace strategy for eastern Congo.

If not revamped, the Darfur peace process will almost certainly fail. Though hopes were high for talks that convened in early November, the United Nations/African Union joint mediation team made a critical mistake by trying to unify the rebels and assemble them all in one place without a clearly defined vision for an end state that resonates with Darfur’s civilian population.

Though it has garnered the concern and condemnation of governments worldwide and triggered unprecedented grassroots activism in the United States, the crisis in Darfur continues to intensify. In response to what both the legislative and executive branches of the U.S. government have repeatedly called genocide, the gulf between rhetoric and action on the part of the Bush administration is profound. What is driving U.S.

Between 1996 and 2002, the two massive wars fought in the Democratic Republic of the Congo were arguably the world's deadliest since World War II. With almost no international fanfare, Congo is on the brink of its third major war in the last decade, and almost nothing is being done to stop it.

The fate of a war that has crossed three international borders, displaced nearly two million people, and created the highest child abduction rate in the world hinges on the fate of one man: Joseph Kony, the notorious leader of the rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA).

Negotiations ongoing in Juba, southern Sudan, are addressing a wide array of issues, but until there is agreement about how to deal with Kony and his top deputies -- all indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against humanity -- there will be no peace deal.