In its thirteen years as an independent country, South Sudan has been plagued by political and economic instability. Negotiations in Nairobi between the coalition government, which is made up of the parties that signed a 2018 peace deal, and various holdout groups seek to supplement the precarious power-sharing arrangement agreed upon six years ago. That peace deal, signed by South Sudan President Salva Kiir and former rebel leader and current First Vice President Riek Machar, created a government of national unity and laid out a series of goals, such as drafting a new constitution, unifying the armed forces (which had splintered upon the onset of civil war in 2013) and holding elections. But after several extensions, the accord is once again due to expire soon, though few of its promises have been met. Furthermore, violence is simmering across South Sudan, and the country’s oil revenues have collapsed following the war in neighbouring Sudan. It now seems improbable that elections supposed to be held in December will take place.

Since Kenya launched the talks between Kiir’s government and exiled opposition leaders in Nairobi in May, negotiations have focused on rebooting the 2018 deal, extending the deadline for its implementation and greenlighting a delay in the polls. Machar, who is currently part of the national unity administration in Juba, is represented on the government side, but his rift with President Kiir, as well as internal divisions in Kiir’s camp, imperil the negotiations. Machar has insisted that Kiir honour the entirety of the 2018 deal before organising polls, and he has reacted frostily to a preliminary agreement signed in Nairobi, claiming that it has made changes to the arrangements now in place. In mid-July, he pulled out of the talks. Parallel conversations between Kiir and Machar have since kicked off in Juba, but there is no sign as yet that these will culminate in a new deal. 

The prospect of political deadlock and turbulence over the potential postponement of elections could not come at a more inauspicious moment. The country is suffering an acute humanitarian crisis, with 7.1 million of its twelve million people suffering hunger. The crisis is exacerbated by the civil war in neighbouring Sudan, which has seen hundreds of thousands of people flee southward to the country, starved Juba of oil revenues and disrupted cross-border trade.

Nairobi is providing a forum for political dialogue between representatives of the government and exiled opposition forces. The government and some of the holdout groups that were not party to the 2018 peace deal launched the talks in Rome under the auspices of the Society of Sant’Egidio. Just months earlier, in April 2019, these negotiations had been preceded by a memorable meeting in the Vatican, in which Pope Francis knelt and kissed the feet of Kiir and Machar, along with three other vice presidents, as the pontiff pressed upon these leaders the importance of peace. Eventually, however, these talks broke down in March 2023, prompting President Kiir to ask Kenya in December to take over and restart negotiations. Kenya’s President William Ruto responded by choosing retired General Lazarus Sumbeiywo, who brokered the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended Sudan’s long civil war and won South Sudan its independence, to lead the process. Enjoying good relations with key leaders and negotiators from both sides, Sumbeiywo’s appointment appeared to increase the likelihood that the talks could hatch a deal.

South Sudan’s government is represented at the talks by all parties in the national unity administration, and its delegation is headed by Presidential Special Envoy Albino Mathem Ayuel. Prior to its withdrawal from the talks, Machar’s party was represented on the government side by Stephen Par Kuol, minister of peacebuilding. The exiled opposition side, in turn, is made up of groups that were not signatories to the 2018 peace deal and whose leaders seek to return to the country. These include Pagan Amum, former secretary general of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), South Sudan’s ruling party that led the campaign for independence, who heads a group of exiled close associates of the late SPLM founder John Garang; former army chief Paul Malong, who launched a short-lived rebellion in 2018; and Stephen Buoy, a prominent former general who started a rebel movement in 2021 that has ties to armed groups near the Sudan border. Other smaller groups and exiled activists are also taking part, although one major rebel leader from Central Equatoria state, Thomas Cirillo, has refused to join despite his participation in the Rome talks, citing fears for his safety in Nairobi. 

Civil society groups, for their part, have decried the lack of women delegates at the talks. Although civil society organisations have two women representatives, and the government delegation also includes two women, the ten-strong opposition delegation is exclusively male.

