South Sudan’s Democratic Mirage

In December 2024 South Sudan was scheduled to hold elections for the first time. They would have finally given its citizens a chance to pass judgment on the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A), which had fought a twenty-two-year-long civil war against the Sudanese government and then been in power in South Sudan ever since its secession in 2011. In the run-up to the vote, the SPLM held rallies up and down the country for Salva Kiir, the incumbent president, whose main opponent was one of his vice-presidents, Riek Machar.

The two men had fought on opposing sides of the civil war that broke out in the newly formed country in 2013. It began as a struggle between elites over control of the SPLM, as Machar led a rebel faction against Kiir. But the conflict rapidly took on ethnic dimensions. Kiir’s militia forces—recruited from his own ethnic group, the Dinka—went house to house in Juba, South Sudan’s capital, slaughtering civilians from the Nuer, the group to which Machar belongs. Both sides inflamed local conflicts among South Sudan’s sixty-four ethnic groups as the country split into a series of warring militias. The remnants of Machar’s forces were comprehensively defeated on the battlefield. The peace agreement, ratified in 2018, was a negotiated surrender that Kiir signed under regional pressure. It enabled Machar to return to Juba as a vice-president, but power remained in the hands of Kiir’s confidants. With Machar’s position weakened, his support around the country collapsed.

Under the terms of the 2018 agreement, elections had originally been scheduled for 2022. The UK, the US, and Norway—the three countries in the Global North with the most investment in South Sudan, collectively known as the Troika—bemoaned the lack of preparation over the next four years and blamed the South Sudanese government for its lack of political will. In truth, Kiir had mastered the art of tajility, an Anglo-Arabic word from tajil, or “delay” in Arabic. As the scholar Alex de Waal has noted, procrastination is a productive political strategy in the Sudans.¹ Exhibit A was a proposal for a unified national army that, under the terms of the 2018 agreement, was to be formed from rebel and government forces. Kiir relegated the rebel troops to inoperative training camps and withheld food and medical care. I visited several of these camps in 2019, only to be greeted by emaciated soldiers who were barely strong enough to pick up a gun, let alone fight. The rebel forces blamed Machar for the delays, and there were mass defections to the government. Kiir gained much by doing nothing. In 2022, when elections were supposed to be held, Kiir announced that they would be postponed for two years.

By 2024 the situation had changed. Kiir was now prepared to consolidate his victories on the battlefield by vanquishing Machar at the ballot box. Yet preparations for the elections still lagged. A census had not been conducted since South Sudan became independent. Although electoral bodies had been formed, they had received no funds, and so opposition political parties couldn’t register—in one case, because there was no paper for the printer.

The government blamed an economic crisis. In February 2024 South Sudan’s major oil pipeline went offline—the war in Sudan had prevented maintenance crews from addressing a rupture—taking with it approximately 90 percent of state revenue. Most government salaries haven’t been paid in more than eighteen months, and the South Sudanese pound lost 72 percent of its value against the dollar in 2024—one of the highest rates of inflation in the world. “Even if I were paid,” one bureaucrat explained to me, “my monthly salary wouldn’t buy a kilo of goat.” Government employees customarily leave the office at lunchtime to find other ways to get by. Corruption is endemic.

Of course, the pipeline shutdown occurred almost a year before the scheduled date of the elections, and Kiir’s regime had had six years to prepare for them. “The real problem,” one politician told me, “is that ministers fear public anger and the loss of their positions.” Sinecures in government, often given to apparatchiks without any popular legitimacy, come with access to funds and opportunities for corruption. The opposition also opposed elections. Machar was only too aware that he would be wiped out in an electoral contest. The intricate 2018 power-sharing arrangement, which gave each party a certain number of seats in government until elections were held, at least kept him and a coterie of friends and family members in political positions. No one, other than Kiir, had anything to gain from an election. Rather than come out against the vote—which would have risked diplomatic censure from the Troika—the ruling elite strategically underfunded the electoral process. In September 2024 Kiir bowed to the inevitable and delayed the elections for two more years.

