The roots of the war ran deeper than any single political dispute. For millennia, cattle raids between ethnic groups in the South Sudan region had been governed by unwritten rules -- an accepted practice with understood limits. The influx of automatic weapons during the long war against Khartoum shattered those constraints, transforming customary raiding into something far more lethal. When independence came, the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) inherited a military culture shaped by decades of guerrilla warfare and a political landscape fractured along ethnic lines, principally between the Dinka, the country's largest group, and the Nuer. President Kiir is Dinka; Machar is Nuer. Their falling-out in December 2013, and Kiir's accusation that Machar had attempted a coup, split the army and the country along those ethnic fault lines with devastating speed.

What followed was not merely a war between two armed factions. It was a catastrophe visited upon civilians. Ethnic massacres occurred in Juba, Bor, Bentiu, and Malakal. In Juba, Nuer civilians were hunted through neighborhoods. In Bor, the pattern reversed. Across the country, people were killed not for anything they had done but for who they were. Forced displacement became a weapon of war; families fled to United Nations compounds, churches, and into neighboring countries, creating one of Africa's largest refugee crises. By 2017, the fighting had spread to the Equatoria region -- the country's agricultural heartland -- and the number of people facing starvation soared to six million. Famine was formally declared in parts of Unity State in early 2017, the first famine anywhere in the world in six years.

The international community brokered multiple peace agreements. The August 2015 Compromise Peace Agreement brought Machar back to Juba as first vice president, but the arrangement collapsed spectacularly in July 2016 when fighting erupted again in the capital, forcing Machar to flee on foot through the bush to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A revitalized peace agreement signed in September 2018 eventually led to the formation of a coalition government in February 2020, with Kiir as president and Machar again as first vice president. Uganda, which had sent troops to support the government in 2014 and helped retake cities captured by the opposition, withdrew its forces as part of the 2015 agreement. The United Nations peacekeeping mission, UNMISS, maintained a presence throughout the conflict but faced its own tragedies -- in April 2013, five Indian peacekeepers and seven civilian UN employees were killed in an ambush in Jonglei State.

The South Sudanese Civil War killed an estimated 400,000 people. Nearly four million were displaced, with more than two million fleeing to neighboring countries. The economy, never robust, was devastated. Oil production -- the source of nearly all government revenue -- was disrupted by fighting in the oil-producing regions. Schools closed, hospitals were destroyed, and an entire generation of children grew up knowing nothing but conflict. The coalition government formed in 2020 continues to govern, but the underlying tensions -- ethnic division, competition for resources, the militarization of politics -- remain. South Sudan's story is not finished. The people who endured this war carry its weight, and the country's future depends on whether the fragile peace can hold long enough for something better to take root.