South Sudan is not facing a single emergency. It is facing five overlapping ones, and each is making the others worse. This explainer maps the full picture and what it means for the country's next twelve months.
The 2018 peace agreement, the Revitalised Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in South Sudan (R-ARCSS), ended the large-scale civil war between President Salva Kiir's government and the forces of Riek Machar. But it did not end violence. In 2025 and into 2026, armed clashes have intensified in several of the country's most fragile states: Upper Nile, Jonglei, and Unity, the same regions that saw the worst fighting during the civil war.
Part of this violence is political in origin: factional disputes within the transitional government, armed groups that were never fully integrated into the peace process, and tensions between communities whose land and power arrangements were never settled in the 2018 agreement. But an increasing share is driven by something different, and in some ways harder to resolve.
Across South Sudan's pastoral and agricultural communities, violence over cattle, gold, land, and water access has been escalating. A gold mine attack near Juba in early 2026 killed more than seventy people, an event that received minimal international attention but illustrated a pattern that OCHA and UNMISS monitors have been tracking for years. Artisanal mining has expanded rapidly since the civil war ended, drawing workers from multiple communities into contested territories with no regulatory oversight and no functioning courts to adjudiate disputes. The result is violent competition decided by whoever has the most weapons, and weapons are plentiful.
Cattle raiding, long a feature of life in Greater Jonglei and Lakes states, has been transformed by automatic weapons from a traditional practice into a mass-casualty event. Raids that once involved spears and produced small numbers of deaths now involve AK-47s and kill dozens at a time. The Lou Nuer-Murle conflict in particular has continued in cycles of raid and retaliation that the transitional government has struggled to interrupt.
Violence is no longer confined to political fault lines. It is spreading through resource competition into communities that were previously more stable, expanding the geography of insecurity and making it harder for any single political settlement to address.
South Sudan is expected to hold general elections in December 2026. On paper, this should represent the culmination of the transitional period, a moment when the country moves from an internationally-managed peace arrangement to a democratically-elected government. In practice, the conditions required for credible elections are almost entirely absent.
Elections, in the current environment, could function as a trigger for renewed conflict rather than a mechanism for resolving political competition. A managed election, nominally competitive but with a predetermined outcome, is more likely than a genuinely free one. A third postponement is also possible. Neither outcome resolves the underlying political crisis.
South Sudan has been producing refugees and internally displaced people for most of its existence. The 2013–2018 civil war displaced an estimated four million people internally and created approximately 2.3 million refugees in neighbouring countries, Uganda, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, and DRC. The 2018 peace agreement allowed some returns, but the combination of ongoing violence and annual flooding has prevented any sustained recovery.
In 2025–2026, displacement has continued on a significant scale. Communities in Jonglei and Upper Nile are moving due to intercommunal fighting. In Unity and Warrap states, flooding has destroyed homes and made farmland inaccessible. Many displaced people are living in temporary shelters, United Nations Protection of Civilian sites, makeshift settlements near town centres, or with host communities already stretched thin.
The humanitarian access problem compounds the displacement crisis. Armed conflict, flooding, and poor infrastructure limit the ability of aid organizations to reach people who have moved. Communities that were already receiving limited support before displacement often receive none after it. Prolonged displacement without support is itself a driver of further instability, people without livelihoods, especially men and boys, are more likely to be recruited by armed groups or to engage in the kind of resource-linked violence described above.
Large-scale displacement increases pressure on already fragile host communities, reduces economic productivity, and creates a pool of people with neither stable livelihoods nor confidence in the state, conditions that fuel rather than contain conflict.
South Sudan has faced chronic food insecurity since independence. In 2017, it became the first country since the early 2000s to have famine officially declared. The causes then, civil war disrupting food production, economic collapse, and blocked humanitarian access, have not been resolved. In 2026, the Integrated Phase Classification (IPC) assessments consistently place millions of South Sudanese in Phase 3 (Crisis) or above, with significant populations in Phase 4 (Emergency).
The drivers of food insecurity are multiple and interacting. Conflict prevents planting and harvest in affected areas. Flooding destroys crops and livestock. The collapse of South Sudan's oil-dependent economy has produced hyperinflation that makes imported food unaffordable for most households. Supply chain disruptions, caused by both the civil war's legacy road destruction and ongoing security risks on key transit routes, mean that food aid cannot easily reach the areas that most need it.
South Sudan's dependence on humanitarian food assistance is structurally problematic. The government has neither the resources nor the institutional capacity to replace aid with functioning food markets and social protection systems. Donor fatigue, a global problem given competing crises in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, and elsewhere, threatens the sustained funding that the aid operation requires. When funding gaps occur, ration cuts follow. When ration cuts follow, people move, or fight, to find food.
