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 Juba, South Sudan's capital, something is afoot. Over the last two weeks, in meetings between the very distinguished ambassadors of very concerned Western countries, a plan of action was plotted, one that seemed eminently reasonable when considered in an air-conditioned container in the EU compound, and entirely insane when spoken about in Upper Nile, if one can even be heard over the aerial bombardments.
The plan is this: get Machar and Kiir to sit down again and be friends, and get the peace agreement back on track by implementing the SSR provisions of the Revitalised Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in the Republic of South Sudan (R-ARCSS). If this plan were to work, then the violence scarring South Sudan at present would merely be a temporary detour on the road to elections and happiness. All that one needs to do to believe in this plan is to continue to believe the myth that Machar determines anything on the ground.
If one considers the R-ARCSS as a roadmap to a unified army and free and fair elections, then so far we have just been down one long detour after another.
But that was never its intention.
As set out in length in a previous Debate Ideas African Arguments piece titled: 'Death by Peace: How South Sudan's Peace Agreement Ate the Grassroots,' the peace agreement has always been a means for Kiir's regime to extend its domination over South Sudan. The political algebra of the R-ARCSS created Potemkin political parties that Kiir's regime instrumentalized, allowing it to select political candidates all the way down to the county level. Kiir's regime never had any intention of implementing the SSR provisions of the agreement. Instead, it recruited at least three division-sized forces in Bahr el Ghazal, in express violation of the R-ARCSS, induced Sudan People's Liberation Army in Opposition (SPLA-IO) commanders to defect, in violation of the agreement, and built up mono-ethnic militias across the country - once again, in violation of the agreement - while letting the South Sudan People's Defence Forces (SSPDF) and the Security Sector Reform (SSR) process, atrophy.
The peace agreement offered Kiir's regime the chance to wage war by other means. In Warrap, it has used disarmament campaigns as a mask to attack rivals. In Upper Nile, it has fragmented the opposition by buying off commanders, who then defect and attack their former colleagues. These campaigns are chalked up to 'inter-opposition' fighting despite the fact that the ammunition is supplied by the government - a classification to which Western diplomats in Juba have been only too happy to accede, as it preserves the fiction that the peace agreement is holding.
Over the last seven years, Kiir's regime has displaced populations, committed war crimes, and entrenched its control of the country. It is a war that does not say its name, but it is, nonetheless, a war. In 2022, in yet another violent government campaign against the opposition, its militias rampaged through Leer County, Machar's place of birth. The commander in charge, Gordon Koang Biel, invented a new game. He would decapitate the men and force the women to carry their heads back to his base in Koch County. While some countries sanctioned him, several Western governments, in their wisdom, chose to declare Biel a partner for peace, and built him some prisons. The peace agreement, after all, needed to be supported.
The real question is not whether this is the end of the peace process, but why the diplomatic community has spent so long pretending that the R-ARCSS is alive, when it was dead on arrival.
The R-ARCSS is an exemplary case of the failures of what John Young and Sharath Srinivasan have critiqued as 'liberal peace-making.' The agreement created an elite accord that far from empowering local democratic forces, was a means of fragmenting them, by centralizing power in Juba in the hands of political parties that substituted external support for popular local legitimacy. It gave the diplomats a roadmap, but at the cost of falsely representing the territory. Its cookie-cutter invocation of elections, which could have been taken from transitional agreements the world over, didn't take seriously the complexity of South Sudan as a one-party-state. Let us not mention that the R-ARCSS was a negotiated surrender by the SPLA-IO, after a series of comprehensive military defeats, or that Kiir's regime had no intention of repeating the errors of the 2006 Juba Agreement, which incorporated Paulino Matiep's Nuer militias into the SPLA. Kiir's regime thus had absolutely no intention of creating a national army, unless it was by forcing all the SPLA-IO commanders to defect to its side. Certain truths shouldn't be said. What is important is that even if the peace agreement was a fantasy, there was a timetable, leading to an election, and it was recognizable to the diplomatic world.
If the R-ARCSS unsurprisingly failed to bring peace to South Sudan, it is important to underline that for Kiir's regime, it was absolutely successful. The period since 2018 has allowed the regime to consolidate its control of the SPLM by exiling or killing dissident voices. The party is now a coterie of fractious politicians competing for Kiir's favour. International attention to the formal elements of the SSR process has allowed Kiir's regime to perform a three-card-monte, by building up mono-ethnic militias that he can more easily control, outside the ambit of the national army, while everyone is fixated on the R-ARCSS, despite the fact that the SSPDF is demoralized and unpaid and Kiir's regime's true military strength lies elsewhere.
