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In yesterday’s post, I discussed the varied gaps in our understanding of historical atrocities trends, and the need for a multi-level perspective on the ways in which atrocities have occurred within societies, political institutions, and conflict operations. The piece–the first in a three-part series–was intended as a survey of contemporary perspectives, and the ways in which we might hypothesize frameworks for further research. In the absence of tangible, disaggregated historical data–particularly concerning pre-1945 periods–the most we can do is speculate about opportunities to diversify interpretations of atrocity events, organizations, and networks. In this post, I talk about the present literature on governance institutions and mass atrocities, and ways to advance a more complex understanding.

Revisiting Governance: An Institutional-Level Approach

A “democratic peace theory” strand of academic literature was the first to confront the intersection between governance and mass atrocities. Rudolph Rummel, writing in the mid-1990s, offers a liberal-democratic perspective on atrocities risk, highlighting non-democratic governance as a central atrocities indicator and correlate. Matt Krain, however, has observed a core shortcoming of a preventive theory of atrocities and democratic governance: Rummel’s framework, which identifies authoritarian regimes as inherently more likely to perpetrate atrocities, characterizes political institutions as static, monolithic actors; in the absence of political dynamism and, in extreme circumstances, upheaval, democratic states will remain democratic, with little variation between and within internal networks. As Krain notes, a thorough base of comparative governance and democratization research has complicated this perspective, noting the instability, factionalism, and accountability challenges associated with transitional regimes.

To make matters more complicated, what we perceive as democratization does not always foster the types of transitions we want, nor the types of transitions that will lead to long-term stability, a reduction in atrocities, or an increase in human security. As Jay Ulfelder wrote earlier this week, confounding factors often muddle the experience of political transition–in the context of “democratization” events, atrocities may become more frequent, rather than less. Non-comparative surveys of historical atrocities have presented the democratization/atrocities interaction as a novel characteristic of emerging regime types: as Branch and Cheeseman indicate in their survey of Kenya’s 2007-8 electoral violence, democratization is a risky business, and its advocates, practitioners, and participants should proceed with caution. Similar narratives populate coverage of older atrocities, highlighting the “dark side” of transitional politics: 1933 Germany was democratic, due to the confluence of Weimar culture and civil society, the German Rechtstaat, and parliamentary representation; 1994 Rwanda emerged as a multiparty experiment, following Habyarimana’s status-quo-threatening reforms.

Democracy may–or, alternately, may not–reduce historical atrocities risk–as Krain indicates, atrocities prospects likely depend on the quality of democratization, rather than whether or not democracy, per se, exists. In reality, atrocities indicators may have less to do with democratic institutions–popular participation, representative leadership, and inclusive governance–and more to do with the transitional dynamics of civilian/military relations, an underemphasized aspect of the democratization discourse. Barbara Geddes highlights varied regime-type typologies, underlining bargaining distinctions between multiparty, military, and “personalist” regimes. Or, as Geddes notes, regimes may represent a confluence of the three, in ways which are not strikingly evident to atrocities watchers: see, for example, Turkey, which maintains a partially-consolidated democracy, alongside a disproportionately influential shadow regime, comprised of strongly-networked military elites. The Turkish “deep state” mirrors Rwanda’s Zero Network, which orchestrated Rwanda’s atrocities infrastructure, in the midst of multiparty democratization. An indirect relationship between civilian/military relations and atrocities risk is plausible, if not robust: as political transition continues to disrupt the status quo, undermining shadow military networks’ political influence, the prospect for instability likely increases.

According to the Polity IV project, the world is getting more democratic. From an institutional perspective, that doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re getting better at mitigating atrocities risk.

