As Africa’s youngest nation prepares for what would be its first national vote since independence in 2011, the temptation to treat December 2026 as a symbolic deadline rather than a democratic milestone must be resisted.
Elections held without trust, consensus and inclusion will not deliver peace. Instead, they are likely to deepen the fractures that the 2018 Revitalised Agreement on the Resolution of Conflict in South Sudan (R-ARCSS) was meant to heal.
