South Sudan’s peace process stagnates as violence grips Greater Upper Nile region

In September 2024, South Sudan’s government postponed elections until 2026.¹ This and other violations of the 2018 Revitalized Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in South Sudan (R-ARCSS) reinforce the country’s deep divisions and continued, widespread violence.² After a devastating civil war (2013-2018), politicians, generals, and communities have lacked a unifying identity or incentive and have focused on shoring up their political power, undermining their rivals, and diversifying their economic holdings. As South Sudan’s oil fields dry up, wealth and sustenance are carved out wherever they can be found, often violently.³ The central government in Juba deprives national institutions of funding, neither state nor rebel forces are committed to integrating into a unified military, and state officials at all levels exploit their positions to fund expensive lifestyles and large patronage networks.⁴ Politicians have long plundered South Sudan’s main source of wealth, its state-owned oil company, Nilepet, to fuel their wars and wealth, and the country remains economically destitute.⁵ Across South Sudan, violence has become more geographically dispersed as armed groups have fractured. Between 1 January 2013 and the signing of R-ARCSS on 12 September 2018, there were conflict events in 718 distinct locations, compared to 1,720 between 13 September 2018 and 17 January 2025 (see maps below). Given these realities, the peace process could hardly address South Sudan’s myriad, local-level contests over borders, resources, and political positions.⁶

Greater Upper Nile region, which consists of Unity, Upper Nile, and Jonglei states, exemplifies South Sudan’s diffuse, opportunistic violence and accounts for 43% of communal militia activity since 2018. In 2024, it accounted for 49%. After decades of existential war in Greater Upper Nile, communities and leaders are mobilizing whatever forces they can to make sure they do not lose political power and wealth once the elections and peace process are formally concluded. This political-economic contest undergirds violence across several states, including deadly raids on communities and cattle involving the Bor Dinka, Lou Nuer, and Murle ethnic groups in Jonglei state; state repression between Nuer factions in Unity state; demographic engineering by the Padang Dinka against the Nuer and Shilluk in Upper Nile state; and the battle between the largely Shilluk Agwelek and Nuer Kitgwang splinter factions across all three states.

The civil war’s legacy

In 2013, South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir Mayardit and Vice President Riek Machar Teny Dhurgon plunged South Sudan into civil war as they fought for control of the newly formed state, which attained independence in 2011, and its wealth. As the head of the ruling Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), Kiir mobilized a network of ethnic Dinka largely from Northern Bahr al-Ghazal state, while Machar mobilized ethnic Nuer communities largely from Greater Upper Nile under the banner of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-In Opposition (SPLM-IO).

As Machar is from Unity state and Unity and Upper Nile states contained South Sudan’s lucrative oil fields, Greater Upper Nile became an important battleground and base during the civil war.⁷ Both factions forged alliances, enticed defectors, and collectively punished communities, leaving South Sudan fractured, militarized, and traumatized. Though SPLM and SPLM-IO signed the R-ARCSS peace deal in 2018, in reality, Kiir was largely victorious over Machar and faced little incentive to share power or build a representative democracy.⁸ Indeed, it took another two years after signing the peace deal for Kiir and Machar to accede to a unity government, all while Kiir suppressed dissent, arrested political rivals, and secured a vast economic empire for himself and his family.⁹ In this context, there has been neither resolution nor reparation for the extensive displacement, atrocity crimes, and political hostility of an essentially unresolved civil war.

Conflict dynamics in Greater Upper Nile

Since 2018, tens of thousands of South Sudanese civilians have been killed, injured, or abducted by political factions, communal militias, or criminal gangs (labels that are often used interchangeably to describe many of these groups). Unity, Upper Nile, and Jonglei states have been particular hotspots for violence both during and after the civil war. While the three states contain approximately 24% of South Sudan’s population,¹⁰ they account for 40% of all reported fatalities from political violence — over 6,700 out of nearly 17,000 combatant and civilian deaths — as recorded by ACLED between October 2018 and December 2024, with an average of 87 monthly fatalities (see graph below).

