Peace agreements can stop a war. They rarely make a state work. South Sudan’s post-2013 settlement cycle illustrates a repeatable failure mode in international crisis management: mediation delivers an elite pact, then institutions are expected to “boot up” as if the political deal itself were an operating system. It is not. The result has been a sequence of agreements that reshuffle executive positions and defer elections, while the core functions of governability—payroll, budget execution, revenue control, procurement discipline, and service delivery—remain intermittent or absent.
The operational picture is unambiguous. In 2025, the UN reported humanitarian needs affecting 9.3 million people (around 69% of the population) and a response plan requiring $1.7 billion that was only 10.5% funded as of late March 2025 [UN ECOSOC Report of the Secretary-General: Integrated UN Support for South Sudan and the Sahel, Apr 2024–Mar 2025]. In the same reporting window, government revenues fell sharply and salary arrears reached 11–12 months for civil servants and organised forces [UN ECOSOC Report of the Secretary-General: Integrated UN Support for South Sudan and the Sahel, Apr 2024–Mar 2025]. These are not peripheral problems. They are the state.
What South Sudan demonstrates—at high cost—is that diplomacy can suspend conflict without constructing administration, and that international mediation often overestimates elite coherence while underestimating the engineering burden of running public systems. Future interventions must therefore shift from politics to operations: from who sits where, to whether the state can reliably execute the routines that make authority real.
Agreements as constitutional blueprints, not operating systems
South Sudan’s revitalised peace architecture was designed to restore a transitional centre of gravity. The 2018 Revitalised Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in the Republic of South Sudan (R-ARCSS) establishes a Revitalised Transitional Government of National Unity (RTGoNU), sets a pre-transitional period, defines a transitional term, and lays out responsibility-sharing among the signatory blocs [Revitalised Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in the Republic of South Sudan, 12 Sep 2018]. It also states ambitions that are explicitly administrative—most notably “radical reforms and transformation of public financial management systems to ensure transparency and accountability” [Revitalised Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in the Republic of South Sudan, 12 Sep 2018].
The difficulty is that agreements of this type are best understood as constitutional blueprints. They specify political geometry: the distribution of executive roles, the sequencing of elections, the creation of commissions, the outline of security arrangements. They do not install the machinery that converts authority into routine outputs. An operating system—by analogy—requires dependable process: identity and payroll; cash management; procurement rules that can be enforced; audit trails; staffed ministries that can issue directives which are then implemented across territory.
In South Sudan, the blueprint repeatedly outpaced the build. The UN reported in 2025 that key provisions of R-ARCSS remained pending, including permanent constitution-making, national elections, transitional security arrangements, public finance management, reconstruction, and transitional justice [UN ECOSOC Report of the Secretary-General: Integrated UN Support for South Sudan and the Sahel, Apr 2024–Mar 2025]. The transition itself was extended again, with elections rescheduled to December 2026 [UN ECOSOC Report of the Secretary-General: Integrated UN Support for South Sudan and the Sahel, Apr 2024–Mar 2025]. That is not merely political delay. It is an acknowledgement—implicit but continuous—that the administrative prerequisites for a credible electoral state have not been built.
Why successive peace agreements failed to translate into governability
The conventional interpretation of South Sudan’s stalled transitions is political: elite rivalry, mistrust, and incomplete security arrangements. These are real constraints, but they are also incomplete explanations. The deeper failure is structural: successive agreements treated governability as a downstream effect of elite accommodation, rather than as a distinct production problem with its own inputs, constraints, and timelines.
Three features of the state’s political economy make this predictable.
First, revenue concentration collapses the distinction between politics and administration. The IMF has repeatedly underscored that South Sudan is overwhelmingly dependent on oil, with oil exports historically accounting for the vast majority of exports and government revenue [IMF Executive Board Press Release: South Sudan SMP, 10 Jun 2024]. When revenue is narrow, control of the centre is not an abstract constitutional matter; it is the gatekeeper to cash. This incentivises elite bargaining over positions and discretion rather than over systems, because discretionary control is the asset being negotiated. (IMF)
Second, volatility destroys planning horizons. The World Bank reported in March 2025 that South Sudan’s economy was projected to contract by 30% in FY24/25, driven largely by disruption in oil production and associated export revenues, with losses estimated at $7 million per day [World Bank Press Release: South Sudan Economic Monitor Issue 7, 13 Mar 2025]. In such a context, agreements that assume predictable fiscal space for cantonment, force integration, and institution-building are structurally mis-specified: they promise timelines that depend on revenues the state cannot guarantee. (World Bank)
Third, legitimacy in fragile settings is operational before it is constitutional. When the state cannot pay civil servants for close to a year, cannot fund basic services, and cannot stabilise currency dynamics, the “settlement” does not feel like a settlement. It feels like a periodic reallocation of elite access to scarcity. In 2025, the UN reported 11–12 months of salary arrears and a sharp depreciation of the currency in the unofficial market from 1,260 SSP per US dollar in early January 2024 to 5,800 SSP per US dollar by late March 2025 [UN ECOSOC Report of the Secretary-General: Integrated UN Support for South Sudan and the Sahel, Apr 2024–Mar 2025]. Administrative failure becomes the visible face of politics.
