Debating Ideas reflects the values and editorial ethos of the African Arguments book series, publishing engaged, often radical, scholarship, original and activist writing from within the African continent and beyond. It offers debates and engagements, contexts and controversies, and reviews and responses flowing from the African Arguments books. It is edited and managed by the International African Institute, hosted at SOAS University of London, the owners of the book series of the same name.
African Arguments is publishing a three-part series on the unfolding situation in South Sudan. Part one looks at the dynamics of the current conflict. Part two considers whether the current conflict spells the end of the peace process, the role of the Ugandan forces, the consequences of the war in Sudan on South Sudan, and the politics of succession. Part three considers what is likely to happen next, and possible policy responses from the UN and the diplomatic community.
In late 2024, Kiir's regime began military campaigns in three states: Western Equatoria, Western Bahr el Ghazal, and Upper Nile. All three states have experienced multiple government offensives since the signing of the Revitalised Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in the Republic of South Sudan (R-ARCSS) supposedly brought an end to South Sudan's civil war (2013-18). In all three states, offensives have been conducted by opposition commanders that defected to the South Sudan People's Defence Forces (SSPDF), and who were then used to attack their erstwhile colleagues (Joseph Dongo in Western Bahr el Ghazal; Ochan Puot and Johnson Olonyi in Upper Nile; and James Nando in Western Equatoria). Since the signing of the R-ARCSS, Kiir's regime has used militias to fight its battles, rather than an unpaid and demoralized SSPDF.
All three states had governors that were part of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army-in Opposition (SPLM/A-IO), and all three states contained opposition military forces. In theory, under the terms of the security sector reform (SSR) provisions of chapter two of the R-ARCSS, both the SSPDF and the SPLA-IO were to join a 'Necessary Unified Force' (NUF): a national army composed of all the belligerent parties that fought the South Sudanese civil war. There proved to be nothing necessary about the NUF. The SPLM/A-IO sent recruits to cantonment sites, where they wasted away without food or wages, as Kiir's regime strategically underfunded the SSR process. Instead of committing its forces to be part of the NUF, Kiir's regime built up militias outside the ambit of the peace agreement, in violation of the R-ARCSS.
Justifiable opposition suspicion of the government in Upper Nile and Western Bahr el Ghazal meant that the rump of the SPLA-IO forces in these states remained outside the NUF cantonment sites. As of mid-2024, the three states contained the vast bulk of actual armed opposition fighters in South Sudan, aside from a few SPLA-IO cantonment sites in Central Equatoria. All the forces in these states are nominally under the control of Riek Machar, the leader of the SPLM/A-IO. That formal unity hides the fact that the SPLM/A-IO was never a coherent entity, and since the signing of the R-ARCSS in 2018, Machar's support has collapsed across the country. In Western Equatoria, Alfred Futuyo Karaba, the former governor - who was unilaterally dismissed by Kiir in February 2025 in an abrogation of the peace agreement - has no loyalty to the SPLM-IO, which he used as vehicle for his own communitarian interests, just as he had used the Arrow Boys. The Nuer 'White Army' in Nasir has long complained that the communities from which it is drawn have been abandoned by Machar, who is seen as having only made self-interested appointments to government positions from a narrow coterie of advisors and family members. Popular discontent with Kiir's regimes in the three states cannot be reduced to a simplistic picture of the SPLM/A versus the SPLM/A-IO.
The proximate cause of the conflict that is occurring in the three states in 2024-25 is checkpoints. This war for checkpoints is rooted in the political economy of South Sudan. In a country without productive forms of industry, economic power depends on two things: (1) controlling the country's extractive industries, including the gold mines of Eastern Equatoria and Western Bahr el Ghazal, and (2) controlling networks of circulation, such that armed actors can extract taxes and levies from flows of people and things. Checkpoints, along with taxation at national borders, are primary sites for this mode of predation. Both humanitarians and Western diplomats have frequently asked for the removal of the checkpoints which pockmark the country, and that provide a source of income to otherwise unpaid soldiers. You should be careful what you wish for. In 2024, Kiir's regime decided to remove the checkpoints. Its rhetoric was that they would remove 'illegal' opposition-held checkpoints, but in truth this was only as a means of cutting off opposition revenue-streams, and replacing their roadblocks with its own, just as it did in in Maiwut county after Ochan Puot's defection in 2019. Kiir's regime, along with the opposition, depends on illicit forms of resource extraction and taxation for its survival; it's a feature, not a bug, of the current political-economic system in South Sudan.
