![]() Communal violence in parts of the country is running up the death count, particularly in remote rural areas. Meanwhile, groups that fought under Machar’s banner could well split off and return to conflict. The peace process requires endless maintenance by external actors, notably East African leaders, with their attentions consumed by efforts to prevent a slide back to war between the two chief factions. With the country so broken, the first challenge is maintaining and expanding upon the ceasefire. Since the 2018 peace deal, which moved forward in February 2020 when Kiir and Machar agreed to form a unity government, the ceasefire between the two main warring parties has held but the pact has accomplished little else. The resultant fighting, which has mostly taken place along ethnic lines, has killed as many as 400,000 people. Just two years after the triumphal inauguration of the world’s newest country in July 2011, South Sudan collapsed at the centre, as the rival camps loyal to President Salva Kiir and Vice President Riek Machar turned against each other in bloody combat that shattered the ruling party. While the country’s stark development needs were apparent at independence, South Sudanese and outsiders significantly downplayed its political woes, especially its ethnic cleavages. While prospects of that for now appear slim, the country’s reform-minded elites, civil society and external partners should still work toward fairer power sharing at the centre and greater devolution. They also need a revised political settlement. South Sudanese need to get through elections, which may well require some form of pre-election power-sharing pact. ![]() Moreover, South Sudan’s winner-take-all political system ill suits a country that requires consensus among major blocs to avert cyclical power struggles. Elections looming as soon as 2022 threaten to inflame tensions between its signatories. Not only could the pact collapse, but it does little to calm an insurgency in the nation’s south or local violence elsewhere. ![]() The war has quietened thanks to a peace deal, signed in 2018 by the two main belligerents. It suffered a brutal civil war from 2013 to 2018, exposing a country whose foundations were weaker and divisions deeper than its well-wishers envisioned. Fêted at birth a decade ago, South Sudan is failing.
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