Last month, Jay Ulfelder posted a characteristically insightful perspective on time-sequenced selection bias, which, in the midst of the “Congress defunds political science research” debacle, remains strikingly relevant. The central point, beyond the piece’s implications for research methodology, pertains to the indispensable humility of political forecasting. Forecasting, like much of historical analysis, is a teleological process–that is, it presumes the progression of human events towards a pre-configured goal: mass atrocities, political conflict, instability, or state failure. As Jay discusses in his post, however–and Anton Strezhnev references in a related discussion–the limits of human knowledge, the dynamic nature of political events, and history’s inconsistent evolution gives forecasters pause. The inherent uncertainty of political knowledge makes our predictions, historical analysis, and political narratives chaotic, even as we develop models to rationalize them:

Given a choice between a chaotic theory of history and a conspiratorial one, I’ll take chaos…Marry chaos to biography and we live in a world of wonder and innocence. Marry conspiracy to genealogy and we live in a world of unending inequality, in which our origins are inescapable.

The quote is from Jill Lepore’s New Yorker review (gated) of David Maraniss’ recent Obama biography, which Lepore critiques for its unwillingness the confront the contradiction between crazy-random-happenstance and the smooth, deterministic course of narrative biography. You might as well substitute “international politics” for “biography,” and “political development” for “genealogy”: the result is much the same. As in the study of individual lives, the characteristics we choose, the event data we aggregate, and the behavioral typologies we establish have an inescapable effect on predictive conclusions, whether we’re assessing individual decision-making, mass atrocities, or institutional breakdown.

Modeling Historical Atrocities Trends

As concerns mass atrocities, Jay references the rarity of atrocity events as a barrier to trans-historical, empirical analysis; indeed, the multi-level, complex ubiquity of atrocity events is equally challenging. While diffuse information networks amplify knowledge of present-day atrocity events, forensic technologies yield a limited base of tangible atrocities evidence. For macro-level, multi-event-based forcasting, atrocities data needn’t be precise, but the principle remains: we know too little about historical atrocity events, and our existing forecasting base contains significant gaps across local, intra-organizational, and sub-state levels of analysis.

Prediction, however, is possible. Mass atrocities are political events, and political forecasting has a proven record of success. It’s not Moneyball, but existing models of political instability prediction have made impressive contributions to our understanding of conflict indicators. According to recent research, predictive models operate at both the macro- and micro-levels, with institutional, structural, and social factors providing a useful localized assessment framework. Atrocity analysis across history, however, remains elusive; we know plenty about the post-Cold War era, but our understanding of mass atrocities’ non-modern characteristics, their rocky, inconsistent evolution towards the present-day, and the ways in which they have interacted with their political contexts, is woefully limited.

Jay makes this point well–with 66 years of atrocities data since the Second World War, it’s hard to tell whether Sudan, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, and Libya are historical anomalies, or problematic trend indicators. Statistically speaking, the “n” is too small, without a regionally diverse dataset to strengthen empirical inquiry. With such a small set of atrocities–Ulfelder and Valentino’s 2008 “state-sponsored mass killing” list offers 120 atrocity events, some of which span more than sixty years–modeling trends is a difficult task. But, like I said, it’s a possible one.

In keeping with trends in political science research, disaggregated atrocities modeling requires a shift in premise: atrocity events are all-encompassing, complex political events, rather than exclusive, humanitarian catastrophes. Frameworks beyond state-sponsored violence are difficult to consolidate and, perhaps as importantly, to quantify. At the same time, a reinterpretation of atrocities as an extension of political authority, rather than unique, depoliticized occurrences, may be a helpful way forward. Mass atrocities have functioned as a mechanism of power throughout human history–major historical works, epic poems, and theological texts describe mass atrocities as a critical, nearly universal characteristics of state formation, political expansion, and ideological consolidation. Human institutions may have crafted normative barriers to atrocities perpetration, but the core, driving force of violent politics makes atrocities possible, regardless of modernity. It’s not a matter of human nature, but of power–in the context of institutions which, indisputably, rely on the consolidation of acute violence, acute violence is bound to occur.

If we see atrocities as a symptom of political violence, a multi-level understanding of atrocities’ historical development emerges: that is, an evolving, interactive relationship between individual, operational, and institutional dynamics. This evolution underlines an interpretation of Jay’s central question: is our ability to mitigate atrocities improving, and how do we interpret blips on the trend graph?

