South Sudan’s conflict history begins with Anglo-Egyptian rule, which administered the south separately from the Arab, Muslim north and left it marginalized when Sudan gained independence in 1956. The central process shaping modern South Sudan was armed struggle for self-determination: the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army fought two civil wars against Khartoum, in 1955-1972 and 1983-2005, killing an estimated 2.5 million people and forging southern political identity around resistance to northern domination. South Sudan’s greatest influence on world history followed directly from that struggle: its 2011 secession, won through a referendum closing the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, created Africa’s newest state and the most significant redrawing of the continent’s borders since decolonisation. The civil war that erupted in 2013 between former liberation allies Salva Kiir and Riek Machar exposed that legacy’s limits: unity forged against a common enemy did not survive the transition to self-rule.
Throughout 2025, the South Sudan conflict combined renewed state-based fighting between the Government of South Sudan and both the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army-In Opposition and the Nuer White Army militia with extensive intercommunal violence among Dinka, Nuer, Murle and Toposa communities. UCDP recorded 1,287 battle-related deaths across the year, including 180 civilians.
The World Map of Conflict uses two complementary datasets from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) to visualise conflict per country.
The colour coding of the overview base map is derived from the UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset (GED), which contains fully verified conflict data aggregated at the country level. UCDP publishes the GED annually (typically May–June of the following year) to allow careful validation of every recorded event.
The map on this country page draws from the UCDP Candidate Events Dataset (CED), which includes the most recent reported events and provides a near-real-time overview of conflict developments. Because these events are still under verification, the data should be considered preliminary.
Historical Lenses
To understand South Sudan’s conflict history, it is first important to understand what kind of country it is. Historians often explain the same country in different ways depending on what they believe are the main forces driving history. Each historical lens below offers a different, evidence-based interpretation of the country’s development.
The interpretation most widely accepted by historians, based on mainstream historical research and university scholarship. It reflects broad areas of agreement while acknowledging where historians disagree.
A note on borders and names: South Sudan is Africa’s youngest country, created in July 2011 when the southern third of Sudan voted almost unanimously to secede after decades of civil war, and it should not be confused with Sudan itself, the larger country immediately to its north. The border between the two is only partly settled: the oil-producing Abyei area is claimed by both and has never held the referendum promised to decide which state it joins, and a further stretch of the frontier, including the disputed Heglig oil field, has at times drawn the two states’ armies into open fighting.
South Sudan lies in the middle of northeastern Africa, landlocked and roughly the size of France, at the point where the woodland and grass of equatorial Africa give way to the drier Sahel. Much of its centre is filled by the Sudd, one of the world’s largest wetlands, formed where the White Nile spreads out and slows on its passage north; the country’s roughly eleven million people are divided among more than sixty ethnic groups, the largest of them the Dinka and the Nuer, both cattle-keeping peoples who speak related Nilotic languages. Mainstream historians read South Sudan’s story chiefly as the long aftermath of Sudan’s own colonial and post-colonial history: a southern periphery kept administratively and culturally separate from the Arab, Muslim north under British rule, left underdeveloped at Sudan’s independence in 1956, and driven by that neglect into two long civil wars against the government in Khartoum. Independence in 2011 closed the struggle for separation from the north and opened a second, still unresolved, one: whether the many peoples gathered inside the new state’s borders can build a single working nation together. On this reading South Sudan is less a finished country than an unfinished experiment in doing so.
Douglas H. Johnson, South Sudan: A New History for a New Nation (2016); Øystein H. Rolandsen & M. W. Daly, A History of South Sudan: From Slavery to Independence (2016).
Five thresholds define the mainstream account, each because it reset the relationship between south and north, or later, within the south itself. British rule from 1899 governed the south apart from the north under a “Southern Policy” that restricted Arabic and Islamic influence, leaving the region isolated and poorly developed; the effect endured long after the policy itself was abandoned in the 1940s. A mutiny by southern soldiers at Torit in 1955, on the eve of Sudan’s independence, grew into the guerrilla movement known as Anyanya and the first civil war (1955–1972), ended by the Addis Ababa Agreement, which granted the south a decade of self-rule. That settlement collapsed in 1983 when Khartoum imposed Islamic law nationwide and re-divided the south, triggering a second, far larger civil war fought by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) under John Garang. The Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005 ended that war and set a path to the 2011 independence referendum. The fifth threshold came only two years later, in December 2013, when a political rupture inside the ruling party turned into a new civil war between rival army factions. Each threshold restructured who held power and against whom it was defined.
