The recent article, South Sudan’s Unfinished Transition: The Search for Common Ground, by Dr. Francis Deng and Dr. Amir Idris, offers one of the most thoughtful diagnoses of South Sudan’s contemporary crisis. Their central argument, that South Sudan is not a failed state but rather a country trapped in an unfinished transition, moves the debate beyond simplistic narratives of collapse and dysfunction. Yet their analysis raises an even deeper question: can a transition be completed when the state itself remains unfinished?
The conventional description of South Sudan as a “failed state” has always been analytically weak. States fail when functioning institutions collapse. South Sudan’s predicament is more fundamental. The country possesses government buildings, ministries, laws, armies, and administrative structures, but these alone do not constitute a state in the fullest political sense. They are merely the visible instruments of statehood. A legitimate state requires a shared political community that agrees on the rules of coexistence, citizenship, and governance.
In this regard, South Sudan’s crisis is not merely institutional; it is existential. Independence in 2011 created a sovereign country, but it did not automatically create a state or a nation. The liberation struggle united diverse communities against a common external adversary, but little effort was invested in defining a common internal future. The referendum answered whether Southerners wished to separate from Sudan; it never answered what kind of political community they intended to build afterward.
Dr. Deng and Dr. Idris correctly identify the absence of common ground as the central obstacle to democratic transition. However, this absence did not emerge after independence. It is rooted in a longer historical trajectory. Colonial administrations, successive governments in Khartoum, and decades of war left behind fragmented communities whose relationships were shaped more by historical circumstance than by a shared national vision. The result was a territory inhabited by distinct peoples rather than a nation bound together by a common civic identity.
South Sudan therefore represents what might be called an “aborted state building project,” a political entity born before the foundational questions of citizenship, governance, and national purpose were resolved. As Mahmood Mamdani has argued, the country’s crisis is less a failure of law and order than a failure to transform colonial era subjects into equal citizens. Similarly, Alex de Waal’s concept of the “political marketplace” captures how public institutions have been subordinated to patronage networks and elite bargaining rather than national development.
The distinction between country, state, and nation is crucial. A country is territory. A state is the machinery of governance. A nation is a community united by shared identity and common aspirations. South Sudan achieved the first in 2011 but remains uncertain about the latter two. Political elites frequently confuse control of territory with successful state building. Yet sovereignty without legitimacy, and institutions without national consensus, produce only fragile governance.
The article is also correct in warning against unrealistic expectations surrounding the December 2026 elections. Elections are not magical instruments of democracy. They are mechanisms through which an already agreed political order is periodically renewed. Where the foundational questions of citizenship, constitutional order, resource sharing, and national identity remain contested, elections risk becoming another arena of conflict rather than a solution to it.
Nevertheless, one limitation of the authors’ analysis is their reluctance to confront the question of responsibility. While the crisis undoubtedly reflects structural and historical factors, it is also the product of political choices. Institutions did not weaken themselves. Peace agreements did not fail to implement themselves. Oil revenues did not disappear on their own. The concentration of power, manipulation of ethnicity, and persistence of patronage networks are outcomes of elite decisions. Any genuine search for common ground must therefore be accompanied by truth telling and accountability.
At the same time, it would be unrealistic to dismiss external assistance as inherently problematic. History demonstrates that countries emerging from conflict rarely build stable institutions in isolation. External support remains essential for constitutional development, electoral management, security sector reform, judicial strengthening, and economic recovery. The challenge is not international involvement itself but ensuring that such support strengthens domestic ownership rather than replacing it.
The path forward requires more than extending transitional timelines or creating new political bodies. South Sudan needs a sovereign constitutional conference that addresses the fundamental questions postponed since independence: What form of state should exist? What model of citizenship should govern relations among communities? How should power and resources be distributed? What constitutional safeguards can protect minorities and prevent domination by any group? Without answers to these questions, the country risks continuing to mistake political management for nation building.
Ultimately, Deng and Idris are correct that South Sudan’s transition remains unfinished. Yet the deeper reality is that the transition remains unfinished because the project of state building itself remains incomplete. South Sudan possesses the skeleton of a state, but the democratic spirit, civic consensus, and national vision needed to animate that skeleton have yet to fully emerge. Until the country moves beyond elite bargains toward a genuinely inclusive national compact, the search for common ground will remain not merely a political task but the unfinished work of creating the South Sudanese nation itself.
The writer, Hon. Juol Nhomngek Daniel, is a South Sudanese constitutional lawyer, academic, and political figure. He holds a legal education from Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. He is an independent legal researcher, constitutional expert, and serves as a lecturer and the Deputy Dean of the College of Law at Starford International University in Juba. He is a member of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement in Opposition (SPLM IO).
The views expressed in ‘opinion’ articles published by Radio Tamazuj are solely those of the writer. The veracity of any claims made is the responsibility of the author, not Radio Tamazuj.
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