The South Sudan confict paints a picture that falls short of most of the expectations of classical wars. The war has been cyclic and therefore lengthy. Unlike classical wars, which involved only militaries, were fought according to rules of war, and ended when a political objective was attained, the South Sudan war has involved armed civilians (militias), and as is the case with most modern (intra-state) armed conficts, has been lengthy and laden with a heavy human and material cost, with no clear political objective.
The war in South Sudan has been internecine and cyclic for three main reasons. The frst reason is that the confict is partly embedded in the interpersonal feud between Salva Kiir and Riek Machar; second is the fedgling approaches to the DDR of ex-combatants; and third is the failure to deal decisively with societal injustices committed over time.
The differences between these two leaders can be traced back to the history of the Sudanese People's Liberation Movement, which was established in 1983 under the leadership of John Garang. The objective was to free the South from the leadership of Khartoum and rebuild a secularised state.With the achievement of independence in 2011, the common enemy had been defeated and now the two ethnically divergent leaders had to each deal with their own ethnic constituencies, laden with political inclinations. This made it diffcult for the two leaders to envisage common interests that would have determined a path to defne (negotiate) between themselves the terms of peace for South Sudan’s self-governance. This diffculty has its basis in the historical differences, which have over time become structural in nature, between the two political elites. There are several differences between these two political actors that negotiators/mediators have often ignored, making it diffcult to reach agreeable terms of peace. These include:
During the lengthy North–South war, the people of South Sudan demon strated strong nationalism because they had a common enemy and therefore the common purpose of defeating the enemy. They were inspired by the four tenets of nationalism: national identity, self-determination, solidarity, and autonomy. The leadership of John Garang was characterised by post-war nationalism, which carried on even after his death on 30 July 2005. This common purpose dissipated gradually, as the Dinka and Nuer challenged each other for political power. Immediately after independence in 2011, pre independence nationalism was quickly replaced with divisive ethnopolitical differences exhibited by both Kiir and Machar through a political power struggle.
According to Pinaud (2021: 105), Garang’s post-war nationalism was supported by the international community. However, after his death, Salva Kiir’s faction’s hijacking of power invoked the nationalist ideology in con trolling the state, with the SPLA Dinka being seen to be above the other ethnic groups. Pinaud goes on to say that "Salva Kiir’s faction side-lined other Dinka competitors from Garang’s faction and other ethnic competi tors." The resultant ethnicity bred a new security landscape, triggering the third civil war in December 2013.
The cyclic (recurrent) nature of civil wars in the history of South Sudan and the defance demonstrated by parties to the confict against peace agreements are emblems of non-conclusive and/or circumscribed negotiations and medi ations. The failure of negotiating parties and their mediators to guide the peace process towards agreeable terms has often left the feuding parties pro jecting their egos as the henchmen of their tribal communities. This has been to the detriment of peace and the aspirations of the country’s citizens, who expected a better life in a post-independence South Sudan.
According to classical strategic military theorists, war can end either through tactical victory or through negotiation. Both the South Sudan inde pendence and the various inter-ethnic conficts within South Sudan have "ended" (albeit sometimes temporarily), not by an outright win by one side over another, but through negotiations. Classical theorists further advise that even when a war ends in tactical victory, negotiations are still necessary for former belligerents to agree on the terms of peace as a way of attaining strategic peace. This is why Sun Tzu (1971), believed to have lived between 544 and 496 BC, advises that the successful strategist must, in victory, create a common interest with the defeated enemy in order to have lasting peace. The victor can achieve this by treating the captives well and caring for them. This, according to Sun Tzu, means winning the battle and becoming stronger. He adds, "generally in a war the best policy is to take a state intact; to ruin it is inferior to this" (Sun Tzu 1971: 79).
Machiavelli and others have advice on how to effectively end cyclic civil wars such as the one in South Sudan with minimum adverse human impact. In this instance, Sun Tzu’s recommendation for reconciliation when the war ends (mentioned above) would still reverberate in today’s spheres of military strategy and the termination of conficts, such as that in South Sudan, if a lasting solution is to be found.
In a similar vein, Clausewitz, a more recent classical military theorist and an advocate of why effective negotiations should follow a cessation of a war, objects to the annihilation of the vanquished by the victor in favour of a mutual negotiation, particularly on the terms of peace.
However, Alusala (2015: 215) points out that although these classical military theorists call for a negotiation on the terms of peace in ending a war, the negotiation process itself often poses challenges, particularly in Africa’s civil wars, for several reasons. First, rebels often lack a clear political ideol ogy around which to effectively negotiate their political objectives like gov ernments would. Second, rebel factions tend to proliferate and change their affliations rapidly, making it diffcult to know their legitimacy, and thirdly, governments are often reluctant to recognise rebels as equals in negotiations.
Before the French Revolution, most wars of the time (or wars of the ancien regime) were conducted between professional armies of limited size for lim ited interests. Under such conditions, once an army had been defeated on the battlefeld, given the moderate demands of the victor, it was relatively easy to agree on the terms of peace. This was because the wars of the ancien regime involved only professional militaries and not civilians. In today’s wars, par ticularly in non-international conficts, civilians also take up arms and turn into rebels and militias (Raleigh 2016). Civilians, unlike professional mili taries, do not observe the laws of war. Because wars are a continuation of politics, they are a way of attaining a political objective. This is in line with Clausewitz’s explanation that modern wars are never fnal until the objective is attained or convincingly lost.