Douglas H. Johnson, The Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil Wars: Old Wars and New Wars (expanded 3rd ed., 2016); Øystein H. Rolandsen & M. W. Daly, A History of South Sudan (2016).
The mainstream account states the relationship plainly: in South Sudan the state arrived well ahead of the nation, and the gap between the two has not closed. Statehood was built rapidly through an internationally supervised process — a 2005 peace agreement, a 2011 referendum in which 98.8 percent voted for separation, and swift admission to the United Nations — all achieved by the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), the political wing of the wartime rebel army. But the SPLM itself had always been less a single nationalist movement than a wartime coalition of southern factions and militias, Dinka, Nuer, and smaller groups alike, held together chiefly by their shared opposition to the government in Khartoum. Once independence removed that unifying enemy, the coalition’s internal seams were exposed: within two years, the same army that had won the country’s freedom split along factional and, increasingly, ethnic lines. Mainstream historians therefore describe South Sudan as a state that achieved sovereignty before its people had settled what, beyond separation from the north, they held in common — a nation still, in the fullest sense, under construction.
Douglas H. Johnson, South Sudan: A New History for a New Nation (2016); Øystein H. Rolandsen & M. W. Daly, A History of South Sudan (2016).
The long-term force the mainstream identifies is the repeated substitution of an external enemy for internal cohesion. For more than half a century, southern unity was manufactured less by a shared positive identity than by a shared adversary: first the British administration, then the government in Khartoum, both experienced by southerners of every background as an external, alien authority to be resisted together. That shared resistance produced two long wars and, eventually, a state. But it never produced the harder achievement of a settled internal order, because the moment the external adversary was removed by independence in 2011, the coalition that had fought it had no equivalent external pressure left to hold it together, and its internal rivalries, over land, army rank, and access to the state’s resources, came to the surface instead. On this reading, South Sudan’s defining process is not ethnic hatred rising up but unity-by-opposition running out: a pattern of cohesion that worked only so long as there was a common enemy, and that has struggled, twice now, to survive the enemy’s absence.
Douglas H. Johnson, The Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil Wars (expanded 3rd ed., 2016); Douglas H. Johnson, South Sudan: A New History for a New Nation (2016).
Alternative interpretations developed by respected historians that challenge or expand the mainstream view. These perspectives highlight debates within historical scholarship rather than presenting a single accepted explanation.
A revisionist reading resists the common framing of South Sudan’s violence as the eruption of old, deep-seated hatred between the Dinka, the Nuer, and other ethnic groups, and argues instead that the driving mechanism is transactional rather than tribal. The researcher Alex de Waal describes politics across Sudan and South Sudan as a “political marketplace” — a system in which loyalty is not a matter of identity or ideology but a commodity, bought by political and military leaders with government posts, cash, and weapons, and sold again whenever a better price is offered elsewhere. On this account, ordinary Dinka and Nuer civilians and the young cattle-camp fighters who do most of the actual fighting are not the marketplace’s decision-makers but its currency and its casualties, mobilised along ethnic lines because ethnicity is a convenient recruiting tool, not because ethnic hostility itself is the cause. This is a genuine reinterpretation and a contested one: critics argue it understates real communal grievance and treats elites as more calculating, and ordinary loyalties as more disposable, than the evidence always supports.
Alex de Waal, The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa: Money, War and the Business of Power (2015).
The revisionist account keeps the same sequence of turning points the mainstream uses — the first civil war, the Addis Ababa Agreement, the second civil war, the 2005 settlement, independence, the 2013 split — but rereads each as a renegotiation of the political marketplace rather than a step in a nation’s struggle for self-determination. The analyst John Young argues that the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, celebrated in the mainstream account as the war’s resolution, in fact transplanted a narrow elite bargain between Khartoum’s ruling party and the SPLA’s own commanders into the new south, entrenching a militarised, patronage-driven system of governance rather than building accountable institutions beneath it. Oil revenue, flowing to the south in growing volumes from 2005, gave that system, on this reading, an unusually large treasury to distribute, which raised the stakes of every subsequent bargain among the SPLM’s constituent military factions. The 2013 collapse, in this view, was not an ethnic explosion but a marketplace crisis: a falling-out among commanders over shares of power and oil revenue that then recruited ethnic militias, rather than an ethnic conflict that happened to involve commanders. Because it reinterprets accepted events rather than denying them, this is legitimate scholarship, though how far elite bargaining alone can explain the ferocity of the resulting violence remains disputed.
