South Sudan's elites use peace deals to preserve war economies, researchers find

South Sudan marked 15 years of independence in 2021 with little to show for it. The hope that separation from Sudan in 2011 would close one of Africa's longest civil wars proved short-lived. The newly independent state returned to war in 2013, watched a 2015 settlement collapse, and now operates under a 2018 Revitalised Agreement whose transition has been repeatedly postponed.

Researchers examining this cycle argue the problem may not be that peace deals are failing, but that they are working — just not as intended. Instead of ending the systems that made violence profitable, successive settlements have allowed the political elite to capture those same extraction systems under the guise of order.

How peace preserved war economies

Economic historian research spanning 2020-2024 fieldwork and archival analysis found that South Sudan's peace agreements have reshuffled access to money, offices and external finance among elites, but left the underlying machinery intact. What emerges is a pattern researchers call "predatory peace": the coercive revenue systems and war economies continue to extract from civilians, now in the name of state order rather than open conflict.

Violence changes form rather than ending; it recedes from the battlefield and lodges in the revenue systems, security forces and war economies that continue to extract from civilians.

The state itself becomes the prize. Control of government is so lucrative that capture remains worth fighting for — which partly explains why the 2013 power-sharing breakdown triggered a return to armed conflict. Peace and war function as two settings of the same extractive machine rather than true opposites.

Political settlements theory helps explain the pattern. These deals typically distribute power, offices and resources among rival leaders in the hope that a share in the state will reduce their incentive to fight. The theory often works — but it can also carry wartime systems into peacetime, leaving intact the structures through which rulers extracted money, goods, labour and other resources, and enforced payment through soldiers, officials, checkpoints and offices.

The civil service puzzle

A related finding raises questions about institutional resilience. When civil war broke out in December 2013, the state remained the largest employer in South Sudan, even as hyperinflation eroded wages and salary payments delayed from months to a year. The approved 2015 national budget accounted for 465,041 government personnel, over 85% in security-related functions.

Political sociologists studying civil servants' decisions during the war found they chose to remain in government despite the absence of regular income. The jobs provided social status, access to networks and opportunities, and a sense of normality during political upheaval — as well as a realistic route to paid employment in a hoped-for future. Other options were scarce.

This suggests why state institutions endured despite repeated shocks, but also underscores how deeply embedded extraction systems are in South Sudan's governing structures.

Open questions on causation

The reporting on these dynamics differs in emphasis. One analysis frames peace agreements as having "reshaped" revenue and coercion systems by formalising wartime extraction into recognised office and authority. Another emphasises civil servants' non-material motivations for remaining in post, suggesting institutional continuity arose from individual choice rather than structural predation. Whether peace deals primarily preserved war economies or whether state institutions persisted for other reasons — and how much these explanations overlap — remains contested in the research.

What both accounts agree on: 15 years after independence, the deeper struggles over power, revenue and coercion inside South Sudan have not resolved. The formal chapter on the north-south war closed in 2011. The chapter on extractive state practice remains open.