Conclusion

Kiir’s regime views its current military campaign as a success. The Nasir town incident has been used to undermine Machar, and most SPLM/A-IO leaders are in prison or exiled. Kiir’s power grab, which began with his cabinet purge in mid-2013, appears nearly complete.

In the rest of the country, however, the current situation is unsustainable. The humanitarian situation has gone from bad to worse, and the government has almost no legitimacy. Support for the opposition in Western Bahr el Ghazal and Western Equatoria is widespread. Such is the government’s success in fracturing political constituencies in South Sudan that this popular discontent finds no voice except in local dissent with existing state governments. Such anger, easily ethnicized, is all too often an engine for Kiir’s regime’s fragmentation of the country and not a remedy for it.

This reality is dimly captured by the R-ARCSS. The peace agreement is no longer a vehicle for bringing peace to South Sudan—if it ever was—given the depth of regional involvement in the country’s conflict and the fractured nature of its politics.