John Young, The Fate of Sudan: The Origins and Consequences of a Flawed Peace Process (2012); Alex de Waal, The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa (2015).
In this reading, South Sudan’s failure to build a shared nation was not simply neglect or the residue of colonial underdevelopment, but a pattern actively reproduced by the SPLM’s own method of holding power. From the war years onward, the movement’s leadership absorbed rival militia commanders not by building common institutions or a shared civic identity but by paying them off — offering senior military rank, government positions, and access to state revenue in exchange for loyalty, a strategy researchers call “big-tent” politics. This approach was highly effective at ending immediate rebellions and folding armed rivals back into a single chain of command, but it treated nation-building as a cost to be avoided rather than a goal to be pursued, since a genuinely institutionalised state would have limited the leadership’s own room to bargain. The result, on this account, was a state whose apparent unity was really a standing arrangement among armed elites, kept together only as long as there was enough revenue and enough posts to go round. When oil income fell and the arrangement could no longer satisfy every faction, the underlying absence of a shared institutional or civic nation became visible, in 2013 and again since.
John Young, The Fate of Sudan (2012); Alex de Waal, The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa (2015).
The force this school foregrounds is the oil-financed political marketplace itself: the argument that South Sudan’s trajectory since the mid-2000s is best explained not by ethnicity or unfinished nation-building but by the rise, and repeated destabilisation, of a rent-fuelled system for buying political loyalty. Once oil revenue began flowing to southern authorities after 2005, and then in full after 2011, it gave the ruling elite an unusually large and centrally controlled pool of money with which to purchase the loyalty of rival commanders — but also made the whole system acutely vulnerable to any shock that reduced that revenue. The shutdown of oil production during a 2012 dispute with Khartoum over transit fees, and the collapse of world oil prices from 2014, are read on this account as decisive moments precisely because they starved the marketplace of the cash it depended on, forcing leaders to compete more violently for a shrinking prize. This is a materialist interpretation, and it departs deliberately from readings that put ethnic identity or state-building failure at the centre; its strength is explaining why South Sudan’s crises have repeatedly tracked the price of oil, and its contested point is how much room this leaves for the real force of ethnic and communal loyalty.
Alex de Waal, The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa (2015); John Young, The Fate of Sudan (2012).
Explains history through religion, culture, identity, political traditions, ideology and the stories societies tell about themselves. This lens asks how beliefs and shared identities have shaped historical development.
Seen through the identities its people carry, South Sudan is above all a Nilotic cattle-keeping civilisation in which wealth, marriage, religion, and standing in the community are all measured, in large part, through livestock. Among the Dinka and the Nuer especially, cattle are not simply property but the medium through which a man pays the bride-price that makes a marriage legitimate, a family avenges harm to a kinsman, and a person maintains a relationship with the ancestors and the divine. Both peoples share a religious world built around a single, sometimes remote high god, known to the Dinka as Nhialic and to the Nuer as Kwoth, reached through spirit-possessed prophets and clan divinities rather than a settled priesthood. This shared cultural grammar coexists, in the country as a whole, with the rise of Christianity, spread by missionaries under British rule and adopted widely as a marker of southern identity distinct from, and in conscious opposition to, the Arab Islamic identity of the north. Historians working through this lens read South Sudan’s political conflicts as disputes conducted, in large part, in this older cultural language — of cattle, kinship obligation, and prophetic authority — layered beneath the modern vocabulary of parties and armies.
Francis M. Deng, War of Visions: Conflict of Identities in the Sudan (1995); Sharon E. Hutchinson, Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War, and the State (1996).
Read through culture and religion, the country’s turning points are moments when this older order collided with new state power. British-backed Christian missions, permitted in the south under the colonial “Southern Policy” precisely to counterweight Islam, gave southerners a religious identity of their own well before southern nationalism took political form. When Sudan’s government imposed Islamic law nationwide in 1983, southern leaders, most of them Christian or following traditional Nilotic religion, cast the ensuing war explicitly as a defence of the south’s faith and culture against Arabisation and Islamisation, giving the conflict a religious charge it had not carried in its first phase. Within southern society, meanwhile, a line of Nuer religious leaders known as prophets — men and, at times, women believed to be possessed by a divinity and able to speak with its authority — repeatedly stepped into the space left by weak state institutions, mediating feuds, blessing raids, and in the twenty-first century lending spiritual legitimacy to armed factions in the very wars fought in the name of the modern state. Each threshold, on this account, is a moment where inherited religious authority was drawn into, and reshaped, the politics of the day rather than being replaced by it.