Kiir’s initial goals when the talks began in Nairobi appeared fairly narrow, but Kenya’s mediators have pushed him into pursuing a broader political agenda as well. From Kiir’s point of view, accommodating each of the main opposition leaders present in the Nairobi talks serves a distinct tactical purpose, even if none of them on their own boasts a major following. Kiir aims to overcome his government’s international isolation by incorporating into his government Amum, who had been in exile in the U.S. since 2016. The president is also looking to boost his support in the populous northern Bahr el Ghazal region ahead of future elections by bringing Malong, who is from the area, on board. A deal that includes Buoy, meanwhile, could help to alleviate insecurity along South Sudan’s border with Sudan: the former general is close both to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), one of the main belligerents in Sudan’s civil war, as well as to South Sudanese forces which have fought alongside them across the border in Sudan’s West Kordofan. Negotiating with the RSF over repairing damage to South Sudan’s main oil pipeline, which has deprived the country of its main revenue source, is proving arduous for authorities in Juba. 

At the same time as trying to placate his opponents and bring them into the government fold, Kiir is intent on rejigging the terms of power sharing laid out in the 2018 peace accord. His primary aim in this regard is to dilute Machar’s share of power and ability to veto policy. Kiir also seems to hope that a deal championed by Kenya, a close U.S. ally, could ease his international isolation at a moment of acute fiscal and security threats stemming from the war in Sudan.

Once talks got under way in May, however, the Kenyan mediation team pushed for a more expansive deal. Concerns that South Sudan’s stability was at serious risk and needed more than a power-sharing sticking plaster in large part drove this move. The loss in February of the bulk of the country’s state revenue due to the breakdown of its main oil export pipeline through Sudan fuelled concerns that Juba would be plunged into a deep fiscal hole (on which subject, more below). Meanwhile, long-running, UN-sponsored talks in Juba among Kiir, Machar and others on whether and how to postpone December elections had made little progress, setting up a potential political showdown as elections grew nearer. 

Fearing that South Sudan might follow its northern neighbour down the path of conflict, Kenya proposed a deal that would kickstart a legitimate constitutional process, which Crisis Group has argued is crucial to stabilising the country, and prepare the country for credible elections further down the line. The accord would also reset the country’s transitional period, which is set to expire in February 2025. With these aims in mind, Kenya is trying to help a young, violence-prone neighbour regain its footing before it wreaks more havoc. President Ruto also likely hopes that forging a path forward in South Sudan will help consolidate Kenya’s growing reputation as a reliable anchor state and broker in the troubled Horn of Africa. 

That said, longstanding political rivalries in South Sudan continue to overshadow the talks. Though nominally represented in the same delegation as Kiir, Machar is stalling the Nairobi negotiations out of concern that the president is using the process to undermine and bypass him. Although Machar’s political and military sway has waned considerably since the 2018 accord, he could still spark upheaval and violence, especially if he decides to withdraw from government altogether. Machar’s links with both sides in Sudan’s civil war, as well as his reliance in the past on support from governments in Khartoum for his armed uprising, could pose perils. Machar’s opposition would also dent the legitimacy of any accord or extension of power signed without him.

Until Machar dropped out on 16 July, the negotiations in Nairobi had shown signs of progress. The previous day, the delegates signed protocols on humanitarian access, confidence-building measures and security arrangements. The preliminary agreement also established new ways to ensure that a final deal will be implemented, while leaving to one side sticky issues revolving around power sharing, drafting a constitution and an election timetable. 

The preliminary agreement proposes to address some of the obstacles that implementation of the 2018 peace accord has faced by strengthening oversight. It envisages the creation of a high-level oversight panel, led by Kenya’s President Ruto, to keep tabs on rollout of the accord. Closer monitoring by regional powers could in theory boost the chance that reforms promised in a final deal are honoured, including resuming the moribund process of fashioning a new constitution before holding elections. The deal also proposes creating a joint account that donors and the South Sudanese government would contribute to and share control of; they would hope to attract fresh funds to fund any reforms that a final agreement settles upon.

