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

Predatory peace is developed as an analytical lens for understanding the dynamics of oil rents, elite bargaining, and the reproduction of organised violence in South Sudan between 2005 and 2023. The study argues that peace agreements in resource-dependent fragile states tend to redistribute access to rents rather than transform the political economy of violence, thereby allowing wartime coalitions to evolve into peacetime revenue cartels. Drawing on process tracing across three peace agreement cycles, elite interviews with former ministers, SPLM-IO commanders, and oil sector officials, as well as budget execution analysis of Nilepet revenue data, the research integrates comparative insights from post-2002 Angola and Chad as rentier post-conflict cases. The analysis engages with key debates in rentier state theory (Mahdavy; Beblawi; Luciani), political settlements analysis (Khan; Di John & Putzel), and the war economies literature (Keen; Collier & Hoeffler), and advances the concept of predatory peace—in which peace agreements function as rent-redistribution frameworks rather than instruments of conflict termination. Three core claims are advanced. First, oil revenue in South Sudan operated as the principal medium through which elite bargains were negotiated, broken, and reconstituted, rendering fiscal distribution inseparable from military realignment. Second, Nilepet, off-budget revenue channels, and patron-specific financing linked domestic coalition management to external sponsors in ways that intensified, rather than mitigated, factional competition. Third, durable stabilization is unlikely without fiscal transparency, escrow-type revenue controls, and peace agreement designs that integrate macro-fiscal governance into security bargaining rather than treating it as