Sharon E. Hutchinson, Nuer Dilemmas (1996); Naomi Ruth Pendle, Spiritual Contestations: The Violence of Peace in South Sudan (2023).
On this reading, a shared national identity was always the weakest link in South Sudan’s formation, because what actually bound southerners together before 2011 was chiefly a negative fact: that they were not Arab and not Muslim, and so stood together against the government in the north. That “unity in opposition” gave southern Christians, followers of traditional religion, Dinka, Nuer, and dozens of smaller groups a workable common cause for decades of war, but it supplied no positive answer to the question of what, beyond rejecting the north, southerners actually shared. Once independence removed the shared adversary, the deeper cultural and religious loyalties that had always run beneath the nationalist surface — the standing of particular prophets, the obligations of particular clans, the rivalry of Dinka and Nuer political networks — resurfaced as the primary currency of politics. Historians working in this tradition therefore see South Sudan’s post-independence instability less as a failure to build a nation from nothing than as the return, once external pressure lifted, of older and more particular identities that unity-in-opposition had only ever temporarily submerged.
Francis M. Deng, War of Visions (1995); Naomi Ruth Pendle, Spiritual Contestations (2023).
The lasting force, in this cultural reading, is the persistence of localised systems of moral and spiritual authority — prophets, clan elders, and cattle-based codes of obligation and vengeance — that the modern state has never managed to fully absorb or replace. For as long as records exist, disputes among Dinka and Nuer communities over cattle, land, and killing have been mediated as much by ritual specialists claiming divine sanction as by any central government, and that pattern has proved remarkably durable: colonial administrators governed around it, the post-independence state has repeatedly had to bargain with it, and armed factions in the current conflicts actively seek the blessing of prophets to legitimise their cause among ordinary fighters. The researcher Naomi Pendle argues that struggles over this spiritual authority — over who may credibly claim to speak with divine sanction, and for what — have shaped the country’s cycles of violence and its uneasy peace agreements alike, often more decisively than the formal terms those agreements contain. What best explains South Sudan’s trajectory, on this account, is the durability of this older moral order beneath the modern state, rather than either colonial engineering or the pursuit of oil rents alone.
Naomi Ruth Pendle, Spiritual Contestations (2023); Sharon E. Hutchinson, Nuer Dilemmas (1996).
Explains history through geography, natural resources, trade, demographics, technology and economic structures. This lens explores how the physical environment and material conditions have influenced historical change.
The shape of South Sudan’s land and water has shaped its history as much as any government has. At the country’s centre lies the Sudd, a wetland larger than the Netherlands where the White Nile slows, spreads, and evaporates across a maze of channels and floating vegetation, blocking easy north-south movement for most of history and helping to isolate the south from the riverine, Arabic-speaking north. Around this wetland lie vast, seasonally flooded grasslands that support large cattle herds but almost no year-round farming, forcing Nilotic peoples such as the Dinka and Nuer into a yearly cycle: villages on higher ground in the rainy season, temporary cattle camps on the receding floodplain, known locally as the toic, in the dry months. This ecology produced a historically decentralised, cattle-wealth society with little need for, or experience of, centralised taxation and bureaucracy, in sharp contrast to the more urbanised, trade-based societies further north along the Nile. Economic historians read much of South Sudan’s later difficulty in building state institutions as a direct legacy of this geography: a landscape that rewarded mobility and local self-sufficiency over settlement and central administration.
Raymond C. Kelly, The Nuer Conquest: The Structure and Development of an Expansionist System (1985).
Read through resources and terrain, the turning points track competition for pasture, then for oil. Through the nineteenth century, the Nuer expanded steadily at the expense of their Dinka neighbours, seizing better grazing land and cattle in a long, low-level pattern of raiding that the anthropologist Raymond Kelly traces to population growth pressing against the limited dry-season pasture the Sudd’s ecology made available. That older contest over grazing was overtaken, from the 1970s, by a new resource: oil, discovered beneath the southern grasslands by foreign companies whose exploration efforts were repeatedly disrupted by, and became entangled with, the outbreak of the second civil war in 1983. The 2005 peace settlement then split oil revenue between Khartoum and the south roughly evenly, before full ownership of the oil fields passed to the new state at independence in 2011 — control that immediately became a strategic problem, since the only pipeline able to carry South Sudan’s crude to market ran north through Sudan itself. A bitter dispute over the fees Khartoum charged to use that pipeline led South Sudan to shut down its own oil production entirely for over a year from January 2012, a self-inflicted economic shock from which the young state never fully recovered.
