Please note: this event has passed
The central challenge confronting African states today is no longer whether agency exists, but whether it is adequately resourced to shape political outcomes. Agency without material, institutional, and human support remains symbolic at best—performative, fragile, and easily reversed.
South Sudan’s post-independence trajectory illustrates this paradox with striking clarity. Political actors are repeatedly called upon to exercise agency through peace agreements, elections, and transitional arrangements, yet the systems required to sustain that agency remain chronically under-resourced. Institutions are expected to perform functions they were never designed or equipped to carry, while citizens are invited to participate in political processes that lack constitutional clarity, administrative reach, and credible enforcement mechanisms.
This Africa Week convening advances the debate by grounding these questions in the lived realities of South Sudan’s political transition. Drawing on sustained engagement by the African Leadership Centre (ALC) Working Group on South Sudan, the event reframes political transition away from procedural compliance and toward strategic political investment. In doing so, it places particular emphasis on how unconventional and disruptive pathways to legitimacy and stability can be meaningfully resourced.
The central objective of the convening is to reposition South Sudan’s transition as a problem of resourcing agency rather than merely asserting it. Rather than reiterating diagnoses of fragility, the discussion interrogates how different political pathways distribute risk, legitimacy, and institutional capacity, and with what consequences.
To support this analysis, the event applies a Portfolio Model of Transition, treating governance pathways as investment choices with distinct time horizons, risk profiles, and resource demands. This framework enables participants to critically assess whether prevailing transition strategies in South Sudan are aligned with the political, administrative, and social capacities required to sustain them.
Conventional peacebuilding and state-building approaches, often grouped under the liberal peace paradigm, have tended to prioritise elections, elite power-sharing, and externally driven timelines as indicators of progress. In South Sudan, however, these approaches have frequently produced short-term political closure without generating durable legitimacy or institutional resilience.
This convening therefore challenges the assumption that elections are inherently democratising. Instead, it treats them as political technologies whose value depends on the conditions under which they are deployed. By foregrounding resourcing—financial, institutional, human, and temporal—the event introduces a necessary shift in how political transitions in Africa are assessed, supported, and ultimately sustained.
About King's Africa Week
Hosted by the African Leadership Centre and Africa research group, Africa Week is an annual celebration of research, education and outreach activities on Africa.
King's Africa Week brings together academics, researchers and students from across King's – and offers the opportunity to hear from African scholars, leaders and thinkers. It also showcases King's collaboration with African universities and partners.