The SSPDF's desire to wrest control of the checkpoints away from the opposition offered local politicians and commanders the chance to reignite sectarian struggles. As ever, in South Sudan, national dynamics are repurposed to local ends. In February 2025, SSPDF forces ravaged their way through Jur River county in Western Bahr el Ghazal, burning villages, displacing civilians, and taking over SPLA-IO checkpoints. The head of SSPDF's Division 5, Gil Mangok, is a Malual Dinka from Northern Bahr el Ghazal, and the government's forces are thought of as an occupying Dinka army by the civilians of Wau, the state capital. These forces confront a divided opposition. The new SPLM-IO governor, Emmanuel Primo Okello, who replaced Sarah Cleto in November 2024, is unpopular in Jur River. The opposition's principal military commanders are either under house arrest in Wau, or else have been detained in Juba. (The fate of Abdullah Ujang and Ashab Khamis, respectively.) Nevertheless, neither the opposition forces in Bagari, 12km west of Wau, nor the opposition forces in Raga County, under the command of Musa Dakumi, have been defeated by the SSPDF, and they remain prepared to attack Division 5 if the situation should deteriorate.
In Western Equatoria, conflict this year has reignited an inter-ethnic struggle between the Balanda and the Zande. This struggle has its origins in the anger of the Avungara elite of the Azande over Futuyo's appointment as governor. Zande politicians in Juba cast Futuyo as a Balanda ethno-nationalist, setting the two communities against each other. Violence erupted in Tambura county in 2021. One of the leading figures in those clashes was the former opposition commander James Nando, who was induced to defect to the government. After the clashes, in which government forces used sexual violence and attacks on Balanda civilians as weapons of war, Nando was warehoused in Juba - one of a number of commanders that Kiir's regime has bought off and kept in storage, in case they might come in useful later. In February 2025, Nando, released from Juba, wreaked havoc in Western Equatoria. Futuyo was unilaterally dismissed from his position as governor, and fled Yambio, the state capital, while the main SPLA-IO cantonment site in Li Rangu was captured, and Zande militias controlled by Nando burned down the houses of Balanda politicians. Opposition checkpoints were indeed overrun, but only through reigniting an ethnic conflict that threatens to expand beyond the borders of Western Equatoria. Forces in Western Bahr el Ghazal are mobilizing in support of the Balanda, and there is a Zande militia in the Central African Republic (CAR), trained by Wagner, that is loyal to Nando and commanded by South Sudanese officers.
These conflicts have been overlooked by diplomats and international organizations that have fixated on the situation in Upper Nile. That conflict also began as a war over checkpoints. In 2022, a Shilluk commander, Johnson Olonyi, had used his fabled barges to attack SPLA-IO positions along the White Nile, with direct government support. His attacks earned the ire of riparian Nuer communities, which mobilized and attacked the Shilluk on the West Bank of the White Nile, humiliating Olonyi. In 2023, Olonyi had been keen to relaunch his famous barges and avenge his defeat, but like Nando, he was warehoused in Juba; both men, had, for a time, served their purpose, by instilling strife in their respective states. Two years later, in 2025, Olonyi was released from house arrest in the capital, and given a new riverine target: Nasir.
Nasir has long been an opposition redoubt, going back to Machar, Lam Akol, and Gordon Kong Chuol's Nasir Declaration of 1991. During the South Sudanese civil war, it was a centre for the SPLA-IO until a brutal occupation by the SPLA - renamed the SSPDF in 2018 - displaced much of the population. Since 2016, an SSPDF force under Majur Dak, its Duk Padiet Dinka commanding officer, had been installed in Nasir, and conducted itself as an occupying army, harassing and killing civilians. This SSPDF force was placed in difficult circumstances. It received no wages, food, or support, except for the ammunition that the soldiers sold to survive, often to hostile Nuer youth in the surrounding area. By 2024, the relationship between the SSPDF and the local community had soured to such an extent that the soldiers couldn't go fishing without someone taking a pot shot at them. As Vice-President Rebecca Nyandeng said in her speech at Dak's burial in Juba: 'If you truly loved him, you wouldn't have kept him in Nasir for more than eight years. Majur was not killed by an enemy; he died at the hands of his own people.'
