South Sudan’s Transition: Citizens’ Perception of Peace

"A power-sharing government set up last month is fueling hope for an end to civil war, but layers of confict remain. The power-sharing deal was implemented under the“Revitalized Agreement on Resolving the Conflict in South Sudan” (R-ARCSS), a peace accord signed in September 2018 that sets out some lofty goals for the new transitional government: Over a two-year period, the government of national unity is to stabilize the situation, open the way for humanitarian assistance, return and resettle displaced populations, implement a sweeping reform agenda, and prepare the country for elections and the subsequent normalization of politics. But easing the top-level conflict—symbolized by the signature “handshake” moment between President Salva Kiir and the leader of the biggest opposition party, Riek Machar—by no means addresses the totality of conflict dynamics at work in South Sudan. Armed conflict tends to proliferate and diversify far beyond the fault lines apparent in national politics. In South Sudan, disputes among elites at the national level have obscured more localized violence, whose causes include perceived marginalization, intercommunal grievances, competition over resources, endemic cattle-raiding and conflict between cattle-keepers and farmers. In a January 2020 report, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan noted that “armed conflict at the national level mostly transformed into localized conflicts at the beginning of December 2018.” From February to May 2019, civilian casualties in such conflicts jumped 192 percent from a year earlier, according to the report. Without a nuanced view of how subnational conflicts relate to the broader one, the transitional government and its international partners won’t understand the conflict management initiatives and deal-making needed to create stability. Critical to developing such an understanding is learning how the citizens of South Sudan perceive the peace process and the politics of the transitional period, and how they experience peace, conflict and political change in their daily lives. "