Grassroots Deals Offer South Sudan Its Best Hope for Peace

[John Ashworth]

Grassroots Deals, Not International Processes, Offer South Sudan Its
Best Hope for Peace

Centre on Armed Groups
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 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.

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.

https://www.armedgroupscentre.org/reports-and-articles/grassroots-deals-south-sudan

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