South Sudan: War, Peace Processes and Regional Economic Integration

In retrospect, South Sudan’s independence presaged a change in the regional economic order. The implications of these changes became apparent in the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD)’s inability to bring a swift end to the post-independence civil war and hold parties to the original Agreement for the Resolution of Conflict in South Sudan (ARCSS) they had forced them to sign in 2015. Early fears that the first South Sudan civil war would become the site of a wider regional conflagration, with Uganda and Sudan as the principal protagonists and the Kiir government and Machar’s opposition as their respective proxies, did not materialise. Rapprochement between Juba and Khartoum, and Khartoum and Kampala, based on their mutual interests in Juba’s oil-based economy had gone relatively unnoticed.