Why the Crisis in South Sudan Does Not Need Another “Peace Agreement”

South Sudan President Salva Kiir (Photo Credit: Luis Tato/AFP)

By Jack Miles

The United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) warned on 27 February 2026 that South Sudan’s leaders are “systematically dismantling” the 2018 peace agreement. The agency warned further that South Sudan is heading toward a “full-scale war and mass atrocity crimes.” Government-backed airstrikes hit civilian areas at levels never seen since before the country’s independence. 

Since December 2025, 280,000 people have become displaced. The opposition has already declared the peace agreement null and void. The recent developments in South Sudan follow a pattern. Since 2005, the country has produced three major peace frameworks, and each has collapsed when armed elites calculated that keeping the deal cost more than breaking it. 

With 92 percent of citizens below the poverty line, South Sudan needs three structural interventions that change who benefits from the conflict. The government must place oil revenues beyond presidential control and build alternative pipelines for oil flow. Additionally, there is an urgent need to redirect peace investment from elite bargains to community processes that will actually reduce violence.

South Sudan’s conflict operates as a political marketplace. Armed actors trade loyalty for oil revenue, and peace agreements redistribute rents among those with guns. The Revitalised Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in the Republic of South Sudan (R-ARCSS) operates as an elite bargain, redistributing revenue among signatories who profit from permanent transition. 

(Credit: UN Peacekeeping)

A UN report documented $25.2 billion in opaque oil revenue since South Sudan’s independence. To maintain ultimate control over oil revenue, President Salva Kiir moved to remove Vice President Riek Machar, whom he saw as a threat to his rule. Having formally declared the R-ARCSS defunct, opposition forces have seized territory across Jonglei. Nearly ten million people need humanitarian aid, and the country is heading towards an imminent return to the civil war that killed 400,000 people. 

Whatever political party controls South Sudan’s presidency also controls its oil revenue. Oil flows through opaque channels with no institutional constraints. This represents a structural foundation for the political marketplace—a prize that makes political power worth killing for. 

The International Crisis Group has proposed depositing all revenues into a single auditable account, with commercial lenders compelled to disclose payments. This proposal is necessary but insufficient. Implementing the proposal would only redirect the competition from armed contestation over state control to political contestation over institutional allocation, which is the difference between war and politics. There should be international co-management of the account, with conditional disbursements of funds. The conditions should include the mandatory publication of expenditure on health, education, and security reforms.

The Overseas Development Institute (ODI) recommended the Timor Leste’s Petroleum Fund, specifically suitable for fragile and post-conflict settings. The Fund places all petroleum revenue in an independently managed account, subject to parliamentary oversight and a sustainable spending rule. From $205 million in 2005, it grew to $18 billion by 2021. This formulation is imperfect, as the Fund has overspent against its own sustainability targets, and its political class contests withdrawals. 

South Sudan should leverage the IMF’s 2025 Staff Monitored Programme (SMP), which calls for oil transparency reforms. It is attainable to attach a co-managed fund to the SMP as the IMF has direct fiscal leverage.

South Sudan’s fiscal system runs through two pipelines crossing an active war zone. After the damage to the Dar Blend pipeline in February 2024, exports collapsed from 160,000 to 60,000 barrels per day, and the economy contracted 23.8 percent. The dependency on limited pipelines is both a vulnerability and a political asset. An opaque pipeline is easier for elites to control than diversified infrastructure with multiple oversight points. 

South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir discussed an alternative route with Djibouti in September 2024 but never pursued implementation. Rerouting, proposed by the government in 2012, would address this vulnerability. However, it remains an idea because the current arrangement serves the political agenda of decision-makers.

An alternative route through Ethiopia to Djibouti or via the Lamu Port-South Sudan-Ethiopia Transport Corridor to Lamu would structurally distribute control over oil flow. First, it would give regional states genuine economic stakes in stability through commercial integration. Second, it would create infrastructure with residual trade value even as oil reserves deplete. The African Development Bank, the European Union, and China can fund this oil pipeline distribution project. 

What has been missing is the political framing that connects infrastructure to conflict. Pipeline diversification is a structural intervention against the concentration of power that sustains South Sudan’s political marketplace. Every year that passes without implementation maintains the system that makes the presidency worth fighting over.

Every South Sudanese peace process has assumed that buying armed elites’ compliance produces peace. The R-ARCSS allocated five vice presidencies and a bloated cabinet to faction leaders. The newest attempt at peace, building on the waning R-ARCSS agreement, the Tumaini Peace Initiative proposed adding a Leadership Council on top of it. Each round expands the patronage architecture. 

The result is a market in which violence is the entry ticket to state resources. Therefore, a rational strategy for any commander is to fragment, arm followers, and present himself at the negotiating table. 

That assumption is wrong, and there is evidence to prove it. PeaceRep’s Perceptions of Peace survey shows growing public scepticism toward national peace processes. Research on local peace agreements in the Yei, Wau, Yambio, Aweil, and Malakal regions of South Sudan shows that community-led processes, though fragile, produce measurable reductions in localised violence where national agreements do not.

South Sudan should redirect peace investment from national elite bargains to community-led processes. The UK’s Peacebuilding Opportunities Fund already operates on this logic, funding subnational conflict-resolution mechanisms and community-owned initiatives. The government should scale the Fund by pairing it with mobile money (MoMo) infrastructure that routes diaspora remittances outside state-controlled banking. Estimated at $86 million annually, MoMo gives citizens alternatives independent of the government’s direct control. 

The government should also protect press freedom to enable communities to monitor their own agreements rather than depending on international observers. The government’s duty is to protect human rights, including life, liberty, and property. When the government becomes the primary threat to all three, peace will build around it and not through it.

A co-managed revenue fund will end the presidency’s monopoly on oil revenue. An alternative pipeline will disrupt the infrastructure that concentrates power in the presidency. Redirecting peace investments to communities will change the logic of elite bargaining that has produced three failed agreements in twenty years. 

Together, these interventions transform the structure of the political marketplace rather than asking its beneficiaries to reform themselves. They would create conditions in which economic freedom would sustain peace for 12 million citizens, rather than the compliance of armed men. The people of South Sudan have waited for peace since 2005. These people deserve solutions that will benefit them, not those who profit from their suffering.

Jack is an M.Sc. student at SOAS, studying Violence, Conflict and Development, and is currently on placement with African Liberty.

Source: https://afrocritik.com/why-the-crisis-in-south-sudan-does-not-need-another-peace-agreement/