Just two years after its independence, a split between South Sudan’s leaders threw the new country into a devastating new war. After years of destruction and countless negotiations, in 2018, the government and representatives of the major rebel group signed the Revitalized Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in the Republic of South Sudan (R-ARCSS). This negotiated settlement is the focus of this multifaceted edited volume. Its contributors offer a nuanced, broadly contextualized analysis of the agreement, situating it within regional geopolitics and South Sudan’s recent history. Its scope and depth will make the volume a compelling read for scholars of the region and of peace and conflict studies. Collectively, the essays in this volume interrogate the two primary flaws of R-ARCSS: its deepening of the hold of an entrenched military elite and its lack of mechanisms for handling violations of it or for adjudicating justice for violent events that preceded it. The authors flesh out the contours of these weaknesses and their implications through a close reading of past agreements and the context surrounding its creation. One comes away with a rich understanding of R-ARCSS as not so much a transformative peace deal as a ceasefire agreement outlining roles for combatants within an expanded governing apparatus.

One of the volume’s greatest strengths is the authors’ ability to situate the R-ARCSS historically. Several essays compare it to past deals and agreements, particularly the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) of 2005, which ended the second Sudanese Civil War and paved the way for South Sudanese secession. Chapter Thirteen offers the most detailed close reading of R-ARCSS itself and points out that it, like the CPA, is ultimately a power-sharing agreement of convenience that fails to resolve the issues that necessitated it. The origins of the 2013 split have their roots in the conflicts that played out in the Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M) throughout the 1990s and early 2000s as well as the unresolved tensions between SPLA/M founder John Garang’s chosen heir, Salva Kiir Mayardit, and Riek Machar, whose split from Kiir’s government in 2013 echoed his break from Garang in 1991. Several of the volume’s contributors speak to this history and to the ways the CPA and the collective victory of independence papered over cracks that would erupt shortly after. Particularly compelling are Chapter Seven’s close analysis of other deals and Chapter Two’s placing of the South Sudanese conflict and secession within a broader history of partition efforts in Sudan and the competing trends of integration and disintegration across Africa and the world. Offering further key context, Chapter Five and Chapter Nine complicate the ethnic story often offered as explanatory of conflict in South Sudan. They detail particular episodes of the ethnicization of violence, the creation of a unified sense of Nuer grievance (alongside ongoing Dinka disunity), and the means by which elite actors stoked and made use of both animosities and solidarity. These succinct and nuanced essays offer a much-needed corrective to the pervasive essentialist interpretations of conflict in South Sudan and should be required reading for analysts and policymakers.

The volume’s other great strength is its situating South Sudan within the broader regional proxy politics of the Horn of Africa. Chapters Four and Eight are especially insightful in offering clear and thorough accountings of the motivations and machinations of Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, Uganda, and Kenya as well as those of the United States, Russia, and China (who are too often presumed as wholly decisive). Chapter Four offers a particularly valuable analysis of the surprising alignment of Uganda’s Museveni and Sudan’s al-Bashir in pushing for R-ARCSS. Despite having fought a proxy conflict in South Sudan—with Uganda supporting the government and Sudan supporting Machar (an encore of their embrace of his Nasir splinter faction in the 1990s)—they pushed R-ARCSS so as to maintain influence, appease their allies, and nudge out regional power player Ethiopia.

The other chapters offer multifaceted analyses of R-ARCSS in relation to broader histories and theories of conflict resolution and transitional justice. Chapters Ten and Eleven point out the sidelining of women in high-level negotiations despite the deep history of peace-making work done by them. Women’s exclusion from mediation processes is especially egregious considering this history and women’s disproportionate levels of victimization during war. Chapters Three, Six, and Twelve center on issues of justice allocation. Chapter Six traces past and present sources of violence in South Sudan while Chapters Three and Twelve point out how the lack of a system for transitional justice will continue to breed instability.

The volume’s conclusion states well the volume’s greatest strength: “It is one of the rare products in which all the main elements of the conflict are crystallized in one book” (194). The volume’s major weakness is its engagement with theory. Several authors default to quite broad theoretical notions or cite journalistic accounts rather than engaging much Africanist scholarship. This felt like a missed opportunity to expand on many of the authors’ valuable interventions. The introduction also could have been expanded to include the history and context that was often reiterated within individual chapters. This would have granted space for the other chapters to expand on their compelling insights. Overall, this selection of essays by this impressively interdisciplinary group of experts will be of great interest and value not only to scholars of South Sudan but also to anyone looking for a deep analysis of conflict, peace deals, and resolutions.