The victory of his regime has come at the cost of destroying South Sudan. Far from the South Sudanese state creating the flourishing nation hoped for by many its citizens at the moment of the country's secession in 2011, state power has been built on the instrumentalization of ethnic difference. Kiir has ruled - much like his old enemy Omar al-Bashir did in Sudan - by setting communities against each other. Increasingly, South Sudanese groups regard government positions as possessions: sinecures to be guarded against rival communities. Inter-ethnic relations have frayed as groups have come to understand themselves as mini-states in zero-sum competitions with their neighbours - stances that are encouraged by politicians in the capital looking to play communities off against each other. What stability there is in Juba has been achieved only thanks to violence in the peripheries. This is disorder as a means of rule, and it has proved a durable feature of the South Sudanese political landscape. It is not an aberrance. Such violence isthe South Sudanese state. The creation of this state has destroyed the possibility of a South Sudanese nation by rending the country into fragments.
The peace agreement has now achieved everything that Kiir's regime needed it to do. Having vanquished the opposition politically, the regime is now destroying it militarily. Recent developments are not qualitatively different to what we have seen in the past. The repeated abrogation of the peace agreement and the multiple military campaigns of the present moment are not unprecedented events but absolutely par for the course for Kiir's regime.
But, for the sake of clarity, let me answer the question: Yes, The peace agreement is over.
Kiir has unilaterally dismissed the governors of Western Equatoria, Upper Nile, and Jonglei (positions that should go to members of the opposition); he has appointed an SPLM governor in Jonglei, despite the terms of the R-ARCSS, and appointed an SPLM candidate, James Koang Chuol, to govern Upper Nile; Western Equatoria's governorship remains vacant - instead, the SPLM deputy governor has taken charge. Kiir has repeatedly bombed SPLM/A-IO positions and attacked civilians. He has arrested key SPLM/A-IO politicians.
What further sign do you need from heaven in order to conduct funeral rites for a moribund peace agreement?
Will South Sudanese President Salva Kiir leave power?
Since Salva Kiir announced in September 2024 that South Sudan's elections would be delayed once more, the horizon of the country's politics has shifted. For two years, the country had eagerly prepared for elections: the SPLM held rallies up and down South Sudan, while communities engaged in complicated calculations about who would stand where, and for which position. As set out in a forthcoming Small Arms Survey paper, the electoral process was ultimately undermined not by Kiir himself, but by his coalition, whose positions - guaranteed by the provisions of the R-ARCSS - would have been threatened by a popular vote. It is the very peace agreement, in other words, that led to the effective cancellation of the elections that should have been its sine qua non. From September through December 2024, discussions among Juba's elite were dominated by questions over what life would like after Kiir. One of the most fundamental uncertainties is over what happens to the predatory political system that took shape under Kiir's reign, and which we can call Kiirism.
Kiirism is the system of rule inaugurated by Kiir's ascension to the head of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A), following the death of John Garang. It has its antecedents in the militarized forms of rule that took shape during the second Sudanese civil war (1983-2005), about which Peter Adwok Nyaba and Clémence Pinaud have written so astutely. Kiir has positioned himself atop a system that sustains itself from flows of external resources (oil from pipelines and aid from Oslo), which means that his regime is substantively autonomous from the South Sudanese population. Bank transfers from Dubai matter more to the regime's longevity than popular legitimacy in Warrap, Kiir's home state. In this system, all power flows down - commanders and politicians alike are dependent on Kiir's largesse.
We should not confuse the centrality of Kiir's power with strength. Analyses of Kiir tend to suggest that he is either a strategic mastermind that plots the downfall of his foes, or else a hopeless drunk, on death's door, easily manipulated by the shadowy forces around him. Neither of these analyses is correct. Kiir is a tactically astute politician focused on survival. Rather than build long-term plans, Kiir has found a form of rule that improvises from the uncertainties of South Sudanese politics. His genius - whether conscious or not - has been to create a system that places him at the centre, as the necessary mediating force between rivalrous coalitions, whose contours and memberships constantly change. Many of the frenetic appointments that Kiir has made over the last two years are designed to mollify different parts of his coalition; they are hedges to prevent outright conflict. Thus, though Kiir is at the centre of the system, he is not strong. The more the system is centralized in him, the more he is beholden to politicians whose constant demands he must appease - for there are no mediating institutions in South Sudan.
For most of his time in office, Kiir studiously avoided naming, or even suggesting, a successor. This represents tactical common sense: nominating someone would give his rivals something to organize against. Since September 2024 and the electoral extension, Kiir has moved to clean house, in ways that suggest his reticence might be changing. In quick succession out went Akol Kor Kuc, the spy-master general, Lual Wek Guem (Maroldit), the head of the presidential guard, Santino Deng Wol, the chief of defence forces, and Tut Kew Gatluak, the presidential security advisor. Many in Juba suggest that these dismissals were designed to clear a path for Benjamin Bol Mel to be appointed as Salva Kiir's successor.
