The Challenge of Democracy in South Sudan

By Dr. John Young,

January 20, 2024 — In the internationally conducted referendum between 9 and 15 January 2011 southern Sudanese voted overwhelmingly for succession from Sudan and thus realized their democratic right to national self-determination.  Southern Sudanese were also keen supporters of democracy and because of the leading and welcome role of the US in the peace process this meant the US version of democracy.  However, since then there have been no elections in South Sudan and the prospect of elections in 2024 instills fear in many and none of the hopes of a democratic transformation have been achieved.  

This failure is largely due to the rapacious and incompetent politicians led by President Salva Kiir who has established a kleptocratic dictatorship.  It is also because a Western developed model of democracy has failed to develop roots in the radically different conditions of South Sudan.  In my book The Poisoned Chalice of Democracy:  Studies from the Horn of Africa (John Young, 2024) I make three major arguments:  first, US democracy is in decline in the US; second, the US model of democracy cannot meet the needs of countries in the Global South including South Sudan, and lastly, problems with US democracy do not negate the pressing need of South Sudanese to develop a system of democratic governance that meets their particular needs and not those of the US.

The Failure of US Democracy

After false claims by the Democrats that Russian President Vladmir Putin fixed the 2016 presidential election in favour of Republican candidate, Donald Trump, the latter’s claims that a conspiracy around voting machines deprived him of a victory in 2020, and fears that the 2024 presidential election could produce instability and violence, the US model of elections long pressed on the Global South is no longer convincing.  Moreover, other critical components of US democracy like freedom of speech and human rights have recently been seriously undermined.  

Widespread suppression of views and persecution of those that opposed official narratives on the Covid pandemic, Ukraine war, Gaza war and other issues make clear that freedom of speech is a dated issue in the US and other Western countries.  In addition, Edward Snowden revealed mass spying on American citizens by US security agencies, while the ‘twitter files’ exposed how not only the US intelligence agencies, but those of Israel and Ukraine forced social media companies to censor posts and articles not to their liking (Matt Taibbi, 13 April 2023).  And the response of the mainstream media to these revelations?  To condemn the journalists who exposed this interference and insist on the need for more censorship or ‘content moderation’ and indeed official, unofficial, and self-censorship has become endemic in the West.  

But undoubtedly the decline of US democracy most noted internationally as evidenced by recent votes in the UN Security Council and General Assembly has been US support for Israel’s mass murder of civilians in Gaza.  After that, US hectoring in the Global South about human rights will not carry any weight.  

Democracy in the US has long been class-based, circumscribed, and designed to ensure stability and the orderly circulation of elites and not to express the will of the people.  While during the Cold War the socialist bloc largely defined democracy in terms of meeting the social and economic needs of the people (and gave little heed to political freedoms), with the end of the Cold War the US conception of democracy was largely restricted to the political sphere and it held that capitalism was integral to democracy.  As a result, socialism and state led development which was initially employed by the US and successful industrializing countries like the Asian Tigers were considered undemocratic and were rejected.  Governments were only to have a minimal role in meeting the demands of their constituents for raising living standards which now had to be left to the market.  Moreover, the US set itself apart from most of the world by largely ignoring UN Covenants on Civil and Political Rights, and on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.  These Covenants held economic, social, and cultural rights to be human rights within the scope of international law and this was considered a reproach to US neoliberalism, not only because of the rights themselves, but because to realize them involves state regulation of the market (Jeff King, 2003).    

The US has prioritized its role as the global hegemon and this involves undermining, if not totally rejecting, the right of other countries to national sovereignty, and without national sovereignty the entire notion of democracy becomes impossible.  In the economic sphere the US insists that countries accept oversight by the IMF and World Bank which it controls.  The US further insists that all countries bring their foreign policies in line with American interests.  This raises the question of how governments can be considered democratic when they place the interests of the US above those of their own citizens?  Indeed, the US version of democracy undermines the revolutionary spirit of democracy, promotes the status quo, and is designed to perpetuate US domination.

Although of little interest to Western democracy, of crucial importance in the Horn of Africa and South Sudan is the right of oppressed people to national self-determination.  A conception of democracy that does not give due attention to the issue that has been the focus of the most conflict in the Horn cannot be considered of much value to the people of the region.

And lastly, the US conception of democracy requires all countries to adhere to its ‘rules based international order’. However, this US defined order is in opposition to international law rooted in the UN and largely rationalizes US global domination. 