Violence in the expansive Greater Upper Nile involves myriad actors and motivations. Because the White Nile river snakes through the region, Greater Upper Nile’s flood plains and waterways provide for bountiful agriculture, fishing, pastoralism, and trade and transport.¹¹ Historically, rituals and agreements regulated the intensity and longevity of conflicts between and within clan groups over land ownership, pastoral routes, and compensation for violence and theft.¹² However, half a century of making war and attempting to forge peace in South Sudan has fractured Greater Upper Nile’s communities and their livelihoods. While the rivalry between Kiir and Machar is often framed as the key driver of South Sudan’s violence in both the 1990s and 2010s, it is merely a national-level manifestation of a nuanced process of mobilization and enrichment along ethnic lines. Political rivals, traditional leaders, and businesspeople weaponize identities through hate speech and patronage networks, mobilizing or partnering with armed youth, government soldiers, and mercenaries.¹³ These networks have pursued the connected goals of political power and financial gain by fighting over land, oil wells, cattle herds, and political offices.¹⁴

South Sudan’s predominant pastoral livelihoods have become a big business involving violent raiding and vast inequality, while militias and foreign corporations continually exploit its forests and minerals.¹⁵ Political offices are treated as personal coffers, resulting in massive, unaccounted-for state deficits and the systematic looting of development aid.¹⁶ Added to this, proxy warfare and widespread recruitment along ethnic lines during the First (1955-1972) and Second (1983-2005) Sudanese civil wars left South Sudan awash with weapons and reasons to use them, including cycles of raiding, blood feuds, and political contestation.¹⁷ As a result of these dynamics, the basic resolution of grievances or acquisition of resources has become an exercise in violence.¹⁸

Factions fight for wealth and power (2022-2024)

With historically and culturally fluid boundaries, Greater Upper Nile’s three states face similar yet discernible political, economic, and environmental pressures. In Jonglei state, ethnic Murle, Lou Nuer, and Bor Dinka have fought for years over cattle, slaves, and loot.¹⁹ In 2022 and 2023, Bor Dinka and Lou Nuer militias undertook a joint offensive in Murle lands in the Greater Pibor Administrative Area (GPAA).²⁰ Between November 2022 and February 2023, ACLED records at least 694 reported fatalities in Jonglei, including 488 in GPAA alone. In late December 2022 and early January 2023, Lou Nuer White Army forces clashed with Murle militias and depleted government forces (that soon retreated) in and around Gumuruk and Pibor towns.²¹ According to ACLED data, these battles in the GPPA accounted for over half of the offensive’s reported fatalities (see map below). Hundreds more were injured, there were multiple reported cases of sexual violence, and at least 300 people were abducted. White Army forces then transported their loot and Murle abductees to slave markets in Jonglei’s Bor town.²² Having raided their enemy’s capital despite government resistance, it became clear that the White Army, not the national or state government, was ascendant in South Sudan’s largest state.

In neighboring Upper Nile state, the Padang Dinka-dominated state government, supported by the national government, official forces, and communal militias, is engaged in complex demographic engineering and land-grabbing against ethnic Shilluk and Nuer along the banks of the White Nile. This political-economic campaign frequently involves attacks by Dinka militias or government forces against civilians living, traveling, or working along the White Nile river (see map below).²³ This engineering further manifests as a concerted campaign of settling Dinka families in Shilluk homes in Malakal town while Shilluk and Nuer communities who were displaced during the civil war remain stranded in the neighboring Malakal Protection of Civilians (POC) site, which is administered by the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS).²⁴ The Nuer and Shilluk internally displaced people (IDPs) face deprivation and contestation in the crowded, under-resourced displacement camp. In June 2023, a dispute over a water well quickly spiraled, resulting in a stabbing.²⁵ On 8 June, displaced Nuer and Shilluk clashed with small arms inside the camp. Twenty people were reportedly killed and dozens more were injured.²⁶ The camp’s Nuer then burned their shelters and marched out of the camp in protest, seeking shelter elsewhere. In some cases, they took up arms and mobilized into Nuer militias like the White Army.²⁷UNMISS, ‘UNMISS Urges Malakal PoC Community Leaders to Address Root Causes of Violence,’ 11 June 2023 As Nuer White Army youth operate across Greater Upper Nile, the Dinka government works to dominate fertile lands along the White Nile river, and displaced Shilluk seek to return to their burned or expropriated homes, this existential conflict over land and belonging shows no signs of dissipating.