Bol Mel is a businessman from Northern Bahr el Ghazal state who has quickly ascended within South Sudan's political elite by imbricating himself within Kiir's economic affairs. One of the principal ways that Kiir's regime gets money off-book and into-pocket is via the oil-for-roads programme, which is the single largest destination of funds in South Sudan. In theory, this programme, controlled by Bol Mel, goes toward building roads, but almost no highways are constructed, and there is no detailed financial reporting. All the funds for this program - which since South Sudan's major pipeline went off-line in February 2024 constitutes the the country's oil income - are deposited directly in the accounts of the contracted companies - all of which are tied to Bol Mel. In recognition of his role in government corruption, he was sanctioned by the US in 2017. This did not stop his growing power in Kiir's regime.
Bol Mel once served as the Chairperson of the South Sudan Chamber of Commerce, Industry, and Agriculture, as well as being Kiir's private secretary and principal financial advisor. He has become essential to the management of Kiir's family's wealth, and has shared economic interests with many members of the family, including Adut Salva, one of Kiir's daughters, and Gregory Vasili, Kiir's brother-in-law and the director-general of the General Intelligence Bureau of the National Security Service (NSS). These economic interests range from Forex to fuel, from agriculture to construction.
Since the firing of Akol Kor and Lual Wek, Kiir has moved not only to dismiss their supporters, but to appoint Bol Mel loyalists to key positions. In October 2024, he appointed Ayuel Ngor Kacgor as the new boss of Nilepet, the state oil company, and in November 2024, he removed the popular West Equatorian politician, Africano Mande, from his berth as the Commissioner-General of the South Sudan Revenue Authority, and appointed another Bol Mel loyalist, Simon Akuei Deng. Both men had previously served under Bol Mel in the Chamber of Commerce.
Though Bol Mel has no military background or prior history within the SPLM, Kiir appointed him to the SPLM National Liberation Council in March 2023; he became the First Deputy Secretary-General for Political Mobilization and Organization. In January 2025, continuing his sudden assent, Bol Mel was appointed to the board of Nilepet, and made a member of the National Transitional Council, which had previously been dominated by Tut Kew Gatluak, Kiir's former security advisor. Bol Mel's February 2025 appointment as a vice-president was one of the last administrative moves that Kiir needed to make before Bol Mel could be confirmed as his successor. When he appointed Bol Mel as a vice-president, he simultaneously removed him as an SPLM deputy secretary general, a move that enabled Bol Mel to later be appointed as the SPLM's first Deputy Chairperson, the second highest position in the party after Kiir himself, the SPLM chairperson.
It's possible that Bol Mel is indeed Kiir's chosen successor. However, it is just as possible that Kiir has no plans to leave power, and is letting Bol Mel serve his purpose, before he, like so many before him, is dismissed. Bol Mel has no real popular constituency in the country, and has been forced to take up two difficult projects: he has promised salary payments for government workers, and a bold and violent reorganization of the security sector, in a further abrogation of the R-ARCSS. A failure to deliver either of these programmes could see Bol Mel thrown to the curb.
If Bol Mel were to take power, he will face serious resistance. He is not a popular politician in South Sudan. The country's political culture remains very hierarchical, age-based, and cantered in the traditions of the SPLM/A. Bol Mel is seen as an arriviste, representative of a class of South Sudanese elites that became rich only after the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) in 2005, thanks to the inflows of capital that accompanied the establishment of a regional government in Juba. Frequently denounced for 'jumping the line' ahead of established SPLM cadres, Bol Mel is also looked down upon for his extensive self-enrichment and corruption, which beggars even the avarice of the party's old guard.
Whether Kiir is replaced by Bol Mel, or a more conservative choice from within the SPLM/A (some once whispered about Daniel Awet), there is little chance that Kiirism can continue. The system was reliant on the fracturing of the country, and the creation of private direct relationships between Kiir and individual commanders. It is not clear that anyone has the political legitimacy to continue these relationships after Kiir. Even if someone did have legitimacy, Kiirism was constructed atop a dynamic processes of fragmentation in South Sudan. This process has gone too far for anyone to put the country back together again by utilizing the same system of rule.
What is Uganda's role in the current conflict?
Museveni has long backed Kiir. In 2014, it was only the Ugandan army that stood between Peter Gadet and the capital. Since then, Uganda has expanded its commercial activity in Juba; South Sudan's capital is almost entirely reliant on Ugandan goods. Its forces have also recently displaced civilians in Eastern Equatoria, to allow Museveni's brother to build a sugarcane plantation, and, with the behest of the NSS, have moved into Boro Medina, Raga County, Western Bahr el Ghazal, where the Ugandan People's Defence Force (UPDF) is involved in gold mining. The Raga County Commissioner has called this a violation of South Sudanese sovereignty.