Mediation as conflict suspension, not state construction
International mediation is built to solve a particular category of problem: violent contestation among armed elites. Its tools—ceasefire monitoring, power-sharing formulas, transitional timelines, security guarantees—are suited to stopping escalation and creating a minimum political container. In South Sudan, R-ARCSS explicitly centres the establishment of a transitional government tasked with implementing the agreement, restoring stability, and enabling a path to elections [Revitalised Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in the Republic of South Sudan, 12 Sep 2018]. That is mediation doing what mediation is designed to do.
What mediation is not designed to do is construct an administrative state. “State construction” requires long-duration capability building, political protection for technocratic routines, and enforcement mechanisms against rent extraction that are typically absent in transitional pacts. It also requires something mediators do not control: time without fiscal collapse.
South Sudan’s macro-fiscal trajectory makes the distinction visible. In June 2024, the IMF described an economy expected to contract sharply, with rising inflation and a severe fiscal shock linked to oil production issues [IMF Executive Board Press Release: South Sudan SMP, 10 Jun 2024]. By October 2024, the IMF reported inflation at 107.3% (year-on-year, end-July 2024), currency depreciation, and salary arrears around six months [IMF End-of-Mission Statement: South Sudan, 2 Oct 2024]. These dynamics are not simply economic indicators; they are the operating conditions under which any peace implementation must occur. They indicate that the state is not merely post-conflict. It is operationally insolvent. (IMF)
In practice, mediation in such environments becomes a form of conflict suspension. It reduces the probability of full-scale relapse by creating joint mechanisms, international attention, and a stake in the process for key elites. But suspension is not construction. It can even crowd construction out, because the political energy of the system is consumed by maintaining the coalition, managing defections, and renegotiating timelines—rather than building the administrative routines that would reduce the coalition’s fragility in the first place.
The administrative hard constraint: payroll, cash, and control
Governability is measurable. The fastest diagnostic is payroll: whether the state can identify its workforce, control its wage bill, and pay salaries on time through auditable systems. On this dimension, South Sudan’s constraints are not marginal; they are foundational.
World Bank project documentation on public financial management (PFM) in South Sudan described a public sector that dominates formal employment, with 449,343 national-level public sector employees in FY2019/20 [World Bank South Sudan PFM and Institutional Strengthening Project, 2022]. Critically, it noted that payroll management challenges pose significant fiscal risks and that the security sector and rule-of-law functions employ nine in ten public sector employees [World Bank South Sudan PFM and Institutional Strengthening Project, 2022]. This is a structural trap: the wage bill is concentrated in coercive institutions, while capacity to administer that bill is weak. (World Bank)
The same World Bank material documented a payroll architecture that is technologically obsolete and procedurally fragmented: servers procured more than a decade earlier, human resource management that remains mostly manual, limited experience paying civil servants through bank accounts, and weak accountability when unpaid salary funds are not returned to the treasury [World Bank South Sudan PFM and Institutional Strengthening Project, 2022]. This is what “non-governability” looks like in administrative terms. The state does not lack policy. It lacks machinery. (World Bank)
By 2024–25, the consequences were visible at national scale. An IMF programme document from late 2024 included commitments by the authorities to repay salary arrears and to pay one month of salary every month during FY2024/25 to prevent arrears from accumulating further [IMF Country Report No. 24/327: Third Review under Staff-Monitored Program, 11 Nov 2024]. The UN reported that arrears nevertheless reached 11–12 months in early 2025 [UN ECOSOC Report of the Secretary-General: Integrated UN Support for South Sudan and the Sahel, Apr 2024–Mar 2025]. The point is not the inconsistency. The point is the constraint: even where commitments exist, the operating environment repeatedly overwhelms them. (IMF)
This is why elite political settlements have not translated into governability. Without payroll control and cash management, ministries are titles. Governors are decrees. Uniformed integration is a communiqué. The administrative state cannot be willed into existence by signatures. It has to be built—and protected—from the daily incentives that turn public finance into private distribution. (World Bank)
The settlement–capacity gap: when institutions exist on paper only
R-ARCSS is not silent on administration. It mandates reforms to public financial management, envisages constitutional processes, and embeds a logic of institutional rebuilding [Revitalised Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in the Republic of South Sudan, 12 Sep 2018]. The gap is therefore not an absence of clauses. It is an absence of executable capacity—human, fiscal, and organisational—under conditions of chronic political contestation.