Hunger is not only a humanitarian crisis, it is a stability crisis. Populations facing severe food insecurity are more vulnerable to recruitment by armed groups, more likely to engage in resource conflict, and less able to engage in the economic activity that would reduce dependence on aid.
South Sudan is among the countries most exposed to climate change impacts. It sits in one of the most flood-prone zones in sub-Saharan Africa, the Sudd wetland system, fed by the White Nile, already creates a landscape that oscillates between waterlogged and dry with relatively little warning. Climate change is amplifying this instability: recent years have seen flooding that exceeded historical records in duration, geographic extent, and destructive impact.
In 2021–2022, flooding submerged large areas of Jonglei, Unity, and Upper Nile states for months, destroying homes, displacing hundreds of thousands, and wiping out agricultural seasons entirely in some areas. The 2023 and 2024 flood seasons continued this pattern. Communities that have traditionally moved with seasonal flooding are finding that the pattern is becoming less predictable and the damage more severe.
The climate dimension is not separate from the conflict dynamic, it intensifies it. When floods destroy farmland, competition for remaining arable land increases. When drought reduces grazing areas, pastoral communities move into territory traditionally used by other groups. When both happen within the same year, as has occurred, the pressure on land and water resources becomes extreme. Climate stress is a threat multiplier, taking conflicts that might otherwise remain manageable and adding enough scarcity to make them deadly.
Environmental shocks are not external disruptions to an otherwise stable situation, they are accelerants for tensions that already exist. Flood and drought cycles directly intensify competition over land, water, and grazing areas, particularly in the pastoral communities of Jonglei, Unity, and Lakes states.
Individually, each of the crises described above is serious. Collectively, they represent something qualitatively different, what analysts increasingly call a "polycrisis": multiple simultaneous shocks that interact with and amplify each other in ways that make the total burden far greater than the sum of its parts.
The interactions between these crises are what make the current moment especially dangerous. Flooding destroys crops, which increases food insecurity, which increases displacement, which reduces the state's ability to maintain political control over displaced populations, which creates conditions for recruitment into armed groups, which generates more conflict, which blocks humanitarian access, which worsens food insecurity. The cycle is not hypothetical, it has been running in South Sudan's worst-affected states for years.
What the polycrisis also does is exhaust the coping capacity of communities, families, and individuals. People who have managed one crisis can often manage another. People managing five simultaneously, with no functioning state to provide a safety net, run out of options. That exhaustion is visible in the scale of displacement, in the reliance on humanitarian assistance among populations that historically fed themselves, and in the willingness of young people to engage in violent group activity when legitimate alternatives do not exist.
The next six to twelve months represent a genuine fork in the road for South Sudan, not in the dramatic sense that collapse or transformation are imminent, but in the more mundane and important sense that choices made now by political leaders, international partners, and regional actors will set the trajectory for years. Two broad paths are visible.
Violence continues to rise in Jonglei, Unity, and Upper Nile. The political process around elections breaks down, producing either a third postponement that delegitimises the transitional government or a flawed election that produces a contested outcome. Donor fatigue reduces humanitarian funding. Flooding in late 2026 pushes more people into displacement. Armed group activity expands into previously stable areas. South Sudan moves closer to renewed large-scale conflict, not a return to 2013–2018, but a more fragmented, chronic violence that becomes harder to address as it entrenches.
Political dialogue between Kiir, Machar, and other faction leaders produces workable arrangements for managing the election or credibly extending the transition. Intercommunal violence reduction programmes in Jonglei and Lakes receive sustained support. Humanitarian funding holds at levels sufficient to prevent acute famine. Climate adaptation investment reaches pastoral communities. Regional actors, Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, remain engaged as guarantors of the peace process. The country does not improve dramatically, but avoids a significant reversal.
The honest assessment is that the deterioration scenario has more of the current structural momentum behind it. The stabilisation scenario requires political will from actors who have consistently prioritised personal and factional survival over state-building, sustained funding from donors facing competing global demands, and effective regional engagement at a moment when those regional actors are themselves facing significant domestic crises, Sudan's civil war, Ethiopia's internal conflicts, Kenya's political turbulence.
This does not mean deterioration is inevitable. South Sudan has defied its worst-case predictions before. The 2018 agreement was reached when many observers had concluded it was impossible. Communities in some areas have negotiated local ceasefires and resource-sharing arrangements without national government involvement, demonstrating that the social capacity for accommodation exists. International and regional engagement, even imperfect, has prevented the worst outcomes at critical moments.
But the window for preventing significant deterioration in 2026 is narrowing. The elections timeline creates a political pressure point. The flood season will arrive regardless of political progress. Food funding gaps are growing. The armed groups that are not part of the peace process are not standing still. If the stabilisation path is to be taken, the choices that enable it need to be made now, not when the next crisis has already arrived.