Mapping Dehumanization: An Individual-Level Approach

I’ve discussed the individual-level analysis of atrocities perpetration before, but its historical and causal elements are worth developing. An individual-level understanding of mass atrocities addresses the following question: why do individuals participate in atrocity regimes, and how do individual perceptions of social factors impact atrocities mobilization? Psychologists and, more recently, anthropologists have found methodological common ground in the study of individual-level atrocity trends. The results are hardly surprising, and confirm a broad consensus on the cognitive and societal determinants of human violence: atrocities result from cognitive processes of dehumanization (the psychologist), which manifest themselves as social myths, cultures, and histories (the anthropologist). However, lest we reduce the individual-level perspective to Goldhagenian monocausality, a bit of nuance is required: dehumanization acutely manifests itself during periods of profound social, political, and economic stress; the dehumanization context in 1994 Rwanda appears notably distinct from, say, contemporary right-wing rhetoric against European immigrant and minority populations.

If atrocities operate at an individual and societal level, how can we understand historical trends in atrocities perpetration? Steven Pinker’s much-bemoaned, much-praised Better Angels of Our Nature provides an important framework, in spite of his problematic causal explanations. To observe that violence has declined throughout modern history is, to a certain extent, an empirical fact, despite  data gaps in non-Western regions. Using the “decline of violence” data and the normative evolution of popular culture, civil society, and political institutions as key factors in the modern story of human society, Pinker observes humanity inching ever-so-slowly towards a Kantian aspiration of sustainable, if not perpetual peace. Pinker’s critical analysis of popular culture is novel, but it provides insufficient grist to demonstrate that human society is, in fact, getting nicer, more peaceable, and less conflict-prone. However, given the robust qualitative interaction between hateful acts and mass atrocities, this individual-level trend may be worth probing further.

The question is likely not, “are human societies becoming less hateful?,” but, “given the existence of social, economic, and political stresses, are dehumanization processes more significant to social, political, and ethnic fractionalization?” The first question perceives hate as an apolitical, exclusively normative entity; the second, in contrast, frames the ways in which hate might interact with its historical problematic. From a qualitative perspective, this is an easy find: public discourse might become less virulent, or the lexicon of social division more peaceable. The quantitative standpoint is, of course, more challenging: given disparities in press coverage, particularly in conflict-affected states, processes of hate-speech categorization, collection, and dissemination are harder to identify, to say nothing of the “salience” factor.

Emerging analytic frameworks, centered around “dangerous speech,” may strengthen our ability to monitor and assess historical trends in dehumanization. As historical atrocities are concerned, the speech itself is less significance than its application, and the ways in which rhetoric, discourse, and public communications have mobilized atrocity events against civilians. As with institutional approaches to conflict prediction, the speech-oriented atrocities trend model may operate more effectively at the local level, especially given the relatively nascent nature of international hate-speech/-crime reporting. Insofar as transnational media trends remain non-standardized, a contextual understanding of informal media–pamphlets, new media, oral forms of information diffusion–is necessary.

I read Patrick Keefe’s recent operational analysis of the Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel with significant interest, not simply as an insightful understanding of one of Latin America’s largest transnational social networks, but also as a nuanced, complex handling of the sub-state politics of mass atrocities. As topically-focused atrocity watchers, the atrocities prevention community has a tendency to ignore, minimize, or dismiss Mexico’s drug violence as a “different issue”; a brief survey of atrocities/R2P-focused human rights organizations demonstrates that, with the exception of the Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation, which has recently expanded its atrocities prevention work to Latin America, Mexico’s atrocity-laden violence remain entirely unaddressed.

