Grassroots Deals, Not International Processes, Offer South Sudan Its Best Hope for Peace
Joshua Craze
April 2026
Last March, South Sudan returned to civil war when the government launched a counterinsurgency campaign that razed villages and executed civilians, largely in areas inhabited by the Nuer, the country’s second-largest ethnic group. After the conflict began, I conducted interviews with rebel commanders who had fled to regional capitals. They all asked the same question: Where might we acquire some guns?
For my beleaguered friends, I had only bad news. Regional powers in the Horn of Africa supported the South Sudanese government, and the country was not tempting for the Russians – besides, they back states, not insurrectionists.
The rebels’ lack of materiel has shaped the dynamics of the conflict. Their forces attack government garrisons, principally to acquire guns and ammunition, and then withdraw before reinforcements arrive. This scarcity makes it impossible for the rebels to hold urban territory; they are now fighting a guerrilla war.
The government has responded by waging a counterinsurgency, with its attack helicopters as the deus ex machina that can save it from an acute absence of political legitimacy and an army that is unpaid and prone to desertion.
In mid-April, one dyspeptic rebel commander phoned me to complain. “I try to talk to diplomats, but I am just having a monologue with myself. No one is interested in South Sudan.” Humanitarian investment from the Global North has cratered. Western diplomats in Juba, the country’s capital, talk about packing up and going home. The African Union and other regional bodies are distracted and dysfunctional. Diplomats pay lip service to a peace agreement that ended South Sudan’s last civil war (2013-2018), while acknowledging that it is now dead in the water.
The lack of regional and international appetite for peace processes has removed a source of rebel funding. “Briefcase rebels” once toured the region’s capitals in search of per diems and negotiating tables. Living off such processes is no longer possible, and many rebel groups have splintered. In Addis Ababa last summer, I met with a dozen different Nuer commanders, all looking for foreign funding for their small rebel forces. Their penurious condition makes it easy for the government to induce defections, which in recent years has meant that Nuer communities have been set against each other.
“It is a damning indictment of state-building efforts that the most democratic institutions in South Sudan today are its militias.”
It is not clear whether one should weep too many tears for South Sudan’s peace processes. A 2018 agreement brought the rebels into government, but as part of a power-sharing arrangement that apportioned the country’s wealth to warlords. Soon enough, it broke down. One major problem was that the deal lacked popular legitimacy. There were so many politicians to accommodate that government positions, down to county commissioners, were chosen in the capital and such figures had no political legitimacy on the ground. Indeed, locally weak candidates were often selected because they had no traction in their communities, for those figures were easier to exploit.
Since South Sudan’s independence in 2011, there have been no end of peace agreements and democracy initiatives. Foreign countries have ploughed billions of dollars into making the South Sudanese state. The country is poorer and more violent as a result of all this investment, which has been appropriated by a predatory elite in Juba, or wasted on workshops designed to satisfy donors in Washington and not the needs of the people. It is a damning indictment of state-building efforts that the most democratic institutions in South Sudan today are its militias.
The contemporary civil war began when the South Sudanese army fought against the local “white army” in Nasir. The white armies are communitarian Nuer militias. Emerging from the young cattleguards that protect the livestock of pastoralist communities, they became increasingly militarised during Sudan’s second civil war (1983-2005), as rebel groups tried to co-opt them as fighting forces. It never really worked.
The Nuer are a segmentary society. Each section has its own white army, whose leadership is chosen by the youth and easily replaced by democratic decision. As one fighter told me in July 2025 in Ayod County, South Sudan: “I am a father, a fisherman, a hunter, and a white army fighter. It is not a profession, but a duty to the community.” Unlike South Sudan’s marauding army, the white armies are constrained by their own communities.
During South Sudan’s previous civil war, Nuer rebel leaders tried to recruit these forces as foot soldiers, but they were unsuccessful. White armies were interested in defending their territory, and were not motivated by power struggles in Juba. Last July, white army fighters I spoke to were as critical of the opposition as the government: both sides had used the fiction of state-building as a means of plundering the country.
The white armies are capable of working together against common threats, such as the government. These mobilisations are defensive and temporary, but nevertheless demonstrate a strong tradition of grassroots democracy: leaders are selected from the white army commanders that local sections choose.
“When the attention and the money have dried up, it is local agreements and grassroots democracy that are likely to provide a more durable foundation for peace.”
This is not to write a hagiography of the white armies. Responsible for war crimes, they have raped and razed their way through their enemies’ territory, just like the government’s forces. They can also be instrumentalised by rebel leaders and government officials, who buy their temporary loyalty.
During the current conflict, rebel commanders have gathered in Gambella to try to lay claim to the white armies. Without external supplies to seduce young fighters, their serenades have not been successful, and the white armies have instead focused on protecting their territory against the government.
These democratic militias hold out the greatest hope for peace. Agreements between local communities have a long history in South Sudan. Any injection of foreign capital into these efforts tends to hinder their success, turning peace processes into competitions for external resources.
For the good of South Sudan, the international community should stop pretending that its efforts are peace building work. The per diems, power-sharing formulas, and workshops are designed to satisfy constituencies abroad, rather than address the lives of those who will actually have to live with the consequences of these efforts. When the attention and the money have dried up, it is local agreements and grassroots democracy that are likely to provide a more durable foundation for peace.
Joshua Craze is a Fellow at the Centre on Armed Groups. He has spent twenty years working as a conflict researcher and writer in Sudan and South Sudan, for organizations including Small Arms Survey, Human Rights Watch, and the Norwegian Refugee Council. He is finishing a book for Fitzcarraldo Editions on war, silence, and bureaucracy in the Horn of Africa, and regularly writes essays for a wide variety of publications, including the New York Review of Books, the New Left Review, and The Baffler.