The postponed vote is only the most newsworthy example of state failure in South Sudan. Over 70 percent of the population, some nine million of its citizens, will need humanitarian assistance this year. Famine is afflicting the areas to which almost a million people—both refugees and returning South Sudanese—have fled from the war in Sudan. Severe flooding in the Greater Upper Nile region has compounded the humanitarian crisis, as has Trump’s recent suspension of funding for aid agencies, which are now forced to triage between the hungry and the starving.²

The government doesn’t even provide security. Politicians in Juba fight for position by raising militias to attack one another’s territories in the country’s peripheries. No one expects the security services, which have looted and engaged in widespread sexual violence for a decade, to protect them. Deprived of their salaries, soldiers sell their weapons to ethnically organized militias, which have become the South Sudanese people’s main means of defense against both the government and other armed groups. This year Kiir’s regime has deployed helicopter gunships in Jonglei and Upper Nile states to attack armed Nuer youth who were resisting assaults by government forces. Fourteen years after independence, the country has become a patchwork of competing communities.

Elites profit from this disorder by looting and extorting money at the checkpoints that pockmark the country. But in the last few years, Kiir’s inner circle has narrowed, and funds for the political class have dried up. While elections were still in the offing, Kiir was careful to keep his rivals close. Once the extension was announced, he cleaned house. On October 2, 2024, he abruptly removed Akol Koor Kuc—the head of the Internal Security Bureau of the National Security Service (NSS), the most powerful military force in the country—along with the commander of the presidential guard, amid rumors that the two men had been plotting a coup. Tension turned into gunfire on November 21, when Kiir attempted to move Kuc out of a fortified compound near Juba’s airport. Friends sent me videos of a sky lit up by tracer fire. The scenes recalled the beginning of the civil war in 2013. Yet Kuc was soon relocated to another compound and placed under house arrest; the coup attempt many feared never came to pass.

Kiir is seventy-three years old and in poor health. At international conferences he often rambles and misidentifies other heads of state, and he has been caught on video pissing himself in public. But for all his frailty, Kiir has constructed a system in which he is indispensable. Appointments and firings come at a frenetic pace; the head of the NSS has already been changed twice since Kuc’s dismissal. This rapid turnover keeps other politicians uncertain and dependent on Kiir’s favor, dividing both the opposition and the SPLM. Their weakness is Kiir’s triumph but South Sudan’s disaster. Without him, the country is likely to fall back into civil war.

For the foreign dignitaries who poured into Juba on July 9, 2011, to celebrate South Sudan’s declaration of independence, this was not the plan. There were almost no paved roads in the world’s newest nation, but there was plenty of optimism. In 2005, with the end of the Second Sudanese Civil War, the south had been given regional autonomy, pending a referendum on secession. Over the next six years it received billions in donor funds, in addition to plentiful oil revenue. By 2008 it had a larger economy than regional heavyweight Uganda and could count on international goodwill, particularly from the American government, which had done so much to bring about South Sudan’s creation.

I first arrived in Juba during this period. The city had become an unlikely boomtown, full of East African laborers seeking their fortunes in an economy inflated by a wave of new foreign inhabitants. These interlopers came in three flavors. Humanitarians were there to provide services to a population immiserated by the war. Diplomats installed themselves in embassies and planned to make a state. For that, they needed the third group: youthful consultants, often without language skills or knowledge of the region.

There was much to be done. Shortly after independence, a World Bank report argued that “as a new nation without formal institutions, rules, or administration accepted as legitimate by society, [South Sudan] must build its institutions from scratch.” Consultants offered what were often cookie-cutter plans for budgetary responsibility imported wholesale from other post-conflict countries. One UN master plan for constitution building that was presented in a meeting I attended kept referring to Sierra Leone. The consultant had simply copy-pasted his report.

The idea that South Sudan was a blank slate freed the consultants from having to learn too much about it. Not discussed, for instance, was the fact that the displacements and destructions of the war had upended communal forms of agriculture and undermined agreements between the country’s pastoralists, leaving much of its population politically and economically insecure. Or that South Sudan was a country full of militia forces, many of which had fought against the SPLA during the Second Sudanese Civil War and few of which were interested in the state-building schemes of youthful foreigners. Their ignorance proved convenient for Kiir, who could keep the donor funds flowing while obscuring his system of rule. In a speech shortly after independence, he declared, “The Republic of South Sudan is like a white paper—tabula rasa!”