And yet, the fact of mass atrocities persists. Violence between Calderon’s security forces and drug cartels has killed approximately 50,000 people since 2006, when the Calderon administration escalated its operations against Mexico’s organized crime syndicates; to add anecdote to statistic, instances of mass violence against civilians are particularly, creatively gruesome. Geographical evidence suggests that, far from random lawlessness, Mexico’s escalating spate of murders represents a systematic characteristic of intrastate violence: between the end of 2006 and mid-2010, seven percent of the country’s municipalities experienced 80 percent of reported murders, according to the Inter-American Dialogue. Security-force and drug-cartel violence has continued to erode popular perceptions of civilian security, and persistently undermine public confidence in Mexican law enforcement, in spite of Calderon’s public-facing, U.S.-supported counter-crime campaign.

Calderon’s security approach has yielded few positive results for Mexico’s populace, and instability has worsened, rather than improved, under his administration; in the absence of an effective interlocutor, the international community will have to wait until Mexico’s upcoming presidential transition to facilitate a shift in security, counternarcotics, and stabilization policies. With that said, Mexico’s drug violence will likely get worse before it improves; the evolution of atrocity events will, unfortunately, follow the same path. According to Greg Weeks, cartel-related violence has also metastasized: as cartel networks become more diffuse, related murders have occurred in a wider variety of Mexican municipalities. In spite of Mexico’s economic growth, its institutional capacity to mitigate the acute and structural factors of cartel violence will remain limited, absent a decisive shift in political consolidation. In the meantime,  an atrocities prevention-infused framework for conflict assessment and early warning may prove useful. A preventive approach necessitates a thorough understanding of indicator signposts: that is, how do we know when atrocities are likely to escalate, and in which circumstances?

A broad range of atrocities indicators and forecasting models have emerged over the past fifteen years; most frameworks have centered around an intent-related “genocide and politicide” classification, as articulated by political scientist and Political Instability Task Force adviser Barbara Harff. Gregory Stanton’s Eight Stages of Genocide and the UN Office of the Special Adviser for the Prevention of Genocide (UNOSAPG)’s analysis framework incorporate similar criteria, defined by an escalatory, intra-societal trend in political, ethnic, religious, or social fragmentation. More recent efforts, however, including Jay Ulfelder’s (unfinished) public early warning system and Chris Blattman’s Liberia-oriented conflict prediction research, have centered on a more general range of political institutions and indicators. The indicators to follow will use the latter approach, given ethnic fractionalization’s secondary role in cartel dynamics. Additionally, the indicators focus on Mexico’s internal politics, despite foreign drug consumption’s well-established contribution to Mexico’s illicit narcotics supply chain. In the interest of brevity, I selected two qualitative indicators, culled from Keefe’s analysis of Sinaloa operations, Mexican politics, and intra-organizational dynamics:

Corruption: As Keefe’s interviewees indicate, corruption is the primary driver of continued cartel mobilization in Mexico. As Michael Busch suggests in his recent, excellent post on organized crime and international relations theory, the Mexican state bears a striking similarity to Anne-Marie Slaughter’s “disaggregated state,” an amalgam of transnational networks, political institutions, and illicit trafficking operations. Under a “disaggregated state” model, illicit actors conduct dynamic interactions with legitimate, established institutions, seeking to wield influence within local, regional, and international political spheres. As Mexico’s corruption levels increase, drug operations expand; as the cartels’ networks emerge, bolstered by their infiltration of Mexican political and security institutions, incentives for violence–against rival cartels, as well as security forces–increase. Mexican security forces may step up their operations, capacity, and reach, but if corrupt practices continue to persist, there’s little hope of restoring basic security to Mexico’s citizens.

