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

This study advances the concept of "predatory peace" to explain how oil-financed elite bargains in South Sudan have systematically reproduced, rather than terminated, organised violence between 2005 and 2023. Drawing on rentier state theory, political settlements analysis, and war economies literature, it examines three peace agreement cycles—the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (2005), the Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in South Sudan (2015), and the Revitalised ARCSS (2018)—to show how control over Nilepet and oil revenue disbursement has functioned as the primary medium of political competition. Using process tracing, elite interviews, and budget execution analysis, the study demonstrates that peace agreements in resource-rich fragile states often operate as instruments of elite revenue management rather than mechanisms of conflict resolution. The findings challenge dominant liberal peacebuilding frameworks, revealing how external mediation efforts have inadvertently institutionalised a political economy of predation that incentivises continued armed contestation. It contributes to scholarship on the political economy of peace processes while offering policy-relevant insights for mediation design, conditionality frameworks, and the political economy of DDR in resource-dependent post-conflict settings.