In fact, the techniques of Kiir’s reign—from the use of foreign resources to dominate local groups to the outsourcing of violence to militias—have long histories. Southern Sudan has experienced a series of violent state incursions since its integration into the global market in the nineteenth century. The Turco-Egyptian conquest of Sudan (1820–1824) by Muhammad Ali, the khedive of Egypt, was motivated by Ali’s need to find slaves for his army. The slavers who raided southern Sudan imposed a policy of divide and rule, striking deals with some local communities, which would then attack others. From the beginning, the state was an emissary from elsewhere.

The British, who took control in 1898, governed indirectly. They classified the region’s many ethnic groups and ruled by appointing chiefs, who used their guns and resources to go after rival communities. There was also plenty of resistance, as the anthropologist Naomi Ruth Pendle shows in her book Spiritual Contestations: The Violence of Peace in South Sudan. The pastoralist Dinka and Nuer peoples, which today constitute South Sudan’s two largest ethnic groups, were rigorously egalitarian and fought back against a thirty-year British campaign of violent suppression.

The colonialists were bewildered by the diverse forms of political organization they encountered, which included monarchies and multiethnic anarchist communities formed by those who had fled slavery. The British wanted precisely ordered groups, each with its own clearly delimited territory—a far cry from the flexible borders and shifting forms of identification that actually existed. Their solution was to separate the “Arabs” from the Africans: there was to be Islam and development in the north and Christianity and pastoralism in the south. The differences were stark. Colonial legislation prevented traders from coming south, and while the north had political parties and agricultural schemes, southern Sudan was left relatively untouched.

The first civil war started in 1955, the year before Sudanese independence. It was already clear that Arab politicians in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, would treat the south as a periphery to be exploited. The southern rebels were divided along ethnic lines and united only in their hatred of the north. The war rapidly reached a stalemate. Then a peace agreement, signed in 1972, promised regional self-rule and development in the south, inaugurating a decade of optimism. Crushing international debt, recklessly borrowed by Sudanese president Gafaar Nimeiri, meant little was done. The south continued to be undeveloped by the north. At the end of the 1970s Nimeiri tried to create a new administrative region called—ironically—Unity, in an effort to bring resource-rich areas of the south under his control. The measure was deeply opposed by southern politicians. An attempt to drain the wetlands of southern Sudan to irrigate agricultural projects in the north proved to be a crucial breaking point, and in 1983 the country returned to war.

That year a group of soldiers who had been rebels in the first civil war mutinied in southern Sudan, inspiring other desertions. These rebels fled to Ethiopia, where they formed the SPLM/A. (The SPLM is the political party, the SPLA the armed wing.) The first SPLM manifesto, written by its charismatic founder, John Garang, was stridently Marxist, and clear-eyed about the country’s problems:

Differences between North and South Sudan arising from levels of socio-economic development, nationality, culture, and religion were aggravated during the colonial period as a matter of policy.

The solution, according to Garang, was to “take the town to the village.” This meant struggling not for a separate South Sudan but for the transformation of the entire country, developing the rural hinterlands that had previously been exploited. It was a message that resonated across much of the region, though some parts of southern Sudan, including Equatoria, looked askance at what they saw as a Dinka movement, given the preponderance of that group’s commanders in the SPLM/A.

For much of the second civil war the rebels’ opponent was Omar al-Bashir, a military officer who took power in a coup in 1989. Rather than coax a reluctant Sudanese army to fight, he outsourced the conflict, arming first Arab nomads and then southern groups and encouraging them to loot in lieu of payment for their services. The war had given the Sudanese government the chance to finally create Unity state in the northeast of southern Sudan. There, Bashir sponsored Nuer militias to clear the population from recently discovered oil fields and attack the SPLA. While some Nuer had joined the rebels, others were only too happy to be given arms to fight them. The Nuer and the Dinka had long raided livestock from each other, and young Nuer cattle guards used Bashir’s support for their own goals, such as acquiring enough cows for bridewealth payments. In response the SPLA armed Dinka cattle guards, who wanted to defend their communities against the Khartoum-backed militias but also had the same kinds of local aims.