In Unity state, Machar’s Nuer homeland, SPLM-IO is weakened and beset by an overbearing, frequently violent state government.²⁸ In late 2021, clashes that broke out between Haak Nuer and Dok Nuer militias in Leer county escalated into an April 2022 offensive marked by widespread sexual violence carried out by government forces and allied Haak and Jagei Nuer militias against Dok civilians in April.²⁹ Between November 2021 and July 2022, ACLED records 110 attacks or armed clashes involving these actors in and around Leer county (see map below), which resulted in over 290 reported fatalities, with 180 fatalities in April alone. Adding to this unrest, historic flooding in 2019, 2021, and 2022 has transformed Unity State. The massive IDP camp in Bentiu that houses over 100,000 people has become even more overcrowded as people have attempted to flee the floods.³⁰ Desperate inhabitants have become an important base for political support and armed recruitment by rival factions. Today, Nuer clans still vie for loot and political power at each other’s expense while Leer county remains a hotspot for attacks against civilians and widespread sexual violence.³¹

Finally, all three states are affected by a showdown between two SPLM-IO splinter factions that are facing off along the White Nile river for control of the land.³² As General Simon Gatwech’s Kitgwang armed group recruits from and operates alongside the Nuer-dominated SPLM-IO and White Army, General Johnson Olony’s mainly Shilluk Agwelek forces have government support.³³ Between August 2021, when the campaign of violence began, and October 2023, ACLED records nearly 550 civilian and combatant fatalities arising from at least 54 violent events involving these actors (see map below). During the peak of this violence in the Kodok area between August and December 2022, UNMISS and the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights reported that 258 people were abducted and 62,000 displaced.³⁴ On 27 and 30 November 2022, this Nuer coalition attacked the Aburoc IDP camp in Upper Nile state’s Fashoda county, once again displacing the camp’s entire Shilluk population.³⁵ As both a contest for local power and a proxy conflict between Juba and Upper Nile’s Nuer factions, the Agwelek-Kitgwang rift remains fundamentally unresolved and could re-escalate into violent campaigns along the White Nile.

Despite a deadly governmental offensive against the Shilluk in 2017 and ongoing Dinka colonization along the White Nile at the Shilluk’s expense, the largely Shilluk Agwelek are effectively allied with Kiir’s Dinka-dominated government in Juba against the largely Nuer Kitgwang.³⁶ This is part of a broader, post-R-ARCSS campaign whereby Kiir’s central government uses allies and community militias to carry out violence while trying to detach factions from Machar’s SPLM-IO.³⁷ This poorly hidden process frequently turns into indiscriminate violence against entire communities, as seen with the attack on the Aburoc IDP camp, while allowing Kiir and other power players to claim that ethnic, intercommunal, or local violence is wholly responsible for South Sudan’s continued insecurity. And yet, even in this proxy clash in which Kiir and Machar are supposedly no longer at war, ACLED records 100 clashes between their forces, resulting in at least 188 reported fatalities in Greater Upper Nile alone since the R-ARCSS was signed.

A stagnant peace process and continued violence

The R-ARCSS has changed many actors’ political calculus but has not brought peace to South Sudan. Much of this proxy warfare and political jostling are influenced by the prospect of elections and a post-transition government in South Sudan. The election postponement is a violation of Article 199 of the R-ARCSS, which states that the 2011 Transitional Constitution can only be amended after the Legislature is given a month to deliberate, rather than the one day that was offered.³⁸ Though one survey using random household sampling conducted between March and June 2024 found 71% of respondents across all 10 states believed South Sudan was ready for elections, the postponement is indicative of parties’ structural alienation from their formal commitments outlined in the R-ARCSS.³⁹ The postponement is unlikely to result in new violence but will likely ensure the continuation of existing violent rivalries into 2025 and beyond, typified by the gun battle that erupted in Juba in November 2024 when President Kiir attempted to arrest his influential longtime spy chief, General Akol Koor Kuc.⁴⁰ Elections would have tested whether South Sudan’s political ecosystem could withstand a contentious and repressive national election instead of relapsing into civil war.

In 2025, Greater Upper Nile will continue to be afflicted by mass displacement, poverty and hunger, environmental degradation, and tit-for-tat violence that frequently spirals out of control. As political positions and state salaries replaced, undermined, or supplemented traditional modes of authority, politicians and generals have built coalitions less with political ideology and policy plans than with paternalist networks and the promise of gaining at the expense of others.⁴¹ Sociopolitical factions rely on heavily militarized ethnic differentiation to mobilize voters, soldiers, and financiers.⁴² Contrary to narratives of anarchy and tribalism, this process reflects highly contemporary challenges of political corruption and paternalism, unregulated capital accumulation, and weapons proliferation and impunity. Indeed, the various parties in Greater Upper Nile all have their own definitions of peace and justice and often violent ways of achieving them. In a region in transition like Greater Upper Nile, both change and the status quo are costing lives.

Visuals produced by Ana Marco.

South Sudan’s peace process stagnates as violence grips Greater Upper Nile region

The civil war’s legacy

Conflict dynamics in Greater Upper Nile

Factions fight for wealth and power (2022-2024)

A stagnant peace process and continued violence

Communications ACLED

Related