This thesis follows two equally important lines of inquiry. First, it offers a detailed account of the politics of peace negotiations in Sudan between the late 1990s and 2004, when the country's two decades-long second civil war reached a mediated settlement, but large-scale violence erupted in the western region of Darfur. Second, it proposes a new approach to studying peace negotiations. By analysing how key ideas that constitute peace negotiations institutions are contested, this thesis demonstrates how the politics of peace negotiations go far beyond the parties' bargaining at the negotiating table to include the actions of, and effects upon, a wide range of actors seeking to shape or reshape the 'negotiating table' itself. In order to examine peace negotiations in this way, close attention must be paid to how battles over peace take on increasingly institutionalised and discursive forms, while at the same time the communicative and coercive dimensions of political violence remain in play. These arguments are developed through a close-range empirical examination of how and why the January 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) between the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army and the Government of Sudan was achieved, and with what wider effects, including upon organised political violence in Darfur and the international response to that conflict prior to the signing of the CPA. 'Peace' in Sudan was open to being the name given to diverse possible political trajectories. Much depended on how those who prevailed in shaping the making of peace reduced these many futures to few, and then fewer still. This thesis argues that the CPA negotiations institution - constructed as bilateral 'north-south' talks to end the 'southern war' - was productive of violence in Darfur because of the way these constitutive ideas, and contestations over them, enabled and constrained political actions that fomented violence in northern Sudan.