The UN’s 2025 reporting makes this concrete. It identified persistent divergence between budget allocations, execution, and actual spending, and described a budget suffering from narrow tax base and weak PFM systems [UN ECOSOC Report of the Secretary-General: Integrated UN Support for South Sudan and the Sahel, Apr 2024–Mar 2025]. It also highlighted that social services remain highly dependent on donor contributions, weakening national capacities for policy design, implementation, oversight, and data generation [UN ECOSOC Report of the Secretary-General: Integrated UN Support for South Sudan and the Sahel, Apr 2024–Mar 2025]. This is the settlement–capacity gap in plain terms: the state’s paper institutions do not control the resources or systems required to do what those institutions nominally exist to do.
The OHCHR’s Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan has framed this as predation rather than mere weakness. In September 2025, it stated that official analysis showed oil inflows exceeding $25.2 billion since 2011, while revenues were siphoned off through opaque off-budget schemes and politically connected contracts [UN OHCHR Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan Press Release: “Plundering a Nation”, 16 Sep 2025]. It reported severe budgetary distortion, including the Ministry of Presidential Affairs overspending its allocation by 584% between July 2020 and June 2024 [UN OHCHR Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan Press Release: “Plundering a Nation”, 16 Sep 2025]. This matters for mediation because it clarifies the mechanism: agreements can create new institutions, but predatory spending patterns can starve them of funds, staff, and credibility. (OHCHR)
Meanwhile, the macro-operating environment erodes even basic connectivity. The UN reported electricity access of roughly 5.4% as of 2023 and only 2% of the 20,000 km road network paved [UN ECOSOC Report of the Secretary-General: Integrated UN Support for South Sudan and the Sahel, Apr 2024–Mar 2025; Tracking SDG 7: Energy Progress Report 2023]. In such infrastructure conditions, the administrative state cannot rely on routine mobility, communications, or service delivery. Even if a ministry were competent, the platform it governs is thin.
Why international mediation overestimates elite coherence
Mediation typically assumes that signatories are coherent actors: that “the government” can implement what “the government” agrees to, and that “the opposition” can deliver compliance from its forces and political wings. In South Sudan, this assumption has repeatedly failed.
The UN’s 2025 reporting describes rising tensions among parties to R-ARCSS, frequent removals and reappointments of officials, stalled mediation tracks, and political crises that escalated into arrests of senior figures [UN ECOSOC Report of the Secretary-General: Integrated UN Support for South Sudan and the Sahel, Apr 2024–Mar 2025]. The OHCHR Commission reported that opposition structures fractured under pressure, while elite appointments proliferated [UN OHCHR Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan Press Release: “Plundering a Nation”, 16 Sep 2025]. These are not merely political events; they indicate that signatory labels do not map cleanly onto disciplined chains of command or stable coalition interests.
Coherence is also undermined by the economics of coalition maintenance. When the fiscal base is narrow and volatile, elites sustain cohesion by distributing access to rents and positions rather than by enforcing impersonal rules. Yet impersonal rules—procurement discipline, payroll integrity, cash controls—are precisely what an administrative state requires. Mediation frameworks that prize inclusion in executive allocations can therefore unintentionally reinforce the very incentives that undermine governability.
Security arrangements make this sharper. The UN reported that commitments toward security sector reform, disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration remained outstanding due to political mistrust, lack of transparency, and funding constraints [UN ECOSOC Report of the Secretary-General: Integrated UN Support for South Sudan and the Sahel, Apr 2024–Mar 2025]. That triad is decisive. “Mistrust” is political. “Lack of transparency” is administrative. “Funding constraints” are fiscal. It is the interaction of all three—not one in isolation—that prevents implementation.
International frameworks often respond by adding more mechanisms—commissions, monitoring bodies, new timelines—rather than by confronting the coherence problem directly. But mechanisms cannot substitute for disciplined execution capacity. If the actors are coalition networks rather than rule-bound institutions, then compliance will remain selective, and implementation will remain a tool of bargaining rather than a technical programme.