Raymond C. Kelly, The Nuer Conquest (1985); Luke Patey, The New Kings of Crude: China, India, and the Global Struggle for Oil in Sudan and South Sudan (2014).
On this reading, geography made South Sudan’s independence only ever partial. Political sovereignty was won in 2011, but economic sovereignty was not: almost the entirety of the new state’s government revenue, by some estimates around ninety-eight percent, came from oil that could reach world markets only through a single pipeline system running north across the border into the very country South Sudan had just separated from. This left the new state’s finances hostage to its relationship with its former ruler in a way no referendum could resolve, and it helps explain why disputes with Khartoum over pipeline fees and border oil fields have repeatedly threatened to reignite conflict between the two states even after formal separation. Beyond the oil fields and the small capital, Juba, most of the country’s territory remained, at independence, almost without paved roads, reliable electricity, or a cash economy, its population sustained chiefly by cattle-keeping and subsistence farming largely untouched by the state. State and nation, on this account, both formed on top of an economic geography that concentrated wealth in a single vulnerable resource and left most of the country’s land and people essentially outside the modern economy altogether.
Luke Patey, The New Kings of Crude (2014); Raymond C. Kelly, The Nuer Conquest (1985).
The force that best explains South Sudan’s trajectory, in this reading, is the concentration of the state’s entire fiscal life in a single, geographically exposed resource, laid over a vast hinterland the state has never had the infrastructure to reach or tax. Oil revenue gave whoever controlled the national government in Juba an unusually large prize relative to the size of the economy around it, and because that revenue depended on terms set by a foreign neighbour and on world prices set by markets thousands of miles away, it made the state’s finances, and so its politics, unusually vulnerable to sudden shocks — the 2012 shutdown, the 2014 oil price collapse, and periodic renegotiations with Khartoum among them. Each shock sharply reduced the funds available to sustain the patronage networks that held the government and army together, and each was followed, closely, by renewed political and military instability. Meanwhile the great majority of the population, dependent on cattle and rain-fed farming across a landscape the state has barely developed, has remained largely outside this oil economy altogether. What best explains South Sudan over the long run, on this account, is neither ethnicity nor colonial engineering but this narrow, exposed economic base and the enormous, ungoverned hinterland surrounding it.
Luke Patey, The New Kings of Crude (2014); Raymond C. Kelly, The Nuer Conquest (1985).
Not a fifth lens, but the point of the whole exercise: historians explain the same country differently because they weigh its causes differently.
The origin of South Sudan’s recurring wars is the sharpest dispute. The consensus and cultural readings treat them as the resurfacing of real, long-standing divisions — between Dinka and Nuer, or between competing systems of religious and cultural authority — once the unifying pressure of the war against the north was removed. The revisionist reading treats the same wars as manufactured largely by a small circle of armed elites competing for oil revenue and government posts, using ethnicity as a recruiting tool rather than being driven by it. Same wars, different engines: authentic communal rupture, or elite bargaining that recruits communal identity as its instrument.
The 2013 and 2025 collapses divide the lenses in the same way. The cultural account traces them to the rivalry of Dinka and Nuer political and prophetic authority; the economic account traces them to shocks in oil revenue that starved the patronage system of cash; the revisionist account traces them to a political marketplace renegotiating itself by force.
On one point all four agree: sovereignty arrived in South Sudan before nationhood did, in 2011, and the two have not yet met. They part on why — an absent external enemy, elite choice, older spiritual loyalties, or a narrow economic base incapable of binding a vast country together.
Reference status: every work cited is verified and correctly attributed — Douglas H. Johnson, South Sudan: A New History for a New Nation (2016), The Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil Wars: Old Wars and New Wars (expanded 3rd ed., 2016); Øystein H. Rolandsen & M. W. Daly, A History of South Sudan: From Slavery to Independence (2016); Alex de Waal, The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa: Money, War and the Business of Power (2015); John Young, The Fate of Sudan: The Origins and Consequences of a Flawed Peace Process (2012); Francis M. Deng, War of Visions: Conflict of Identities in the Sudan (1995); Sharon E. Hutchinson, Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War, and the State (1996); Naomi Ruth Pendle, Spiritual Contestations: The Violence of Peace in South Sudan (2023); Raymond C. Kelly, The Nuer Conquest: The Structure and Development of an Expansionist System (1985); Luke Patey, The New Kings of Crude: China, India, and the Global Struggle for Oil in Sudan and South Sudan (2014). De Waal’s “political marketplace” framework is an influential but actively debated thesis, and is presented here as such.