Cartel Fragmentation: Since 2006, instances of localized cartel fragmentation have functioned as flash-points for violent upticks, with substantial consequences for proximate civilian populations. The evolution of Tijuana’s cartel violence, as described by Vanda Felbab-Brown, provides an instructive example. The Arellano Felix cartel–or, more popularly, the Tijuana cartel–operated widely between the 1960s and early 1990s, when Mexican and U.S. security agencies began to crack down on trafficking in the Mexican border town. The cartel hit its low point in 2008, when, following its organizational demise, the Tijuana organization fragmented: one faction merged with an ally of the notorious Zetas; the other, with the Sinaloa cartel. A Tijuana turf battle ensued, due to Tijuana’s essential role as a logistical hub for U.S. trafficking operations. The cartel violence, much of which affected Tijuana’s civilian populace, served a number of purposes, not the least of which was a signaling mechanism: we’ll pick up the operational pieces, or you’ll face this level of brutality. While a manpower-heavy police operation stabilized Tijuana, Sinaloa was able to claim operational victory, securing its cartel monopoly throughout the city. Since 2010, Tijuana has encountered a measure of stability; as rogue cartel groups emerge, however, contained outbreaks of violence persist on the city’s outskirts. The lessons are scalable: Sinaloa’s operational dominance throughout Mexico will fragment, as occurs with all diffuse, networked organizations; when it does, atrocity-heavy, inter-organizational violence is likely to resume.

What am I missing? As Michael Busch observed, there’s not enough research taking place on the intersection between organized crime and international relations theory; the same applies for organized crime, trafficking operations, and mass atrocities, as Central America’s gang violence trends demonstrate. As this blog’s content demonstrates, my regional focus tends towards sub-Saharan Africa–insofar as Latin American conflict and atrocities dynamics persist, however, I’d like to diversify my regional base. Comments from Latin Americanists are most welcome.

First, a sincere apology to my readership: between final exams, my girlfriend‘s Georgetown graduation, and the first few weeks of my summer internship, I haven’t had much time to blog throughout the past month. My summer blogging schedule will be light, and I’ll stick to broader, conceptual pieces, which require summer levels of mental clarity, rather than periodic, frustrated comments on the Shortsighted Sudan Column of the Week. In the meantime, a number of excellent, young blogs have appeared on the Interwebs: Ben Brockman’s travelogue, which will chronicle his experiences as an international development consultant in Zambia; Sean Langberg’s “Tower of Babel,” which centers on critical geography, human rights advocacy, and community organizing; and, not to be missed, Adam Elkus and Dan Trombly also blog at former House-of-Exum Abu Muqawama, and have brought a youthful, insightful perspective to CNAS’ digital discussion of military strategy, disruptive technologies, and policymaking processes.

Last night, I went to see Joss Whedon’s Avengers–my second viewing, and my girlfriend’s first. The first time around, I wrote up a short review, highlighting the Marvel dialogue’s Universe-wide whimsy, Whedon’s sober, humanistic approach towards superheroism, and A.O. Scott’s infernal wrongheadedness. A full month later, I’ve been thoroughly briefed into the Whedon community–if not the fandom, per se, certainly a loose constituency of novice enthusiasts. Taking full advantage of my newfound affection, Hayes proposed a blog concept: reconcile the S.H.I.E.L.D’ counter-alien mobilization, alien military operations, and the Avengers’ unwavering commitment to civilian protection. After a series of Firefly-dependent weeks, a Serenity night, and my second Avengers viewing, Whedon’s prioritization of civilian lives, the relationship between heroism and protection in conflict, and ethical, responsible stabilization operations is evident (see, “Heart of Gold“). As the saying goes, when Hayes gives you lemons, make Mudder’s Milk:

The emergence, over the last decade, of the U.S. and international atrocities prevention movement has, in some respects, both complicated and simplified our understanding of “civilian protection,” its functional purpose, and its relevance to the practice of international human rights policy. Advocates, myself included, often blur rights-related dynamics of political violence, highlighting a pervasive need for civilian-minded approaches to conflict resolution, prevention, and mitigation. However, as Hugh Breakey observes in his excellent literature review of the “responsibility to protect” doctrine and “protection of civilian” framework, civilian protection (as policymakers understand it) and R2P (as advocates perceive it) represent two distinct, if potentially reconcilable policy planes. Under R2P, civilian protection is a policy priority, subject to the myriad whims of intrastate politics: territorial control, operational dominance, and military strategy, among others; in an international-institutional context, civilian protection has encountered a broader normative evolution, ranging from ethical boundaries in warfare to humanitarian procedures. The latter’s humanitarian and peacekeeping iterations, as Breakey indicates, are notable for their veil of impartiality, which prioritizes the fact of life-saving over the complex slog of political violence.