South Sudan and Democracy

Many factors led to South Sudan’s independence, but the failure of successive Sudanese governments to grant southern Sudan self-government and a lengthy armed struggle, even if most of the armed struggle was devoted to achieving a united ‘New Sudan’.  Also of critical importance was the role of the US in backing the peace process which produced the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) in 2005 and granted southern Sudanese the right to national self-determination.  But US engagement in southern Sudan, an area in which it had no interests is best explained precisely because it had no interests.  As a result, groups like the Friends of South Sudan with close links to the Democratic Party successfully employed old tropes about the US as the exceptional state and the global leader of democracy to press the Clinton administration to lead the peace process, while evangelical Christians who formed the backbone of President Bush’s supporters pressed him to come to the rescue of what they believed were Christians persecuted by Muslims.  Meanwhile, Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama naively believed that they could increase the stature of the US internationally by giving birth to a democratic country in its own image.

The US was successful in ending the north-south civil war (even while it ignored the increasingly destructive south-south conflict) and in its ignorance believed that the SPLM would oversee a democratic transformation in independent South Sudan.  As a result, it claimed a great foreign policy success.  But the claim quickly withered.  While the NCP and SPLM could be coerced into holding elections, the leopards could not change their spots and would not carry out a democratic transformation and instead established dictatorial regimes.  This was a major setback for US democracy promotion which was based on the ethnocentric conviction that the US model of democracy could be transplanted anywhere in the world.  Nonetheless, the US continued to support the increasingly despotic Salva regime even after it carried out a genocidal attack on the Nuer in Juba in December 2013 and this support did not end until the advent of the Trump presidency.  

Unlike other liberation movements which found the transition from armed struggle to government difficult, it was not a major problem for the Salva led SPLM because it largely remains a military administration with a few add-ons to bring it in line with international practices.  South Sudan’s National Assembly was so disconnected with the country that it never had a word to say when mass murder was being conducted on its virtual doorstep in December 2013.  As befitting US values women by law must have 25% of the positions in the legislative and executive bodies, while Anti-Corruption and Human Rights Commissions were established.  But this was mere window-dressing and any attempts to develop a democratic culture were ruthlessly suppressed.  

The country’s wealth derived almost exclusively from oil exports, but neither the Ministry of Finance or that of Petroleum could produce figures on the trade and that is what one would expect in a country that in 2021 was rated by Transparency International as the most corrupt country in the world (Transparency International, 2021).  While the vast majority of South Sudanese lived in abject poverty a corrupt elite lived a lavish lifestyle and parked their ill-gotten gains and families abroad.  The US government belatedly reached the same conclusion and announced in July 2022 that it was cutting funding for peace implementation, withdrawing funding from World Food Program projects, and would stop financing various organizations supported by USAID (Sudan Tribune, 31 July 2022).

Conclusion

Unlike countries where US democracy was forcibly imposed, the South Sudanese welcomed the US and its democracy.  As a result, the failure of US democracy in South Sudan represents a failure of the model and those who promoted it and believed that the SPLM was committed to a democratic transformation.  US democracy is ethnocentric and based on a Western nation-state that is inappropriate for a multinational, multicultural South Sudan which had no identity until it was imposed by the British colonial power (John Young, 2021).  US democracy is in crisis and in the context of an emerging multipolar world Washington no longer has the capacity to impose its will in the Global South.  Likewise, the Salva regime maintains power through the support of its security agencies, but as Dr. Lam Akol has noted, they are unreliable and their loyalty to the government in the event of a popular uprising cannot be safely assumed (Lam Akol, 3 September 2021). Change is thus possible and it is crucial that South Sudanese not simply focus on removing the regime, but consider the kind of democracy that meets their needs.

Bibliography

Akol, Lam.  (2021).  ‘Opinion: What makes an uprising?’  Sudan Post.  3 September.

King, Jeff.  (2003).  ‘An Activist’s Manual on the International Covenant of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.’  Law and Society Trust.

Sudan Tribune.  (2022).  ‘U.S. ends support to South Sudan peace implementation mechanisms.’  31 July.

Taibbi, Matt.  (2023).  ‘The Twitter Files.’  Twitter.  13 April.

Transparency International (2021).  ‘Corruption Perception Index 2021.’  CPI2021_Report_EN-web.pdf (transparencycdn.org).

Young, John.  (2021).  ‘South Sudan:  The Artificial State.’ In John Markakis, Guenther Schlee, and John Young, The Nation-State:  A Wrong Model for the Horn of Africa, Max Planck Research Library for the History and Development of Knowledge Studies 14.

Young, John.  (2024).  ‘The Poisoned Chalice of US Democracy:  Studies from the Horn of Africa. London: Bloomsbury.