The border between Sudan and South Sudan is not merely a line on a map; it is a shared artery. Oil, people, trade, and memory flow across it in both directions. When Sudan collapses into war, South Sudan does not experience the shock as a distant crisis but as an extension of its own fragility.
As Sudan’s conflict becomes increasingly entrenched, Juba now faces one of the most consequential foreign policy tests since independence: how to protect national interests without being pulled into the gravitational force of a neighbour’s civil war.
The dilemma begins with oil. South Sudan’s economy remains overwhelmingly dependent on pipelines running through Sudan to Port Sudan. When fighting erupted near key transit points, including the contested Heglig corridor, crude flows declined, revenues collapsed, and Juba’s already-strained budget slid further into crisis. In a country where oil revenue pays salaries, sustains security institutions, and underwrites essential services, a pipeline shutdown is not a technical disruption—it is an existential threat.
This shared vulnerability has compelled authorities in Khartoum and Juba, even amid Sudan’s chaos, to negotiate arrangements aimed at protecting pipelines and pumping stations. These agreements are necessary but fragile. They function less as durable political frameworks than as emergency truce lines, keeping the economic lifeline open while the political ground beneath them continues to shift.
Sudan’s war has also unleashed another destabilising force: mass displacement. Refugees, traders, and entire families have crossed into South Sudan, overwhelming health systems, straining local markets, and deepening humanitarian needs in border states already operating on razor-thin margins. The burden is immense, while the international response remains insufficient.
In such moments, foreign policy becomes a test of discipline. South Sudan’s leadership faces pressure from multiple directions—armed factions, regional powerbrokers, and foreign patrons of Sudan’s war—to choose sides. Each faction offers future rewards: political leverage, security guarantees, or preferential access to trade and pipeline protection. But alignment is a dangerous illusion.
Taking sides would sacrifice South Sudan’s diplomatic neutrality, invite retaliation should a chosen faction falter, and aggravate internal divisions where cross-border loyalties already run deep. Worse, it would tether South Sudan’s sovereignty to actors driven by short-term survival rather than long-term state-building. History is replete with small states that gambled on other people’s wars—and paid with their own stability.
A wiser foreign policy rests on three core principles.
First, protect vital interests without sliding into proxy warfare. Juba must secure oil corridors through transparent, narrowly defined security arrangements—not covert political sponsorship of armed actors.
Second, practise active neutrality. Neutrality is not passivity. It demands sustained diplomacy with all Sudanese parties, alongside engagement with IGAD, the African Union, and international partners—while firmly resisting pressure to tilt toward any belligerent.
Third, prepare for a future beyond a single pipeline. Sudan’s war has laid bare a fundamental vulnerability: South Sudan is perpetually one crisis away from economic paralysis. Diversifying export routes, investing in regional infrastructure, and strengthening non-oil sectors are no longer aspirational goals; they are strategic necessities.
South Sudan cannot determine the outcome of Sudan’s war, but it can decide how deeply that war penetrates its own stability. As conflict continues to burn both northward and southward, restraint, strategy, and credible diplomacy—not opportunistic alliances—remain the only reliable path forward.
Sudan’s war will not end soon. But South Sudan still has the opportunity to ensure it does not become the next front line.
The writer, Dr. Stephen Dhieu Kuach, is a South Sudanese governance expert, disability rights advocate, and senior SPLM member. He served as Director of Disability Affairs in the Ministry of Presidential Affairs and coordinated national programmes in the Office of the Vice President.
The views expressed in ‘opinion’ articles published by Radio Tamazuj are solely those of the writer. The veracity of any claims made is the responsibility of the author, not Radio Tamazuj.