The Small Arms Survey 2015: Weapons and the World examines the role of weapons and armed violence in humanity’s appropriation of the earth’s wildlife and mineral riches—in Africa, where the poaching of elephants and rhinos is becoming increasingly militarized, and near resource extraction sites around the world.

Isolation and Endurance: Riek Machar and the SPLM-IO in 2016-17 follows on from an earlier Small Arms Survey paper by the author (Young, 2015). It begins where the earlier paper left off with the signing of the ARCSS and ends with the first anniversary of the agreement’s collapse in July 2017.

The civil war that began in South Sudan in December 2013 has had dire consequences for the Shilluk people of Upper Nile, with civilians killed, villages and buildings destroyed, and humanitarian aid blocked. Although exact figures are elusive, estimates suggest that as much as 50 per cent of the Shilluk population has left the country during the current civil war—a figure that rises to 80 per cent if internally displaced people are included.

The Fertit community is a minority group in South Sudan that inhabit the former Western Bahr el Ghazal state. Out of it grew an opposition that came to form one of the many groups to take up arms against the Dinka dominated government in Juba and align with Riek Machar’s opposition coalition, the SPLA-IO. 

On 11 July 2016, government forces stormed Terrain, a residential compound in Juba, South Sudan. Systematic violence, looting, and vandalism ensued—including one fatality, multiple incidents of rape and torture, as well as destroyed property.

When civil war broke out in South Sudan in December 2013, thousands of soldiers defected from the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) and joined the opposition. In response, elites loyal to Kiir’s government mobilized fighters to bolster depleted SPLA forces. One of these groups was known as the Mathiang Anyoor, originally an informal northern-border defence force that would later integrate into the SPLA where its alleged role in some of the conflict’s worst atrocities would unfold.

In 2018, the Government of the Republic of South Sudan (GoSS), the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-in-Opposition (SPLM-IO), and the South Sudan Opposition Alliance (SSOA) signed the Revitalized Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in the Republic of South Sudan (R-ARCSS). As part of the transitional security arrangements within the R-ARCSS framework, all warring parties agreed to assemble combatants in designated cantonment sites to facilitate their training, and later, integration into a new ‘unity’ army or other national security services.

In October 2017 the United States lifted three of the most significant components of its sanctions regime against Sudan as part of a shift in bilateral relations with Khartoum.

The conflict between the Government of Sudan and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army-North (SPLM/A-N) in Sudan’s Blue Nile state erupted in September 2011—extending from ongoing combat in South Kordofan, in Jibal El Nouba state. Fighting continued until mid-2016 when both parties declared unilateral cessations of hostilities.

In response to wider economic decline and uneven development, youth-led protests broke out in Khartoum in December 2018. Following this, the Sudanese Professionals Association (SPA) brought together political parties and armed groups to form the Forces for Freedom and Change (FFC), committed to removing Omar al-Bashir from power.