The SSPDF claimed that its mission to Nasir was to replace this force. The Nuer youth of Nasir, tired of being killed, demanded Dak's troops were replaced by the NUF. James Koang Chuol, a Jikany Nuer commander who was previously part of the opposition, was tasked, alongside Olonyi, with the assault on Nasir. In a statement given in Malakal prior to the barges setting off for the Sobat, Chuol explained to the Nuer youth that sadly, all the available NUF forces had already deployed, and those left in cantonment sites had only sticks, making them unsuitable for deployment. Left unaddressed by CDR's message was why there are government forces outside the NUF, something that, per the R-ARCSS, should be impossible.
In any event, the idea that the Nasir operation was simply a regimental rotation is not tenable. Olonyi's famous barges were not full of government soldiers, but Shilluk Agwelek militia forces that had only ever been superficially integrated into the SSPDF. On the barges, the Agwelek kept aloof company with members of Abu Shoq, the Padang Dinka militia from the Ngok Lual Yak section of Baliet County that is commanded by Chol Thon Balok, the national Minister of Defence. Only six years ago, Abu Shoq had been instrumental in violently displacing the Shilluk and attacking the Agwelek. Now, the two militias were forced together to attack the Nuer. In response, the Nuer youth of Nasir and Ulang counties came together to form community self-defence forces known as the White Army. These forces typically mobilize to respond to threats. During the South Sudanese civil war, some elements of the White Army had intermittently fought with the SPLA-IO against the government, but it remains substantively independent of the opposition in Juba, and is organized at a local level, according to sectional and kin-based affiliations.
What followed was a violent farce. One barge had mechanical problems, the other reportedly suffered from a cholera outbreak. One of the attack helicopters the SSPDF deployed to Baliet county to support the operation crashed, while the other strafed Nuer community fighters in Ulang. In the end, the Sobat's water-level was too low for the barges to progress to Nasir and they humiliatingly retreated to Malakal, Upper Nile's state capital. Abandoned, the SSPDF in Nasir were quickly overrun by the Nuer self-defence forces, which emerged victorious.
Kiir's regime wasted no time in turning a humiliation into an opportunity. It blamed the SPLM/A-IO for the violence in Nasir, and arrested several leading opposition cadres, including the IO deputy head of the SSPDF, Gabriel Duop Lam, a Gawar Nuer from Ayod. Machar was placed under house arrest. The idea that Machar was in some way responsible for events in Nasir was a convenient fiction for all involved. It enabled Machar to position himself as a peacemaker who could organize Dak's safe return.
Instead, Dak was killed during a failed UN extraction. Unexplained was why the UN mission, which had entirely failed to protect civilians in Nasir, took it upon themselves to try to save those civilians' oppressor.
Since the signing of the R-ARCSS, Machar has steadily lost power. His appointments to government come from a narrow circle of friends and relatives. The Eastern Nuer largely abandoned him prior to the first extension of the peace agreement in 2022. It was then the turn of the Western Nuer to desert him. Machar was forced to witness the spectacle of Simon Maguek Gai, an unpopular SPLA-IO commander that Machar had foisted onto Unity state, defecting to the government.
In Nasir, Nuer communities had long felt that Machar had abandoned the struggle for justice for those killed in Juba in December 2013, in favour of trying to shore up his rapidly diminishing powerbase. For these communities, neither Kiir's regime nor the opposition have any legitimacy: the Nuer of Nasir have seen no dividends from this peace agreement and have continually been harassed and killed by an occupying army. In Nasir, the South Sudanese civil war did not end in 2013; it has continued into the present.
Machar's baseless assertion of control over the White Army was also useful for Western diplomats, who could focus on 'doing a deal' with the SPLM/A-IO leader, and thus pretend that the situation in South Sudan was still fundamentally a question of resolving relations between the two belligerent parties. Machar's illusions were also opportune for Kiir. Under the cover of arresting those responsible for the violence in Upper Nile - after all, he could hardly arrest himself - he detained a potpourri of opposition figures, most of whom could not be credibly links to events in Nasir, including Ashab Khamis (who is from Western Bahr el Ghazal) and Garang Ayii Akol, the Director General of Procurement at the Ministry of Defence, who is a member of the South Sudan Opposition Alliance (SSOA) from Northern Bahr el Ghazal, and has nothing to do with Upper Nile.