Five mechanisms that convert political settlements into non-governability
South Sudan’s experience points to five mechanisms through which peace agreements fail to translate into governability. Each is operational, not rhetorical.
1) Fiscal centralisation without fiscal systems.
Oil dependence concentrates power at the centre, but without strong PFM it also concentrates opportunity for leakage. IMF reporting has repeatedly emphasised the scale of oil dependence in trade and revenue [IMF Executive Board Press Release: South Sudan SMP, 10 Jun 2024]. The OHCHR Commission described opaque off-budget schemes and politically connected contracting as a systemic pattern [UN OHCHR Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan Press Release: “Plundering a Nation”, 16 Sep 2025]. The combined effect is a centre that controls cash but cannot—or will not—convert it into predictable budgets and services. (IMF)
2) Revenue volatility that collapses implementation schedules.
World Bank analysis tied FY24/25 contraction to oil disruption and estimated export revenue losses of $7 million per day [World Bank Press Release: South Sudan Economic Monitor Issue 7, 13 Mar 2025]. The UN reported that Upper Nile accounts for around 70% of oil revenue and that resumption required meeting security evaluation and operational conditions [UN ECOSOC Report of the Secretary-General: Integrated UN Support for South Sudan and the Sahel, Apr 2024–Mar 2025]. Peace agreement timelines that depend on sustained fiscal flows will consistently fail under such volatility, producing a cycle of extensions that erode credibility. (World Bank)
3) Payroll fragility that turns the public sector into a liquidity shock absorber.
When salaries go unpaid, the state effectively imposes austerity through arrears, pushing civil servants into coping strategies and degrading service delivery. The UN documented 11–12 months of arrears [UN ECOSOC Report of the Secretary-General: Integrated UN Support for South Sudan and the Sahel, Apr 2024–Mar 2025]. IMF programme commitments to stabilise salary payment highlight how central the issue is, yet also how hard it is to solve absent stable revenue and robust payroll controls [IMF Country Report No. 24/327: Third Review under Staff-Monitored Program, 11 Nov 2024].
4) Infrastructure thinness that prevents territorial administration.
Low electricity access and minimal paved roads are not development trivia; they define the feasible bandwidth of administration. The UN reported electricity access around 5.4% and only 2% of roads paved [UN ECOSOC Report of the Secretary-General: Integrated UN Support for South Sudan and the Sahel, Apr 2024–Mar 2025]. In such conditions, decentralised governance, monitoring, and basic service delivery require extraordinary logistical cost—cost that is not priced into standard peace implementation plans.
5) External substitution that sustains services while weakening state capability.
The UN noted that social service delivery remains highly dependent on donors, undermining sustainability and national oversight capacity [UN ECOSOC Report of the Secretary-General: Integrated UN Support for South Sudan and the Sahel, Apr 2024–Mar 2025]. The OHCHR Commission stated directly that international donors spend more on basic services than the government itself [UN OHCHR Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan Press Release: “Plundering a Nation”, 16 Sep 2025]. Donor provision saves lives; it can also reduce the pressure—and sometimes the political space—for the government to build a functional service state. This is not an argument against aid. It is an argument for aid that builds operational capability rather than bypassing it indefinitely.
How future interventions must shift from politics to operations
If the diagnosis is operational, the response must be operational. In South Sudan, the recurrent pattern has been: (1) negotiate a political settlement; (2) finance monitoring and political mechanisms; (3) treat technical assistance as supporting rather than defining; (4) express surprise when governability does not follow. This must invert.
Three shifts are required.
Shift 1: From “implementation of the agreement” to “execution of the state”.
The operational agenda should be framed as a small number of measurable functions, with quarterly verification that is as serious as ceasefire monitoring. The baseline functions are: verified payroll and human resource control; treasury cash management; oil revenue reporting and reconciliation; procurement compliance; budget execution reporting; and service delivery outputs in a limited number of priority sectors (health, basic education, water). South Sudan’s own agreement language on PFM reform provides a legitimate hook for this framing [Revitalised Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in the Republic of South Sudan, 12 Sep 2018].
Shift 2: From elite bargains to operational conditionality that is politically survivable.
Conditionality must stop being purely political (formation deadlines, election dates) and become operational (salary regularity, publication of execution data, oil revenue transparency, audit completion). The IMF’s programme architecture already operates in this space, with explicit commitments on salary arrears, monetary financing, and fiscal transparency [IMF Country Report No. 24/327: Third Review under Staff-Monitored Program, 11 Nov 2024]. The World Bank’s reform messaging similarly emphasises oil revenue management, exchange rate flexibility, and arrears clearance [World Bank Press Release: South Sudan Economic Monitor Issue 7, 13 Mar 2025]. The missing element is political integration: operational benchmarks must be treated as peace implementation, not as technocratic side work. (IMF)
Shift 3: From “capacity building” as training to “capacity building” as system installation.