Now, Hayes posits that, more than any other component of their warfighting approach, civilian protection underlines the Avengers’ efforts against Loki’s alien invasion. From a purely objective perspective, this statement is not in dispute. The Avengers’ operational approach is clear: a containment perimeter, which focuses the battle around an already devastated, largely evacuated Pershing Square Plaza, restricts the civilian costs of violent conflict. Instead, civilian protection’s role is more discrete: the question is not whether, but how civilian protection operates, and how the Avengers’ approach conflicts with S.H.I.E.L.D’s.

As Nick Fury’s wanton endorsement of Phase 2 weapons development demonstrates, the S.H.I.E.L.D director adopts a maximalist understanding of his agency’s mandate, particularly as concerns the complex processes of (human) civilian protection. At the beginning of the movie, Fury actively demonstrates his interest in weaponizing the tesseract, which he intends to use as a technical platform to protect the Earth’s population from divine interventions, alien invasions, zombie apocalypses, and the like (well, not the third one). As Tony Stark is quick to observe, Fury adopts a prototypical “technology rules” fallacy: if Earth’s elites can harness divine technologies, demigod hoards stand little chance of planetary takeover, civilian destruction, and mass subjugation. Of course, Fury is hopelessly incorrect, and soon finds himself before the Shadow Council, defending the strategic, operational, and morale value of the Avengers’ (mostly) human strike force. But, before he adopts a counter-Phase 2 approach, Fury’s civilian protection concept is clear: it’s about the policy, and Fury is willing to use whatever means are most effective to achieve his short-term goals, regardless of their long-term consequences. The Shadow Council’s political leadership is an inherently limiting force, restricting Fury’s civilian protection priorities to the Council’s strategic objectives.

The Avengers, generally speaking, take a different tack. On the Awesome Floating Fortress Thing, the Avengers engage Fury in a heated, Loki-infused debate over Phase 2 arms proliferation, gamma deterrence, and the effectiveness of technical approaches to civilian protection policy. The Avengers, in their extensive wisdom, recognize an essential truth of civilian protection’s implementation: sometimes, settling for an operational framework, therefore avoiding the complications of doctrine, is the best we can hope for. When, at the end of the film, the Shadow Council overrides a nuclear-armed F-35, sending a wave of tactical destruction towards Manhattan, the Avengers seek to destroy the missile, at the potential expense of S.H.I.E.L.D’s operational success. The Avengers prioritize civilian protection, but it’s the civilian protection of a peacekeeping organization, approximating the impartiality expected of UN forces. In an idealized approach, the Avengers circumnavigate the Shadow Council’s politics, ensuring civilian security within their operating environment.

There is, admittedly, a missing link, which Whedon is quick to address at the end of the film: accountability, and its inextricable role in ensuring effective civilian protection policies, operational procedures, and norms. In much of the Marvel Universe’s historical narrative, the Avengers function as a standby peacekeeping force, with a charter to boot. In Whedon’s film, the Avengers are an ad-hoc team, mobilized outside of the formal institutional framework of an accountable organization. S.H.I.E.L.D is depicted as a covert initiative, with few oversight capabilities. However, particularly in the context of superheroism, accountability remains a persistent challenge, and one which should underline the Avengers’–and our–perceptions of responsible civilian protection approaches.