For all the SPLM’s Marxist rhetoric, as Paula Cristina Roque notes in her new book Insurgent Nations: Rebel Rule in Angola and South Sudan, the SPLA tended to act like an occupying army, looting and displacing populations. In 2023 I met residents of Yambio, a town in Western Equatoria, who told me that the SPLA was dominated by Dinka commanders who had pushed them off their land. The problem, as Peter Adwok Nyaba, a noted South Sudanese academic and the author of The Politics of Liberation in South Sudan, once put it to me, is that really there is only an SPLA, with no M.

The SPLA obtained its guns from the Marxist regime in Ethiopia known as the Derg and supported itself by diverting humanitarian resources. The Nuer militias opposing them got their guns from Khartoum. But the basic logic was the same on both sides: military leaders positioned themselves atop a war economy, looting and controlling grain and cattle markets. The conflict resulted in an enormous transfer of wealth from southern Sudan’s poorest people to an emergent class of warring elites.

The Derg regime fell in 1991 as the collapsing Soviet Union withdrew its support, and the SPLM/A, deprived of armaments and of rear bases in Ethiopia, fractured. Its most prominent Nuer commander, Riek Machar, led a breakaway faction that demanded not a revolution in Khartoum but independence for South Sudan. Bashir supported this new faction, seizing the chance to set his enemies against one another. Though Machar later rejoined Garang, the fracture left deep rifts in the SPLM/A that would reemerge after independence.

Garang dropped Marxism and recast the civil war as a conflict between Muslim slavers and embattled Christians, or else the struggle of an African people for self-determination, shifting his rhetoric—and the Bible verses he employed—to suit his audience. In Washington, an unlikely coalition of liberal activists and evangelical senators formed to support the SPLM.

Garang’s converts had to wait a few years before they got any traction in the White House. In the 1990s Sudan had provided a safe haven for Osama bin Laden, and with the onset of the so-called war on terror, Bashir cast an anxious eye at the fates of Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2003, when a rebellion broke out in Darfur, Bashir’s genocidal response put him in the spotlight. Caught between two insurgencies, and under American pressure, he reluctantly signed a peace agreement with the SPLM in 2005, after an estimated two million people had been killed. A revolution in Sudan was out of the question. What was instead agreed to were the lower-hanging fruits of regional autonomy and a referendum on secession. The rebels were about to enter government.

Though the SPLM was now in charge, its basic calculus remained the same, with different inputs. Instead of using guns and humanitarian aid to build fiefdoms in rural areas, the movement’s leaders stayed in Juba’s hotels and availed themselves of the donor funds and oil revenue that now flowed to the southern government. This consolidated the emergence of an elite class dependent on external money rather than local legitimacy. Southern Sudan was soon plunged into a series of corruption scandals.

It’s easy to turn this story into a morality tale about greedy African politicians, but corruption was necessary for the regime’s survival. Salva Kiir, who came to power in 2005 after Garang died in a helicopter crash, was focused on achieving South Sudanese independence, which was by no means guaranteed. Fearing that Bashir would use the Nuer forces he had employed to fight the second civil war to disrupt the referendum, Kiir bought them off with cash and positions in the SPLA. The army was transformed into a series of militias, loyal only to their commanders. The security sector soon ate up South Sudan’s economy, constituting 40 percent of government expenditures by 2008, and tens of thousands of ghost soldiers were conjured up to supplement their commanders’ incomes. It was a far cry from the budgetary responsibility the consultants envisioned, but it was the price to be paid for leading southern Sudan.

Kiir, a taciturn man who lacks Garang’s charisma, quickly eliminated internal dissent and suppressed the emergence of new political parties. Elections in 2010 were a harbinger of the coming conflict. Communities like the Shilluk, who largely voted against SPLM candidates, were targeted by brutal campaigns of repression. Taban Deng Gai, who won a disputed election to become the governor of Unity, used his position to wage war against his political rivals, burning villages and killing civilians under the cover of a disarmament campaign. In Upper Nile, officials gerrymandered new counties to reward their constituents with political offices and pushed development NGOs to build projects in the newly created areas and not in opposing communities. From the perspective of the diplomats bankrolling these activities, a state was being built: borders were being demarcated and county commissioners appointed. For those living in southern Sudan, the situation looked very different. In many places the period after the signing of the 2005 agreement was more violent than the second civil war. The formation of the state was tearing the nation apart.