The idea that the SPLM/A-IO was responsible for Nasir proved the rhetorical foil for a move against the South Sudanese opposition as such. The wave of arrests has continued into the present. Anyone who speaks out against the government's actions is liable to be detained. On 24 March, after the SPLM-IO deputy governor of Lakes state, Isaiah Akol Mathiang, denounced attacks on Upper Nile, he was arrested, along with several of his associates. National ministers - including the minister of petroleum - and state ministers have also been detained. On 23 March, Machar's residence was surrounded by government forces along with armoured vehicles from the Ugandan People's Defence Force (UPDF). On 26 March, Chol Thon Balok, the Minister of Defence, alongside members of the NSS and the SSPDF, went to Machar's house and placed him under house arrest, taking away his phone, and dismissing his bodyguards.
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Many members of the opposition have fled. Ten senior military officials escaped to SPLA-IO bases in Central Equatoria, but these are not safe. On the evening of 24 March, the SPLA-IO cantonment site in Wunlit under the command of Benjamin Gore was subject to aerial bombardment. Other opposition figures have fled further afield. The SPLA-IO's spy-chief, Yiey Dak, fled first to the SPLA-IO cantonment site at Panyume, before fleeing to Akobo in Jonglei state. There the government tried to assassinate him in an airstrike, which instead struck two civilian vehicles.
These airstrikes are part of a campaign of indiscriminate bombardment of opposition forces and civilian populations which was launched by the government after its humiliation in Upper Nile. SSPDF and UPDF attack helicopters and aircraft based at the oil field in Paloich, and in Bor and Malakal, have repeatedly struck Nasir since 16 March, along with Longochuk, Ulang, and Akobo. Dozens of civilians have been killed, and tens-of-thousands have been displaced. Muhoozi Kainerugaba is the UPDF Chief of Defence Forces, and the son of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni. On 23 March he took to X to announce - in a tweet that has since been deleted - that he was 'tired of killing Nuer'. Kiir's regime's brutal military offensive, however, will not stop, and nor will Ugandan assistance. The bodes will continue to be heaped in the charnel houses of Upper Nile.
This aerial war had already been joined by a ground campaign. From 23-27 March, government forces engaged the SPLA-IO at cantonment sites outside Juba, including Wunaliet and Rejaf, and at Tonga, in Panyikang County in Upper Nile. Worse is to come. Government forces have gathered in Malakal and Baliet to begin a land offensive against Nasir, Ulang, and Longochuk counties, which will be led by the Agwelek commander Paromi Angui alongside Koang Thuok. Government militia forces will also pursue the SPLA-IO into Diel, Tonga and Fangak. Ugandan forces have moved to Bor, the capital of Jonglei, in preparation for a land campaign in the north of the state. These campaigns are top-down missions imposed from Juba. The SSPDF in Jonglei is unpaid and lacking materiel - what ammunition they have, they have sold to local Nuer youth. The Bor Dinka are more concerned with Murle raids than they are with the Lou Nuer, who over the last few years have been their allies against the raiders. The government's actions are similarly unpopular in Upper Nile, where the Shilluk community has expressed disquiet with Olonyi's Agwelek. It fears, quite rightly, that the campaign in Nasir will lead to renewed fighting between the Nuer and the Shilluk.
All over the country, we see the same spectacle: Ugandan forces and mono-ethnic militias paid off by Kiir's regime have substituted for a badly paid and demoralized SSPDF that has no will to fight for a regime entirely lacking in political legitimacy. In response, Nuer communities in northern Jonglei and Upper Nile are mobilizing young men to defend against the violent government incursions that are about to occur. The UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS), despite the most robust 'protection of civilians' mandate in United Nations history, will not protect the Nuer communities of Upper Nile and Jonglei. Only the White Army can save them now.
Joshua Craze is a writer with more than a decade of experience conducting research in Sudan and South Sudan. His essays are published in the New York Review of Books and the New Left Review, among many other publications. He is finishing a book for Fitzcarraldo Editions on war and bureaucracy in South Sudan.
