Peace on paper and blood on the ground by Eze Ogbu

South Sudan is once again sliding into the familiar abyss of civil war, and this time there is no illusion left to hide behind. When a senior army commander orders his troops to “spare no one,” explicitly naming children and the elderly, the language of politics collapses into the language of annihilation. This is not a tragic misunderstanding, not an unfortunate escalation. It is a declaration that civilian life is expendable, that survival itself has become partisan.

The arrest and looming trial of Vice-President Riek Machar, accused of treason and other charges he denies, is being framed by the government as a necessary step toward stability. In reality, it has acted as a spark thrown onto dry grass. South Sudan’s power-sharing agreements have always been brittle, stitched together by external pressure rather than internal reconciliation. Once again, the country is learning that peace imposed from above, without trust below, dissolves the moment fear takes over.

What makes this moment particularly bleak is its predictability. South Sudan was born in hope and baptized in blood. Independence promised dignity after decades of marginalization, yet the state that emerged never truly belonged to its people. It belonged to armed men, to ethnic calculations, to leaders who mastered the art of survival but never the discipline of governance. Each peace deal has been less a roadmap forward than a pause to reload.

The renewed violence exposes a deeper truth: South Sudan is not suffering from a lack of agreements, but from a surplus of bad ones. Deals signed in foreign capitals, celebrated with handshakes and headlines, have consistently failed to address the core problem, power in South Sudan is zero-sum. To lose office is to risk death, exile, or prison. To share power is to invite betrayal. Under such conditions, peace becomes tactical rather than moral.

Into this landscape stepped Donald Trump’s self-styled peacemaking legacy, eager to claim another diplomatic trophy. Like many externally brokered agreements before it, the deal rested on the assumption that elite signatures could restrain elite violence. But South Sudan is not a chessboard where kings move predictably. It is a fractured society where militias answer more to ethnicity, fear, and revenge than to any central command. When violence returns, it does so with interest.

The language now emerging from the battlefield, orders to kill indiscriminately, signals something even more alarming than political rivalry. It suggests a moral unravelling so complete that the concept of innocence has vanished. Children are no longer symbols of the future; they are collateral. Elders are no longer keepers of memory; they are obstacles. This is how civil wars rot societies from the inside out, long before the last shot is fired.

The international response, as usual, oscillates between concern and fatigue. Condemnations are issued. Meetings are convened. Sanctions are threatened then softened. South Sudan has become a familiar tragedy, and familiarity breeds indifference. The world knows how this story goes, and that knowledge has dulled its sense of urgency. Yet for South Sudanese civilians, this is not a rerun. It is their lives, restarting the same nightmare with new graves.

Blaming individual leaders, whether Machar or his rivals, is emotionally satisfying but analytically shallow. The real failure is systemic. South Sudan’s political economy rewards violence and punishes compromise. Guns remain the fastest route to relevance. Until that changes, removing one man or prosecuting another will only reshuffle the deck. The bloodbath continues not because peace is impossible but because war remains profitable.

There is also an uncomfortable truth for external actors: peace cannot be outsourced. No foreign president, envoy or summit can manufacture legitimacy where none exists. When international diplomacy prioritizes optics over accountability, it becomes complicit in the cycle it claims to break. Calling a deal “historic” does not make it durable. Declaring success does not stop bullets.

South Sudan is not “returning” to civil war; it never truly left it. What is returning is the honesty of violence, stripped of diplomatic euphemisms. The question is no longer whether another peace deal has failed, but how many more must fail before the world admits that paper peace, without justice and real power transformation, is just another weapon, one that kills more slowly but no less surely.