Governance

South Sudan’s customary authorities play an important role in local government, justice, and as intermediaries or brokers between local communities and the government. While significant attention was paid to the role of customary authorities in South Sudan’s state building project prior to the country’s secession in 2011, the start of South Sudan’s civil war in December 2013 reoriented the focus towards humanitarian activities. Making Order Out of Disorder, which synthesizes and expands on the reports from RVI’s South Sudan Customary Authorities project, refocuses attention back to their position and importance in the country today.
The report considers the hybrid role of customary authorities in governance, the part they play in defining customs, and the evolving nature of chiefship within a rapidly changing and urbanizing society. It concludes that chiefs, and other customary authorities, have retained a meaningful role within South Sudan and do not constitute a static system of governance or affiliation. Given this, there is real value in including them within peacebuilding and other discussions about the future of the country.

This report focuses on the IGAD-led mediation process from December 2013 to August 2015 to address the conflict in South Sudan. As per a project initiated, led and owned by IGAD, it identifies lessons from the South Sudan peace talks with the aim to inform future IGAD mediation efforts.

These lessons are based on interviews conducted by a team of researchers with mediators, advisers, parties and supporters as well as an analysis of internal IGAD documents concerning the South Sudan peace talks.The report highlights the commitment of IGAD to peacemaking in South Sudan, stepping in within days of the outbreak of violence on 15 December 2013 in Juba, convening an extraordinary Summit and mandating a mediation process led by highly experienced envoys.

IGAD’s resolute action helped to prevent further escalation of violence, kept the parties focused on negotiating a political settlement and produced a comprehensive peace agreement signed in August 2015. However, the August 2015 agreement failed to bring peace to South Sudan. This is because the parties lacked genuine willingness to make peace. This condition indeed characterized the South Sudan peace talks throughout. The report cautions IGAD mediators not to rush the process of negotiations. In the interests of sustainable peace, there may be no alternative to strategic patience until the parties reach a sufficient degree of consensus and reconciliation.When the talks reached a standstill in early 2015, IGAD mediators and partners applied leverage, pushing the parties to sign an agreement. This included increased diplomatic pressure, the imposition of targeted sanctions, the threat of an arms embargo and a directive mediation strategy presenting parties with an agreement on a take it or leave it basis. While this strategy produced an agreement, it undermined the parties’ ownership of the agreement, without which sustainable peace is not possible.

South Sudan’s political culture, including its current civil war, is international. This is due to the country’s history of mass migration and displacement, particularly during the last two civil wars from the early 1960s. By the end of the last century, approximately four million of its roughly ten million estimated residents had fled across South Sudan’s borders. Although many regional refugees returned to South Sudan following the CPA in 2005 and independence in 2011, the renewed conflict that began in December 2013 and was reignited in the centre of Juba in July 2016, has forced at least 1.5 million residents to flee once more.

As such, every community across South Sudan is part of a regional and global network. Many politicians, NGO workers, businesspeople and civil servants are themselves returnees or dual nationals. South Sudan’s communities and families have long moved money and goods through international and internal networks. Today, however, as the current civil war spreads and fragments, this transnational network is under significant stress.
South Sudan’s refugee communities have, and have always had, considerable influence on the way that the country’s civil wars evolve. In this study, through research undertaken both in South Sudan and in one of the most active global South Sudanese communities in Australia, the team has attempted to take a broader perspective to understand the nature of this impact—and the mechanisms through which it is felt—more comprehensively.