The signing of the 2018 Revitalized Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in South Sudan (R-ARCSS) created enormous hope for a country exhausted by years of civil war. The agreement sought to establish a transitional government, reunify security forces, reform institutions, conduct a permanent constitution-making process, and prepare South Sudan for democratic elections. It produced important political accommodation, but its implementation has fallen far short of its ambitions.

The central lesson is that peace cannot be achieved simply by bringing political leaders together and dividing government positions among them. Peace must always transform the institutions, incentives, and conditions that repeatedly produce conflict.

1. The implementation gap became the central problem

The evidence is clear. By September 2024, monitoring of the agreement recorded 10% of tasks as completed, 33% as ongoing, and 57% as pending. The transitional period was consequently extended, while elections planned for December 2024 were postponed.

This illustrates one of the agreement’s greatest weaknesses: deadlines without sufficiently strong enforcement mechanisms. When deadlines could repeatedly be postponed, implementation lost urgency.

A future agreement must therefore identify every obligation, responsible institution, financing source, deadline, and measurable outcome, as well as establish consequences for persistent non-compliance.

2. Security-sector reform remained incomplete

The agreement envisioned unified, professional national security forces. Yet the unification, training, deployment, financing, and command arrangements of the Necessary Unified Forces remained incomplete, while UN and regional partners continued to call for completion of these arrangements.

The consequences are reflected in the security situation. During 2024, UNMISS documented 1,019 violent incidents affecting 3,657 civilians, including 1,561 killings, 1,299 injuries, 551 abductions, and 246 victims of conflict-related sexual violence. Community-based militias and civil-defense groups accounted for 79% of documented victims.

These numbers demonstrate that national political agreements cannot substitute for effective security institutions capable of protecting citizens.

3. The peace process remained too elite-centered

The R-ARCSS primarily negotiated relationships among political and military elites. But South Sudan’s conflict also involves communities, land, cattle, resources, local political competition, historical grievances, displacement, and weak institutions.

In the first quarter of 2025 alone, UNMISS documented 1,607 victims of conflict-related violence, including 739 killed, 679 injured, 149 abducted, and 40 subjected to conflict-related sexual violence, the highest quarterly number recorded since 2020.

A national peace agreement cannot succeed permanently if communities remain insecure.

4. Accountability and institutional reform were insufficient

Peace without accountability can leave the underlying incentives for violence untouched. Likewise, institutions that depend excessively on personalities rather than constitutional rules cannot reliably manage political competition.

The implementation record identified unfinished reconciliation and healing, incomplete security arrangements, inadequate devolution of powers and resources, insufficient support for implementation mechanisms, and delays in reconstituting independent commissions and institutions.

This points to a fundamental lesson: South Sudan needs institution-building, not merely elite accommodation.

5. The humanitarian consequences are enormous

The ultimate measure of peace is the security and dignity of ordinary citizens. UNHCR’s 2025 situation overview reported approximately 2.3 million South Sudanese refugees and asylum-seekers in neighbouring countries and about 2 million internally displaced people.

These figures represent families separated, children deprived of stable education, communities unable to rebuild, and citizens who continue to live outside their homes more than a decade after the beginning of the civil war.

What must South Sudan do differently in a future peace agreement?

First, make implementation measurable. Every peace provision should have a deadline, responsible institution, budget, and public reporting mechanism.

Second, build genuinely national security institutions. Soldiers and police must serve the constitution and citizens rather than political personalities or factions.

Third, broaden the peace process. Women, youth, civil society, faith leaders, traditional authorities, opposition movements, refugees, internally displaced people, and affected communities must have meaningful participation.

Fourth, strengthen constitutional governance. Political disputes must be resolved through institutions, courts, legislatures, elections, and dialogue, and not through armed mobilization.

Fifth, establish credible accountability. Serious violations must be investigated and addressed through legitimate judicial and transitional-justice mechanisms.

Sixth, address local conflicts. National peace must connect directly to community reconciliation, land disputes, cattle-related conflicts, resource competition, and local governance.

Finally, elections must be credible rather than merely scheduled. An election date by itself does not create democracy. Citizens need political space, credible electoral institutions, civic participation, security, and confidence that political competition will not return the country to violence.

The shortcomings of the 2018 agreement should therefore become a lesson, not a destiny. South Sudan does not simply need another document signed by political leaders. It needs a peace architecture capable of changing political incentives, strengthening institutions, protecting civilians, promoting accountability, and making peaceful political competition more effective than armed confrontation.

The question before South Sudan is no longer simply, “How do we sign another peace agreement?” The more important question is: “How do we build a political and institutional system in which another war becomes unnecessary?”

That is the lesson South Sudan must learn, and the responsibility of its leaders, political movements, civil society, communities, regional partners, and international community to ensure that the failures associated with implementation of the 2018 agreement are never repeated.