South Sudan is at a critical juncture. Years of conflict, political fragility, and humanitarian crisis have left deep scars: on communities, on institutions, and on individuals. The 2018 peace agreement has failed to hold. Violence has resumed. Millions remain displaced. And women and girls continue to bear a disproportionate burden, facing pervasive sexual and gender-based violence, restricted civic space, and limited access to justice.
Yet amid this crisis, something else is also true: South Sudanese women, youth, and civil society organisations are working every day to build peace. They mediate disputes, they hold communities together, they create spaces of safety and healing where the state cannot or will not. They are the backbone of any peace that will actually last, and the ones who stay when funding gets cut, when the headlines move on, or when the world looks away.
Last Tuesday, we co-organised a roundtable with WO=MEN, Plan International, and HealthNet TPO to reflect on best practices and lessons learned from peacebuilding programming in South Sudan. The event brought together practitioners with own lived experiences, policymakers, and partners to share lessons learned and make the case for a more coherent, ambitious approach. Three urgent messages emerged.
Mental health is not a luxury: it is the foundation
Across South Sudan, trauma is not the exception. It is the lived reality of an entire generation. When people carry unprocessed grief, fear, and violence in their bodies, their capacity to engage in dialogue, civic life, or peace processes is fundamentally compromised. Mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) is therefore not a soft add-on to peacebuilding – it is its prerequisite.
Our work has demonstrated this repeatedly: when communities have access to safe spaces, collective care, and psychosocial support, social cohesion grows. Trust is rebuilt. People become able to participate.
Peacebuilding must engage men and boys: not work around them
Sustainable peace cannot be built by working with women alone. Deeply entrenched gender norms, militarisation, and harmful constructions of masculinity are root drivers of the violence that tears communities apart. Ignoring this does not make it go away. Our experience in South Sudan shows that engaging men and boys as agents of change is transformative. When men are supported to challenge harmful norms, to process their own experiences of violence and coercion, and to embrace alternative models of masculinity, communities become safer for everyone.
Women and youth must lead: not just participate
Too often, gender-sensitive programming stops at inclusion: adding women to committees, counting female participants, ticking boxes. However, a genuinely gender-transformative approach requires something more ambitious – dismantling the structural inequalities that exclude women from power in the first place, and building the collective leadership infrastructure that allows them to shape legislation, justice reform, and peace processes from the ground up.
Our programming, together with its local partners and international allies, has shown what this looks like in practice: young women and men who are not waiting for permission to lead, but who need sustained support – psychosocial, financial, and political – to do so effectively and safely.
The urgency is now
South Sudan cannot wait. The combination of renewed armed conflict, mass displacement, weak institutions, widespread impunity and decades of unaddressed trauma has brought the country to a tipping point. Without a deliberate and integrated response, the prospects for sustainable peace will continue to erode. This integrated response should include:
- Engaging multiple and diverse stakeholders, such as the the church, to address root causes and diverse conflict actors
- Treating mental health
- Gender equality
- And community resilience
The cost of inaction is not abstract. It is measured in the lives of women who cannot access justice, in communities torn apart by violence that could have been prevented, in an entire generation growing up without the safety or support they need to imagine a different future.
The tools exist. The knowledge is there. South Sudanese women, youth, church leaders and civil society are already doing this work, often without sufficient support, under impossible conditions. The question now is whether the international community, donors, and policymakers will match that determination with the sustained political commitment and long-term vision that this crisis demands.
