Competitive Fragmentation: Violence Entrepreneurs and the Political Economy of Armed Group Proliferation in South Sudan

This article develops competitive fragmentation as an analytical lens for understanding how armed group proliferation is driven by commander-level incentives, war economies, and recognition effects. Rather than treating the topic as a descriptive case note, the manuscript positions armed group fragmentation and the proliferation of violence entrepreneurs in south sudan's war economy within wider debates on African political order, state formation, and institutional design. The paper is anchored in South Sudan, with comparative reference to other fragmented civil wars, and it uses the topic brief's theoretical architecture to ask three linked questions: what explains the proliferation of armed factions in south sudan from two principal belligerents in 2013 to over 40 registered armed groups by 2018 and what does this reveal about the internal political economy of rebel organisations? How do local commanders' economic interests in controlling cattle, gold, teak, and humanitarian supply chains drive fragmentation independently of national-level political negotiation? Under what conditions does international recognition through peace agreement inclusion, DDR registration, or humanitarian engagement inadvertently incentivise armed group formation? Methodologically, the article translates the proposed design into a publication-ready strategy built around armed group dataset construction from unmiss monitoring reports and acled (2013–2023); process tracing of fragmentation events; interview-based research with commanders of seven armed groups across greater upper nile and equatoria; application of agent-based modelling to simulate fragmentation dynamics.. It argues that the central analytical payoff lies not only in better explanation of the South Sudanese or regional cases, b