Navigating Fragility: Unraveling Intergroup Relations in South Sudan’s Peace-Building Process

Abstract

Since gaining independence in 2011, the Republic of South Sudan as the world’s youngest nation has been ranked among the most fragile states. Moreover, the civil wars that erupted in 2013 and 2016 resulted in intercommunal violence and crimes against humanity, leading to an immeasurable humanitarian crisis in the region. While it still suffers from political instability, internal security challenges, and lack of economic development, the legacy of ethnic mistrust shaping the intergroup relations within South Sudanese society remains critical. Therefore, this paper seeks to understand the peace-building process in South Sudan to shed light on the stemming reasons that have kept the state-building efforts and peace-building initiatives ill-equipped. The mainstream literature often relies on investigating the functionality of governmental structures in respect to state-building initiatives, and this paper argues that the formation of a collective consciousness toward the constitution of a shared collective identity within the multiethnic society of South Sudan is one of the leading issues in question. Because war-torn South Sudan presents the prototype of a fragile state with its civil wars, armed conflicts, poverty, weak state institutions, and social inequalities, the study utilizes the conceptual framework of fragile states in order to examine the internal factors of fragility.

Keywords

• Civil war
• Peace-building
• Collective identity
• Fragile states
• South Sudan

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