Gerard Prunier, who, in another life, penned a decent history of Sudan’s Darfur conflict, has published a Luttwakian op-ed in today’s New York Times, calling on the international community to “give war a chance” in Sudan. His argument is a thinly veiled case for supporting South Sudan’s mobilization against Khartoum, and is predicated on the overarching, exclusive preferability of the National Congress Party’s imminent combustion:

The status quo is not working, regardless of what American and United Nations officials might believe. Mr. Bashir recently referred to the black leaders of South Sudan as “insects” and insisted that Sudan must “eliminate this insect completely.” For those who remember Rwanda and the racist insults hurled by Mr. Bashir’s janjaweed militias during their brutal attacks in Darfur, his vile words should be a wake-up call. Indeed, without some moral common ground, “negotiations” are merely a polite way of acquiescing to evil, especially when one’s interlocutors are pathologically incapable of respecting their own word. And in the case of a murderer like Mr. Bashir, there is no moral common ground.

Now, Prunier’s right, on a couple of points: the status quo isn’t working, and Khartoum’s rhetoric against civilian populations in South Kordofan, Blue Nile, and South Sudan has added an additional layer of worrisome intent to the mix of interstate conflict. And, Sudan’s border conflict with South Sudan is posing untenable internal challenges for Khartoum’s stability, but not for the reasons Prunier outlines; the popular consequences of Khartoum’s jingoism are less destabilizing than the persistent threat of security-sector defection, which has eroded the regime’s civilian-sector capacity. Between oil production and export restrictions, the diversion of domestic resources towards military mobilization, and the political costs of fighting a four-front, varied-intensity conflict (Darfur, South Kordofan, Blue Nile, and South Sudan), Sudan’s economy–and with it, Khartoum’s last shreds of domestic legitimacy–is hemorrhaging. So yes, unfettered violence is the way to go, if your panacea-of-the-day happens to be regime change.

Unfortunately for advocates of continuous conflict, both Khartoum and Juba recognize the domestic costs of all-out escalation, and are doing their darndest to ensure that the post-Heglig violence remains below the threshold of maximal instability. Racial bias and political discrimination aside, Khartoum’s domestic incentives for conflict with South Sudan remain constant: an external threat allows the regime to consolidate internal unrest, mitigating popular and elite dissatisfaction. However, as Lesley Warner recently observed, the domestic politics that animate the Khartoum-Juba conflict are the same politics that will prevent its escalation to Prunier’s “point of no return.” Of course, the immediacy of Sudan’s humanitarian crisis–particularly in the border states–makes the human distinction between gradual, sustained escalation and all-out conflict difficult to identify.

Where regime change is concerned, the limited utility of spontaneous, unmanaged political transitions is a conflict resolution cliché, particularly under a “sustainable peace” metric. As Luttwak does, advocates will point to Rwanda, willfully ignoring the grave humanitarian consequences of Kagame’s immediate post-genocide incursions into Zaire’s eastern provinces. In Sudan, there are, of course, indications that the spontaneous, violent fall of the Bashir regime would mean fewer atrocities, but the prospects for an inclusive, post-NCP governance framework are far from certain. Hassan al-Turabi’s periodic jail-time has placed the Popular Congress Party leader out of the limelight, but the Islamist leader remains poised to serve as a kingmaker between the Khartoum hardliners and the Sudanese Revolutionary Front. Without a deliberative, representative process of constitutional development, managed political transition, and negotiated settlement, Sudan has little hope of marginalizing the corrosive influence of hardliners within a post-NCP framework. There are plenty of ways in which Prunier’s vaguely-defined “Sudanese Spring” could manifest itself, and the most likely ones don’t involve a sweeping process of liberal democratization.

A better, more sustainable solution has emerged from Sudan and South Sudan’s technically-savvy middle-class, many of whom experienced the disastrous human consequences of the North-South civil war, which was given many chances. Under the umbrella of the #newSUDANS hashtag, Sudanese and South Sudanese civil society are engaging the unified vision of former SPLM leader John Garang, promoting a normative narrative of social dynamism, political savvy, and economic vibrancy. Rather than focusing on the moral bankruptcy of Bashir, it may be worth empowering new actors, new generations, and new voices, in order to encourage a responsible process of conflict resolution in the two Sudans.