Predatory Peace and the Oil-Rent State: Elite Bargaining and the Reproduction of Organised Violence in South Sudan, 2005-2023

This article develops predatory peace as an analytical lens for understanding the predatory peace: oil rents, elite bargaining, and the reproduction of organised violence in south sudan, 2005–2023. It argues that peace agreements in resource-dependent fragile states frequently redistribute access to rents rather than transform the political economy of violence, allowing wartime coalitions to mutate into peacetime revenue cartels. Drawing on process tracing across three peace agreement cycles; elite interview data with former ministers, splm-io commanders, and oil sector officials; budget execution analysis of nilepet revenue data; comparison with angola (post-2002) and chad as rentier post-conflict cases., the paper links the theoretical debates identified in rentier state theory (mahdavy; beblawi; luciani) intersected with political settlements analysis (khan; di john & putzel) and war economies literature (keen; collier & hoeffler). proposes the concept of the 'predatory peace' peace agreements as rent-redistribution frameworks rather than conflict-termination instruments. to a comparative and historically grounded reading of South Sudan and the related cases assembled in the research design. The article advances three core claims. First, oil revenue in South Sudan operated as the principal medium through which elite bargains were negotiated, broken, and renegotiated, making fiscal distribution inseparable from military realignment. Second, Nilepet, off-budget revenue channels, and patron-specific financing tied domestic coalition management to external sponsors in ways that deepened rather than reduced factional competition. Third, stabilization is unlikely without fiscal transparency, escrow-type revenue controls, and peace agreement design that treats macro-fiscal