But these agreements have limited value without consensus between the two main figures in South Sudanese political life, Kiir and Machar (even if the latter appears diminished for now). The decision by Machar’s party to withdraw from the talks was spurred by what he described in two letters he wrote to the mediators as the government’s bid to undermine the 2018 peace deal. He and his allies fear losing the guarantee that Machar’s party receive 28 per cent of cabinet positions, 23 per cent of seats in the national parliament and 27 per cent of government positions at state levels, all elements of the deal that paved the way for creating a government of national unity. As a result, Machar has maintained that the Nairobi process should be treated as no more than an annex to the 2018 peace agreement rather than a separate deal that could supplant the earlier accord. Although the protocols signed on 15 July made no reference to these quotas, they did indicate that the new agreements would assume a higher status than the 2018 deal.

Despite the withdrawal of Machar’s party from the talks, the opposition delegation and the remaining parts of the government delegation have continued to discuss implementation mechanisms and are now working on future arrangements for distributing power. At the same time, Kiir and Machar have once again struck up their own negotiations in Juba. Even if Machar returns to the Nairobi process, the path to an inclusive new deal is uncertain as the parties may not agree on the fundamental issues of how to align the 2018 peace accord with the Nairobi initiative and which of the two is predominant. Some of Kiir’s allies are also uneasy with the Nairobi negotiations, fearing that these talks will threaten their power within the government; these divisions inside Kiir’s camp could make it hard for him to make concessions. A flare-up among Kiir’s allies would in fact pose one of the greatest risks to South Sudan’s stability, given that the president has created a sprawling security apparatus divided among various factions. 

If the Nairobi talks do not result in a broad agreement soon, and Kiir and Machar fail to reach a deal in Juba, South Sudan will be on the brink of another major political crisis. The government has not prepared for December’s planned elections, and there is no widely accepted understanding as to what to do when the 2018 peace deal expires in February 2025. Even if the government decides to hold elections in the near future, it will face an uphill battle to pay for a national poll, register voters (the electoral rolls have not been updated since 2010) and quell outbreaks of violence across the country.

A signed deal between the main political forces, however, does not mean that South Sudan’s problems will be solved. Squabbling elites, combined with poverty and under-development, an overabundance of firearms and militias, a lack of infrastructure, decades-old grievances among disparate groups and climate catastrophes make up a long roll call of challenges. The 2015 and 2018 peace accords turned out to be little more than precarious power-sharing deals that stilled some of the country’s fighting, while few of their promised provisions were put into effect. Even with the strengthened oversight mechanisms agreed to in the Nairobi protocol signed in July and a date for a future election, there is little reason to expect a stable period of peace, let alone the sort of governance and security reforms South Sudan needs. South Sudan’s political elites still lack a basic pact around how to share resources. Leaky state finances largely bypass official coffers, raising the stakes of the country’s violent dispute for power.

South Sudan’s political tensions and the limits on what the government can do to address them is made worse by the financial crunch. The country’s principal export is oil, but as a landlocked nation it is entirely dependent on its war-torn northern neighbour to get oil to international markets, using two pipelines to transport crude to Port Sudan on the Red Sea. One of these pipelines, responsible for about two thirds of South Sudan’s oil exports, broke down in February, drastically reducing Juba’s revenue. Income from oil exports does not just sustain the South Sudanese economy; the proceeds also underwrite a patronage network that President Kiir uses to maintain an uneasy overall peace. Without that largesse, the country could easily lose its precarious political cohesion.

With economic conditions deteriorating markedly, the lack of consensus between Kiir and Machar, as well as the wider discord with other parts of the country’s political elites, could tip the country back toward more generalised violence, both nationally and locally. Despite the 2018 peace deal, insurgencies against the Juba government have persisted. Other deadly clashes continue in many areas of the country, including the regions of Jonglei, Unity, Warrap and Abyei (the last of these disputed between Sudan and South Sudan), often involving communal militias backed by their respective elites. They exact a heavy toll on civilians, especially women and children. 

As Kiir and Machar remain divided over the timing and management of the elections scheduled for December and what the Nairobi talks should achieve, South Sudan is on the precipice of a period of profound uncertainty and instability. The consequences could resonate beyond South Sudan: increased unrest would complicate the civil war in Sudan, given the networks entwining the two countries’ elites. The RSF would be disposed to align with opponents of Kiir given its poor relations with the president, which might push him to throw in his lot with the RSF’s foe, the Sudanese army. The authentic nightmare scenario is now the extension of Sudan’s war to both countries.