South Sudan’s most recent chapter is still being written, and as of writing it is a violent one. A 2018 peace agreement had brought the wartime rivals President Salva Kiir and First Vice President Riek Machar into a fragile unity government, but that arrangement effectively broke down in March 2025, when fighting erupted in Nasir, in Upper Nile State, between government-aligned forces and a Nuer youth militia known as the White Army, allied with Machar’s political-military faction. Government troops surrounded Machar’s residence and placed him under house arrest, detaining several of his senior aides; in September 2025 he was formally charged with treason, murder, and crimes against humanity over the Nasir violence, in a trial that human rights organisations have criticised for falling short of due process. Fighting between government and opposition-aligned forces has continued into 2026, displacing large numbers of civilians and drawing warnings from the International Crisis Group of a full relapse into civil war. In 2026 the United Nations Security Council renewed sanctions and an arms embargo on the country, citing concern that the peace process has stalled. South Sudan’s first-ever national elections, repeatedly postponed since independence, remain tentatively scheduled, but with the country’s leading opposition figure on trial and fighting ongoing, observers widely doubt they can be credibly held on time.
Endpoint facts verified against 2025–2026 reporting (International Crisis Group, UN Security Council Report, Al Jazeera, Human Rights Watch, JURIST).
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South Sudan became independent from Sudan on 9 July 2011 after decades of war and a 2011 referendum in which 98% voted to secede. Under Egyptian and then Egyptian-British rule, southern areas were influenced by English and Christianity, unlike Sudan’s largely Arabic- and Islam-dominant north. After Sudan’s 1956 independence, broken promises of southern political inclusion helped trigger long civil wars, deepening grievances and divisions.
According to UCDP, in 2025 the main state-based conflict resumed between the Government of South Sudan and SPLM/A-In Opposition (SPLM/A-IO) after the 2018 Revitalized Peace Agreement broke down. President Salva Kiir’s arrest of First Vice President Riek Machar and other SPLM/A-IO officials escalated tensions, with fighting especially in Upper Nile, Jonglei, and parts of Equatoria. Local intercommunal clashes also continue, often linked to cattle raiding and land disputes.
UCDP reports that overall violence in 2025 declined slightly from 2024, but fatalities still exceeded 650 and state-based fighting rose sharply. Community violence persists in several regions, keeping insecurity high. The CIA Factbook notes that political deadlock and corruption have slowed peace implementation and contributed to a severe humanitarian crisis, with millions displaced and 7 of 11 million people needing assistance amid food insecurity.
Sources: UCDP; CIA World Factbook.
Displacement is one of the defining political pressures in South Sudan because violence, inter-communal conflict, and repeated shocks continue to uproot large numbers of people and strain state institutions. UNHCR says South Sudan was hosting about 1.8 million internally displaced people in late August 2026, while also facing fresh displacement linked to insecurity in Jonglei and other areas. The same crisis pushes civilians into neighboring states and complicates service delivery, local legitimacy, and peace implementation inside South Sudan. In practice, the government’s room for political maneuver is shaped by humanitarian need, border stability, and the movement of returnees and refugees across the region.Sources: UNHCR Operational Data Portal for South Sudan; UNHCR External Update #8 (January 2026); UN News/UNHCR coverage of Jonglei displacement
The war in Sudan has made South Sudan a frontline state in a wider regional displacement crisis. UNHCR reported in 2026 that large numbers of people from Sudan were entering South Sudan, while hundreds of thousands of South Sudanese refugees were also returning from Sudan because of the fighting there. This has increased pressure on border communities, transport routes, humanitarian agencies, and local authorities, making South Sudan dependent on cross-border coordination with Sudan and on international aid. The conflict also reinforces South Sudan’s importance as a transit and refuge country in the Horn of Africa, even though it lacks the capacity to absorb these movements without external support.Sources: UNHCR Sudan emergency coverage; UNHCR South Sudan Situation (2026); UNHCR Sudan Situation Appeal 2026
South Sudan is best understood as a state shaped by great-power competition rather than one that drives it. Its diplomatic importance comes from its peace process, humanitarian access, and control over oil exports, which matter to outside actors including the United States, China, and Russia. The country’s oil sector links it especially closely to China, while UN peacekeeping and humanitarian coordination keep the United States and European partners engaged. South Sudan has not been a major military actor in the Ukraine war, and there is no evidence of a formal sanctions or combat role; its external relevance is instead indirect, through diplomacy, aid dependence, and energy revenues that influence foreign relations.Sources: UNHCR South Sudan Country profile; UN News coverage on South Sudan humanitarian conditions; recent reporting on South Sudan’s external relations and oil sector