The situation in South Sudan seems to negate this classical adage, as the parties seek to annihilate each other, with limited chances of reaching agree able terms via negotiations. Handel emphasises this point by adding that military victory alone is a necessary but never a suffcient condition for a lasting termination of war, which, after all, can only be achieved through political means. The parties can only achieve this through a political process of accommodation in which the victor recognises the interests of the defeated party and grants him terms that he can accept for long-term peace (Handel 2004: 198).
Handel further points out that history is replete with examples of deci sive military victories that led nowhere because the victor was not ready to acknowledge the legitimate interests of the vanquished adversary. He con cludes that the more resounding the initial victory, the harder it is for the now hubristic (proud) victor, in the heady moment of triumph, to recog nise the reciprocal nature of war termination. This explains to a large extent why the greatest victors paradoxically fail to obtain enduring results (Handel 2004: 198).
Classical theorists object to the annihilation of the vanquished by the vic tor. Rather, classical theory recommends a mutual negotiation between the two on terms that would govern peace between them. This is the essence of negotiating the terms of peace as a guarantee for strategic peace. It is this pro cess that transforms tactical victory into strategic victory (long-term peace).
Similarities can be drawn between the elusiveness of strategic peace in the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and the war in South Sudan. According to Alusala (2014), the tactical victory attained by Rwanda and its allies was an opportunity to offer the Congolese terms of peace that would lead to strategic peace. To the Congolese, that would have meant the "benefts" of the rebellion (a reward for supporting the Alliance des Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération du Congo-Zaire – AFDL) in the overthrow of Mobutu’s regime.
The classical case of the ending of the Peloponnesian War, in which the virtues of magnanimity in victory and goodwill in peace are exemplifed, is instructive in this case. In the case of the Zaire war, this would have entailed the victor presenting to the Congolese a negotiation platform to establish terms by which they (the Congolese) would contribute to the national decision-making processes relating to the political, economic and security future of their own country. However, from July 1997 to August 1998, when the Rwandan alliance occupied the DRC, there were no attempts to transform the tactical victory so far attained into a strategic victory. In the case of South Sudan, the chronology of negotiated peace agreements is illustrative of the opportunities that the parties have missed or squandered to project agreeable terms of peace that would ensure strategic (long-term) peace.
The transitional coalition government formed by President Salva Kiir and his rival Riek Machar under the Revitalized Transitional Government of National Unity of South Sudan was established in February 2020, provid ing a new dawn for the country, following a protracted and devastating civil war that started in 2013. This new coalition coincided with a new report by United Nations investigators on human rights atrocities in the country, which cautions that peace without accountability and justice is unlikely to last (Du Plessis 2020).
The report points out that since independence, the country has been mired in ethnic confict, leaving hardly any time for investment of any kind. Furthermore, deeply entrenched impunity was manifested in the lack of accountability for serious crimes, the failure to establish transitional justice mechanisms, the prioritisation by the state of fnancing for the military and security apparatus over investment in public service, infrastructure and livelihoods; this impunity, among other factors, severely weakened the functionality of the state (Report of the Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan 2020).
The report described the country’s forces as being responsible for most of the attacks against civilians, including pillaging, confict-related sexual violence, as well as other forms of sexual and gender-based violence, not least arbitrary arrest and detention, denial of the freedoms of expression, opinion and assembly, and the recruitment and use of children in armed forces. The violation of human rights law and international humanitar ian law is an ongoing occurrence, while armed groups have also commit ted serious violations of human rights law and international humanitarian law, including through the recruitment and the use of children. There is an increasing reluctance by the parties to implement the key provisions of the R-ARCSS.
Viewed through the prism of agreeable terms of peace (as discussed above), it may suffce to argue that negotiators failed to guide the two parties in setting up an agreeable framework to deal with historical as well as recent injustices, including human rights abuses committed by troops from either side that left deep scars in the community. Many of the human rights abuses were never brought to closure, leading to vicious cycles of revenge, especially between the two leading ethnic communities, the Dinka and the Nuer.
Consensus on how to effectively disarm, demobilise, and reintegrate thou sands of former combatants of the many past wars remains a challenge in South Sudan. DDR is a major factor in the stability of any post-confict society. At the core of the differences are unresolved tensions following the split in the SPLM/A in the 1990s and the failure to effectively reintegrate ex-combatants from both factions into the army following the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) in 2005 (Johnson 2014: 167–174). Turyamureeba (2014) identifes some of the challenges that hindered the comprehensive implementation of DDR of former fghters as was envisaged in the CPA to be lack of political will, tensions between major stakeholders, limited and delayed funding, the depressed economy, lack of inclusion and participation, the nature of the implementation environment, an unsustainable reintegration package, and false assumptions. Turyamureeba contends that those who crafted the CPA were in such a hurry to see the creation of a new state with its associated geopolitical and economic advantages that they failed to ponder the specifcities of the environment in which DDR, which is a sensitive and complex programme, would be implemented.
Johnson concurs with Turyamureeba and adds that as a result of the failure to address these issues, many South Sudanese expected that the simmering intercommunal tensions would eventually erupt in some form of confict following independence in 2011. But he concludes that the rapid escalation and intensity of fghting in December 2013 took everyone by surprise. This was a manifestation of what occurs when the underlying political and military interests of actors are not part of agreeable terms of peace in negotiations. Even though some critics may argue that the 2005 negotiations were more about the secession and subsequent independence of South Sudan from Sudan, the risk of a potential intra-South Sudan confict was quite evident.