Still, no one wanted to return to domination by Khartoum, and in January 2011, nearly 99 percent of the people in southern Sudan voted to secede. By the next year Kiir felt increasingly threatened by his political rivals, and he worried that Machar was plotting with some of the SPLM elite to take over. Tensions within the SPLM’s political bureau offered him an opportunity. In December 2013 he claimed his opponents were plotting a coup, swiftly arrested many of them, and forced Machar to flee.

The ensuing conflict took up the unfinished business of the second civil war. Though Kiir had absorbed Bashir’s Nuer militias into the army in 2006 they were never fully integrated and remained loyal to their old commanders. Mistrustful of these new forces, Dinka generals had built up their own ethnic militias, drawn from the same cattle guards that the SPLA had used a decade earlier. The war in 2013 set these forces against each other. On one side of the conflict were the SPLM/A and the Dinka militias, funded by the country’s oil wealth. On the other were Machar and his commanders—almost all of whom used to be part of Bashir’s Nuer militias—who called themselves the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army-in-Opposition (SPLM/A-IO).

Though the war had an ethnic dimension, it would be a mistake to overplay it. Using his financial dominance, Kiir bought the allegiance of some Nuer commanders, while some Dinka generals opportunistically joined the SPLM/A-IO in an effort to displace local rivals. The war was primarily a fight to control the patrimonial system Kiir had built, in which violence was used as leverage for money and power.

From 2013 to 2018 almost 400,000 people died, and millions were displaced. Several major cities, including Bentiu and Malakal, were razed, their populations forced to shelter in UN bases, where they looked out over the ruins of their former lives. Rather than address the causes of the war, international diplomatic efforts focused on a bargain that would return Machar to government. The first peace agreement, signed in 2015, soon fell apart. Kiir had ratified it under heavy international pressure, and his political base had always opposed the deal; they were winning, and they saw no reason to allow Machar back into the fold. The agreement meant Machar returned to Juba as vice-president, along with his bodyguards, thus forcing two hostile armies to occupy the same city. In 2016 fighting broke out, the SPLA looted almost $30 million worth of food and equipment from the World Food Programme, and Machar once again fled the capital. The SPLA gave chase, looting and pillaging their way through the southern region of Equatoria, many of whose inhabitants then joined the SPLM/A-IO or formed rebel movements of their own. Conflict spread across the country, with government troops repeatedly razing SPLA-IO positions and punishing communities they believed to be loyal to the opposition. Many commanders left the SPLA-IO after these defeats and created their own movements, as the conflict fragmented.

For Kiir and his allies, the war was an opportunity: between 2005 and 2013 the government had used the tools of the state to push people from their land; now they completed the process, carrying out the ethnic cleansing of some groups, including the Shilluk and the Kakwa, who fled to Sudan and Uganda, respectively.

The war returned its participants to a mode of life they knew all too well. Commanders reopened airstrips last used during the second civil war and waited for the aid to flow in. Machar again asked Khartoum for matériel—but this time without much success. After the second civil war, Kiir had appointed a number of Bashir’s old advisers to be part of the government. They helped him forge an agreement with Khartoum, guaranteeing Bashir oil transit fees in exchange for not supporting Machar.

Increasingly Kiir’s regime came to resemble that of his old opponent in the north. Like Bashir, he used militias to fight wars while holding on to power in the capital by playing rivals against one another. In June 2024 a young man from the state of Northern Bahr el Ghazal, on the Sudanese border, told me, “I sometimes wonder why we fought for so long only to be ruled by the very people we fought against.” In a meeting in Nairobi this year, one South Sudanese politician quipped, “We have two Sudans, but both ruled by the same system.”

By the time the peace agreement was finally signed in 2018, Machar’s forces had been roundly defeated across much of the country. He was reappointed as vice-president—now one of five—as the government and its payroll grew to accommodate all the different rebel groups. The agreement also committed the parties to unifying the army, creating democratic institutions, and holding elections.

While the peace agreement guaranteed the SPLM-IO control of some government ministries, these proved a hollow prize. The minister of petroleum, for instance, found himself isolated from the real decisions about oil revenue, which were increasingly made by a politician, Benjamin Bol Mel, who is close to Kiir’s family and subverted the petrodollars into an opaque “oil for roads” program that built almost no highways but allowed Kiir to amass a substantial fortune.