What this claim occludes is that it's the South Sudanese regime that has asked for the intercession of the Ugandans. The UPDF might be paid mercenaries, but that been the tactic of Kiir's regime all along. It buys commanders off and uses them to displace putatively opposition populations. Kiir's regime has created a country of mercenaries; the Ugandans just happen to be more dependable than its local allies.
In March, Ugandan forces flew into Juba to support Kiir's regime. Ugandan military equipment, including armoured personnel carriers, have been flown to Malakal for the SSPDF's ground operations in Nasir. Other Ugandan forces are moving to Bor, Jonglei state, which will be the base for Ugandan operations for a forthcoming UPDF/SSPDF operations in Jonglei and Upper Nile. On 23 March 2025, Machar wrote a letter to the UN and the African Union accusing the UPDF of being involved in air strikes in Upper Nile and Jonglei states. The UPDF has shown every intention of firmly backing both Kiir and Bol Mel in what will be a drawn-out campaign to destroy the opposition.
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Is conflict in South Sudan the result of spill-over from the war in Sudan?
The short answer is no. The long answer, of course, is complicated.
Since the Sudanese civil war began in April 2023, Kiir's regime has tried to walk a tightrope, suspended over the conflict. It is reliant on the regime in Port Sudan for both of South Sudan's pipelines. The pipeline that was suspended in February 2024 now has enough oil wells online to begin pumping once again, but there are issues inside Sudan at pumping station #4 that are currently blocking oil exports. Nevertheless, the resumption of the Petrodar pipeline is anticipated, and for this, the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) remain essential. Kiir's regime has tried to appease Abdel Fattah al-Burhan's gang in Port Sudan by agreeing oil transit fees with them, and allowing SAF to move both troops and supplies through South Sudan, via Bentiu, to its embattled army bases in South Kordofan.
Simultaneously, Kiir's regime has needed to keep the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) onside. It is the RSF that control the vast majority of the Sudan-South Sudan border, and it is with the RSF that Kiir's regime has made common economic cause. Lucrative flows of fuel head north through Northern Bahr el Ghazal and Abyei to RSF positions in Muglad and Raiq Mandalla. In Western Bahr el Ghazal and South Darfur, the RSF collaborate with the NSS and the UPDF in moving gold - from both Sudanese and South Sudanese mines - to Wau, and then onto Kampala and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Kiir's regime, facing straitened economic circumstances, has also been pulled into the gravitational field of the Emirates, similarly to other countries in the region, including Kenya and Uganda. It received a transfer from the Abu Dhabi national bank of several hundred million dollars in October 2024. Kiir's regime has not only facilitated RSF flows of goods and people through South Sudan, but has also allowed the UAE to build a 'hospital' in Madhol, Northern Bahr el Ghazal state, presumably for a role analogous to Amdjarass in Chad, which is used as a staging post for both medical supplies and materiel for the RSF. The UAE is also opening another medical 'centre' in Wau, with plans for two others along the border. South Sudan is thus deeply within the political economy of Sudan's war.
Neither SAF nor the RSF, however, have engaged in wholesale support of either Kiir's regime or its opponents. Recently, following the announcement of the RSF political charter in Nairobi, Malik Agar, the deputy chairman of the Transitional Sovereignty Council, Sudan's ruling military junta, became concerned about the alliance between the RSF and the Sudan People's Liberation Army-North (SPLA-N), and what is forebodes for his forces in Blue Nile. On 16 March, Nuer militia forces, armed by the SAF, attacked RSF/SPLA-N forces in Ulu, Blue Nile. On the same day, the RSF/SPLA-N attacked Nuer forces moving from Bout, in Blue Nile, towards Maban, after having received SAF weaponry; the attack took place in al-Yarmook, also in Blue Nile. SAF, and primarily Agar, is arming Nuer forces to function as a rearguard inside South Sudan to prevent RSF/SPLA-N movements in the border-area. Such support, however, does not extend to the White Army (which received no support from SAF during the clashes in Nasir), nor does such support extend to a mandate for regime change. Sudanese intelligence (the General Intelligence Service, or GIS) considered supporting Simon Gatwich Dual, before concluding he was too old and erratic. The GIS is in daily contact with Riek Machar, but the opposition is fragmented, fractured, and weak, and there is no credible plan to back the SPLA-IO such that it could become a real military force in South Sudan that could pose a threat to Kiir's regime. Despite South Sudan's imbrication in the conflict in Sudan, the dynamics of the country's fragmentation are fundamentally internal--enabled by outsider actors, but not determined by them.
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.