South Sudan, which gained independence from Sudan in 2011, is the world’s newest country. Home to a diverse array of mainly Nilotic ethnolinguistic groups that settled in the territory in the 15th through 19th centuries, South Sudanese society is heavily dependent on seasonal migration and seasonal fluctuations in precipitation. Modern-day South Sudan was conquered first by Egypt and later ruled jointly by Egyptian-British colonial administrators in the late 19th century. Christian missionaries helped spread the English language and Christianity in the area, leading to significant cultural differences with the northern part of Sudan, where Arabic and Islam are dominant. When Sudan gained its independence in 1956, the southern region received assurances that it would participate fully in the political system. However, the Arab government in Khartoum reneged on its promises.
Khartoum’s broken promises prompted two periods of civil war (1955-1972 and 1983-2005) in which as many as 2.5 million people died — mostly civilians — due largely to starvation and drought. The second Sudanese civil war was one of the deadliest since WWII and left southern Sudanese society devastated. Peace talks resulted in a US-backed Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2005, which granted the South six years of autonomy followed by a referendum on final status. The result of this referendum, held in 2011, was a vote of 98% in favor of secession.
Since independence, South Sudan has struggled to form a viable governing system and has been plagued by widespread corruption, political conflict, and communal violence. In 2013, conflict erupted between forces loyal to President Salva KIIR, a Dinka, and forces loyal to Vice President Riek MACHAR, a Nuer. The conflict quickly spread through the country along ethnic lines, killing tens of thousands and creating a humanitarian crisis with millions of South Sudanese displaced. KIIR and MACHAR signed a peace agreement in 2015 that created a Transitional Government of National Unity the next year. However, renewed fighting broke out in Juba between KIIR and MACHAR’s forces, plunging the country back into conflict and drawing in additional armed opposition groups. A “revitalized” peace agreement was signed in 2018, mostly ending the fighting and laying the groundwork for a unified national army, a transitional government, and elections. The transitional government was formed in 2020, when MACHAR returned to Juba as first vice president. Since 2020, implementation of the peace agreement has been stalled amid wrangling over power-sharing, which has contributed to an uptick in communal violence and the country’s worst food crisis since independence, with 7 of 11 million South Sudanese citizens in need of humanitarian assistance. The transitional period was extended an additional two years in 2022, pushing elections to late 2024.
The armed conflict in South Sudan stems from deep political divisions between the Government of South Sudan and the SPLM/A – IO opposition faction. Alongside these state-based actors, numerous ethnic militias based on localized communities such as Bor Dinka, Murle, and Nuer groups also fight each other over land, resources, and political influence. These overlapping conflicts create a complex patchwork of violence driven both by unresolved national political rivalries and longstanding communal disputes.
Civilians bear a heavy burden in South Sudan’s conflict, suffering both collateral harm during clashes and deliberate killings by state and opposition forces. According to UCDP data, over a hundred civilians have died as collateral damage, while deliberate attacks by both government and non-state armed groups have resulted in dozens of targeted civilian deaths. This ongoing violence destabilizes communities and severely disrupts livelihoods.
Sources: UCDP data.
This central government grouping, split into government and opposition factions, controls state resources and fights various non-state ethnic militias, resulting in both collateral and deliberate civilian harm.
Bor Dinka militias are involved in local ethnic fighting primarily against Acholi and Murle groups and contribute relatively low civilian harm compared to government forces.
Bul Nuer militias engage in inter-ethnic clashes with Twic Dinka and maintain low levels of civilian violence.
Gawaar Nuer forces fight against Lou Nuer militias in localized ethnic conflicts, generally associated with lower civilian deaths.
Jie militias fight ethnic conflicts against Murle groups, with limited civilian harm reported in this dataset.
Lou Nuer groups engage in fighting with Murle communities as part of inter-communal conflicts, with relatively low civilian casualties recorded.