Workshops do not run payroll. Advisers do not reconcile oil receipts. A functioning operating platform requires system installation: upgraded payroll infrastructure; banking-based payment pipelines where feasible; treasury controls that prevent diversion; and audit trails that can be externally validated. The World Bank’s documentation on obsolete servers and manual HR processes is a reminder that the bottleneck is often basic system infrastructure, not policy intent [World Bank South Sudan PFM and Institutional Strengthening Project, 2022]. (World Bank)
An operational agenda for governments and multilateral institutions
A shift to operations is not a slogan. It is a programme design choice. For governments and multilaterals seeking to avoid repeating South Sudan’s cycle, the following agenda is actionable.
1) Add an “Operations Annex” to peace mediation frameworks.
Every mediated settlement should include a short annex of non-negotiable operational milestones: verified payroll baseline; monthly publication of budget execution; publication of oil revenue transfers and deductions; and a timetable for integrating payroll with a basic financial management information system. These are not substitutes for political provisions. They are prerequisites for making political provisions credible. South Sudan’s agreement explicitly mandates PFM reform and appeals for international support, providing a legal-political basis for such an annex [Revitalised Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in the Republic of South Sudan, 12 Sep 2018].
2) Treat salary regularity as a peace and security benchmark.
Arrears of 11–12 months are not merely fiscal distress; they are a security risk because they undermine discipline, degrade service delivery, and incentivise predation. The UN’s reporting makes arrears and humanitarian deterioration part of the same crisis system [UN ECOSOC Report of the Secretary-General: Integrated UN Support for South Sudan and the Sahel, Apr 2024–Mar 2025]. A credible peace support strategy should therefore prioritise salary regularity alongside ceasefire compliance.
3) Rebalance support from “political architecture” to “fiscal architecture”.
Monitoring mechanisms matter, but so do treasury systems. Financing should be structured to build auditable cash control, not only political dialogue. The World Bank’s emphasis on oil revenue management and fiscal transparency, and the IMF’s emphasis on restraining monetary financing, point to the core operational levers [World Bank Press Release: South Sudan Economic Monitor Issue 7, 13 Mar 2025; IMF Country Report No. 24/327: Third Review under Staff-Monitored Program, 11 Nov 2024]. (World Bank)
4) Use public expenditure visibility as an anti-corruption instrument.
Where formal enforcement is weak, transparency can still reshape incentives—if it is systematic and externally validated. The OHCHR Commission’s finding of extreme overspending by a politically central ministry illustrates why visibility matters [UN OHCHR Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan Press Release: “Plundering a Nation”, 16 Sep 2025]. Budget execution reporting should be required, standardised, and linked to financing decisions. (OHCHR)
5) Design aid to build state capability where possible, and to avoid permanent substitution.
The UN and OHCHR both document the extent to which donors underpin basic services [UN ECOSOC Report of the Secretary-General: Integrated UN Support for South Sudan and the Sahel, Apr 2024–Mar 2025; UN OHCHR Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan Press Release: “Plundering a Nation”, 16 Sep 2025]. The operational question is not whether to fund services, but how to finance them in ways that expand government oversight capacity: shared data systems, joint planning, and progressively increased government budget responsibility where transparency thresholds are met.
6) Align sanctions and benchmarks with operational outcomes.
The UN Security Council’s South Sudan sanctions architecture references “benchmarks” for reviewing embargo measures [UN Security Council: S/RES/2731(2024), 30 May 2024]. Those benchmarks should include operational governance indicators—public finance transparency, payroll integrity, and execution reporting—because these are measurable and directly tied to stability. (United Nations)
Conclusion
South Sudan’s peace agreements did not “fail” because they were irrelevant. They failed because they were over-expected. Mediation can produce a political container; it cannot by itself produce an administrative operating system. Governability is built from routines: payroll, cash controls, revenue transparency, procurement discipline, and service delivery. Where these do not function, political settlements become periodic elite rearrangements over a shrinking fiscal base.
The most consequential lesson is therefore institutional, not rhetorical. If the international community continues to treat peace implementation as a primarily political exercise, it will continue to fund meetings while the state fails at the basics. If it treats peace implementation as an operational build—measured, verified, and enforced through financing and transparency—then agreements can become platforms for governability rather than pauses between crises. South Sudan’s own agreement language points in that direction. The task now is to operationalise it.
