Expanding the Evidence Base: Local Peace Agreements in Greater Pibor Administrative Area (GPAA) and Warrap State

Author: Jan Pospisil

This policy brief expands on a 2025 PeaceRep report, ‘Local Peace Agreements in South Sudan: Exploring Processes at the Margins’, which examines agreements from Yambio, Yei, Wau, Aweil and Malakal to assess how they relate to wider peacebuilding and the ongoing political transition around the Revitalised Agreement on the Resolution of Conflicts in the Republic of South Sudan (R-ARCSS).

Since publication of that report, additional workshops on local peacemaking in the Greater Pibor Administrative Area (GPAA) and Warrap State have expanded this evidence base to include two settings characterised by distinct conflict dynamics.

The additional material examined in this brief points towards a wider understanding of local peace agreements. Across both settings, agreements extend beyond responses to violent incidents and establish rules that attempt to organise relations between neighbouring communities over time. They therefore illustrate and reaffirm the close relationship between local peace and customary authority, and point towards the structural role of resource governance.