These Dinka sub-groups engage in localized armed conflict with Jalwau Dinka factions with low reported civilian harm.
Murle militias fight multiple ethnic groups including Toposa, Bor Dinka, Jie, and Lou Nuer in intercommunal conflicts causing ongoing regional instability.
Pakam Dinka militias engage in ethnic conflicts against Rup Dinka communities with limited civilian casualties reported.
The conflict in South Sudan is rooted in political power struggles between government factions alongside complex ethnic and communal tensions involving numerous armed non-state actors. These clashes reflect competition over territory, resources, and political control in a fragile state environment, leading to widespread violence among various ethnic militias and government forces.
Independent Sudan inherits colonial borders, centralizing power in Khartoum and privileging northern elites. Southern regions, including present-day South Sudan, face political exclusion and underdevelopment, laying early foundations for armed southern resistance and later separatist movements that still influence today’s SPLM/A factions.
The Anyanya rebellion launches armed struggle against Khartoum over autonomy and discrimination. Prolonged conflict militarizes southern society and entrenches regional grievances, creating early insurgent networks and war legacies that later feed into SPLM/A organization and intercommunal violence patterns visible in South Sudan today.
Sudanese government and Anyanya rebels sign peace accord, forming a Southern Sudan Autonomous Region. While ending the first civil war, the deal leaves power-sharing and resource questions unresolved, setting precedents for contested autonomy that later echo in SPLM/A splits and today’s peace implementation tensions.
President Nimeiri revokes southern autonomy and imposes sharia, sparking renewed war. John Garang forms the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A). The movement’s internal divisions and wartime governance practices shape future South Sudanese politics and today’s SPLM/A–IO rivalries and armed fragmentation.
A major SPLM/A split sees Riek Machar and others break from Garang, triggering intra-southern fighting and atrocities. This schism personalizes rivalries and ethnic polarization, creating a long-running Machar–mainstream SPLM power struggle that remains central to current SPLM/A–IO conflict dynamics.
Khartoum and SPLM/A sign the CPA, granting the south autonomy and a referendum on independence. The deal transforms SPLM into the dominant southern governing force but leaves security sector and power-sharing ambiguities, later complicating state-building and the 2013–2018 South Sudan civil war’s resolution.
Following a referendum, South Sudan becomes independent with Salva Kiir as president and SPLM as ruling party. Weak institutions, unresolved border and oil disputes, and militarized politics rapidly surface, creating conditions for elite rivalries and localized armed groups that underpin later nationwide conflict.
Political struggle between President Kiir and Vice President Riek Machar erupts into armed conflict in Juba, spreading along ethnic and factional lines. SPLM/A fractures into government and SPLM/A–IO camps, devastating institutions and normalizing armed mobilization that continues to shape today’s clashes and mistrust.
The Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict seeks power-sharing and security reforms. Implementation stalls; renewed Juba fighting in 2016 collapses the deal. Failure deepens skepticism over elite bargains, pushing more actors toward local militias and intercommunal violence that still complicate current nationwide ceasefire efforts.
Government, SPLM/A–IO, and other groups sign the Revitalized Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in Khartoum. It creates a unity government and security arrangements but remains only partially implemented, leaving rival command structures and contested areas that fuel ongoing tensions and periodic government–IO clashes.
Salva Kiir and Riek Machar form a transitional government under the 2018 deal. Delays in security sector reforms, cantonment, and constitutional processes persist, encouraging defections, local armed mobilization, and unresolved communal feuds that underpin current violence in Upper Nile, Jonglei, and Equatoria regions.
Parties extend the transitional period and roadmap toward elections, citing delays in unifying forces and drafting a permanent constitution. Continued parallel command chains and weak local governance sustain intercommunal clashes and localized armed groups, directly feeding into today’s Murle–Toposa fighting and broader insecurity.
Despite the formal ceasefire, organized violence remains widespread, driven by cattle raiding, local disputes, and unresolved grievances between government and SPLM/A–IO forces. These patterns of low-intensity conflict and incomplete peace implementation set the immediate background for renewed large-scale clashes in 2025.
Riek Machar’s March arrest triggers renewed fighting between government forces and SPLM/A–IO, causing hundreds of deaths in Upper Nile, Jonglei, and Equatoria, while Murle–Toposa clashes continue. The escalation highlights unresolved power-sharing, security integration, and communal tensions driving South Sudan’s current unstable situation.