The violence of the war continued under a different name. Kiir armed rebels who had defected to his side, and who then attacked the SPLA-IO in clashes that his regime called inter-opposition fighting, as a means of denying responsibility. In 2022 one of his militia leaders, Gordon Koang Biel, attacked Leer, Machar’s home county. Biel’s forces looted humanitarian resources, raped women and girls, and decapitated men. Some of the survivors were forced to carry the heads. While some countries sanctioned Biel, other Western donors said little, concerned that critiquing Kiir’s regime might disrupt the implementation of the peace agreement. Instead a multidonor trust fund—supported by Germany, Canada, and Norway, among others—declared Biel a partner for peace, and even built new prisons in his county.

The politicians also had a new name for the conflicts they pursued in their home areas: “intercommunal violence.” They armed young men and set them against rival communities, in attacks that targeted villages and children, then blamed the communities themselves for the violence. When I went to Kiir’s home state of Warrap in 2021, the young men I spoke to were under few illusions. “It’s the politicians in Juba,” one told me, “that are causing all the problems here.” The UN and Western diplomats, clinging to the illusion of a successful peace agreement, turned a blind eye to the politics behind the violence. In 2021, for instance, Nicholas Haysom, the head of the UN mission in South Sudan, claimed that political violence had decreased since the signing of the agreement in 2018, because the clashes scarring the country were due to intercommunal conflict. He then appealed to the South Sudanese political class to intervene, as if they were not the very people creating the disorder.

This year’s events have made it harder than ever to pretend the peace agreement is a success. Kiir’s regime has continued its assault on Nuer areas of the country, using attack helicopters and air strikes to bomb hospitals and villages in the Greater Upper Nile region, displacing hundreds of thousands of people. In March Nuer youth took over a government barracks in Nasir town, leading to the death of an army commander. It was a humiliation for Kiir’s regime, but the government lost no time in turning it into an opportunity. Kiir arrested Machar, blaming him for the events in Nasir, along with scores of other politicians. While the government insists that the peace agreement still holds, the opposition is detained or in exile. Kiir’s regime has denied humanitarian aid to Nuer areas and repeatedly razed civilian settlements. The diplomatic response has been muted. The Troika has called for Machar to be released, but has said little else. In July 2025, as I was giving a briefing in Juba, one ambassador sighed and told me, “We are condemned to the peace agreement.” Outside of their cookie-cutter plans for elections, diplomats have little appetite for actually engaging with South Sudan.

The billions of dollars poured into the country have not made it richer or more peaceful, but they have allowed the SPLM to become a wealthy, unaccountable ruling class. As during earlier colonial periods, a local elite has used foreign interlopers for its own ends. One difference is that the nineteenth-century slavers were aware of the destruction they were causing, while the Western donors have ostensibly tried to build a liberal state. Another is that it is now South Sudanese elites, rather than foreigners, who are exploiting and displacing their own people.

From Kiir’s perspective, all of this is a triumph. His regime has consolidated its control of the country and fractured the opposition. With his departure, however, a civil war will begin for control of the predatory system he has constructed. The country is already in pieces, and it is unlikely that it can be put back together again.

Could it have been different? Could the international community have not enabled a dictatorship? There have been many missteps that were later critiqued within diplomatic and humanitarian circles. In 2016, after Machar fled Juba, the US assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Molly Phee, decided she was tired of Machar and backed an alternative opposition leader, Taban Deng Gai, who had no local support. The result was a disaster, as Gai razed his way through Unity. In 2021 the UN Refugee Agency participated in demographic engineering by moving Padang Dinka, at the government’s behest, into land contested by the Shilluk (who had been entirely displaced from the area by the Padang). Different decisions at these points would have avoided some of the catastrophes that have engulfed the country.

The more fundamental problem, though, is that both diplomats and development workers refused to engage with South Sudan as it actually existed, rather than the place they wished it to be. To do that effectively would have meant not a change in South Sudan but a shift in the assumptions of development consultants and Western diplomats, who are wedded to a lingua franca of state building and elections that cannot address the complexities of the country with which they are trying to engage. In attempting to build a state, they failed the South Sudanese people.