ABSTRACT
This chapter assesses the reasons why South Sudan’s military integration process disintegrated. The chapter argues that the SPLA had minimal strategic planning and guidance for the integration process, and that in light of the concurrent post-CPA challenges facing South Sudan, third-party support to the integration process could have facilitated the implementation. The chapter also argues that the integration process in South Sudan became open-ended over time, thereby creating a perverse low-cost, high-benefit incentive for members of the SPLA to defect in order to advance their positions or increase their wealth. At the same time, the process for bringing armed groups into the SPLA through military integration outpaced the SPLA’s efforts to reduce the size of the military due to ineffective rightsizing initiatives. Finally, this chapter argues that the development of an ethnically homogenous parallel security structure (Mathiang Anyoor) and its subsequent integration into the country’s Presidential Guard was seen by some as a betrayal of the force’s multi-ethnic ideal, which had been one of the aims of the integration process. The chapter concludes that due to the failed implementation of the process, the SPLA was in a state of arrested development, preventing efforts to transform the military from gaining traction, and making the force more likely to fragment along factional lines during periods of heightened political competition.
