Digital Rights and the Conditions for Positive Peace in South Sudan.

In October 2016, rumors about President Salva Kiir’s alleged ill health and death swept across social media, spilling into neighboring Uganda long before any official confirmation. The Sentinel Project’s account of this episode, documented in "Managing Misinformation to Build Peace in South Sudan," underscores a profound challenge at the heart of the country’s peace and security landscape.

This incident highlights a critical truth: in South Sudan, information is not neutral. In a context marked by low institutional trust and simmering tensions, misinformation can quickly escalate into violence. The information environment is thus not merely a media concern, but a frontline issue for peace and security.

A Broken Information Environment

In societies where institutional trust is low and ethnic identities are politically charged, misinformation does more than simply mislead; it activates existing grievances, reinforces harmful stereotypes and accelerates the slide into conflict before dialogue can begin.

DRF’s own research, published as “Unmasking Disinformation and Misinformation in South Sudan”, found that 98.1% of survey respondents believed disinformation and misinformation increase violence in their communities. Reflecting exactly what Galtung describes when he theorises about structural violence: harm that is slow, cumulative, embedded in systems of information and communication that most people cannot see or name, but can feel.

Disinformation does more than mislead it amplifies existing ethnic and political divisions, turning uncertainty into fear and fear into open conflict. In this way, it operates as a form of structural violence, embedded in everyday systems.

What Real Peace Requires

Peace is often understood as the absence of war but this is only part of the picture.

Johan Galtung’s landmark 1969 paper, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,”  in the Journal of Peace Research transformed how we understand peace. His framework draws a crucial line between two concepts: negative peace and positive peace. Negative peace being merely the absence of direct violence, when the guns fall silent and the fighting ends. Positive peace, however, is a much higher bar. It’s the building of inclusive social systems, addressing conflicts at their roots, and dismantling the hidden harms of unjust systems, that Galtung calls structural violence.

South Sudan achieved a form of negative peace with the 2018 Revitalized Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in South Sudan (R-ARCSS). What it has not achieved however and is far harder to build, is positive peace. An environment that requires functional institutions, ensuring equitable access to resources, genuine civic participation, and a shared information environment that citizens can trust. Which directly echoes Galtung’s vision. Without these, the conditions for conflict persist beneath the surface.

Case Study: The 2025 Social Media Shutdown

In January 2025, the South Sudanese government ordered Internet Service Providers to block access to Facebook and TikTok for a period of up to 90 days. What was analytically interesting about this episode is what it reveals about the government’s operating theory of peace. While intended to curb harmful content, the move revealed a deeper issue; the information vacuum, the lack of credible state communication, the absence of a rapid-response civil society media ecosystem.

Reflecting a negative peace approach of removing a trigger without addressing underlying problems like lack of trusted information sources or weak communication systems.

Voice of America - South Sudan in focus

Importantly, civil society actors like the Internet Society South Sudan Chapter mobilized quickly, helping push for an earlier restoration of access demonstrating the importance of active, rights-based engagement.

Local Digital Peacebuilding Efforts

If disinformation functions as structural violence in Galtung’s terms embedded in the information environment, producing harm without a specific identifiable perpetrator. Then, fact-checking can be understood as a form of structural peace work: intervening not in individual incidents but in the architecture of the information environment itself. Despite challenges, local initiatives are showing what positive peacebuilding can look like in practice.

211 Check, South Sudan’s only independent fact-checking and verification platform, operates on this premise. Its approach combining open-source investigation, social media monitoring, and community engagement mirrors methodologies identified in the digital peacebuilding literature as most effective in high-disinformation environments. The Sentinel Project’s Hagiga Wahid (“One Truth”) project demonstrated that ICT systems engaging citizens in verifying rumours can meaningfully contribute to atmospheres of peace across communities and borders.

These efforts do not just respond to misinformation, they strengthen the overall information ecosystem, helping build trust and accountability.

Joint Parliamentary Workshop on the Cybercrimes and Computer Misuse Bill.

The Cybercrime Bill: A Critical Turning Point

South Sudan’s Cybercrimes and Computer Misuse Bill 2026 presented the starkest current test of whether digital governance will be oriented toward positive or negative peace. DRF’s SafetyComm programme has recorded over 850 cyber incidents since 2021, yet the absence of any legal framework for redress is itself a form of structural violence. But the regional track record gives serious grounds for caution.

Regional experience warns that poorly designed laws risk becoming instruments of repression, not protection. The Atlantic Council’s analysis of Sudan’s information environment documents how the 2020 amendment to Sudan’s Cybercrimes Law passed in secret was used to criminalise dissent rather than protect citizens. Similar dynamics have been documented in Uganda, Tanzania and Ethiopia.

Poorly drafted cybercrime law is not a safety net. It is a trap door and the people who fall through it are always the same: journalists, activists, the marginalised, the inconvenient. The key question is whether this law will protect citizens or limit their rights. The design and implementation of the new law will shape the future of digital governance in South Sudan.

Toward a Digital Rights Framework for Positive Peace

Digital rights are not separate from peacebuilding; they form a core part of the foundation that makes sustainable peace possible. Yet misinformation continues to act as a significant driver of conflict by deepening divisions and accelerating the spread of fear and uncertainty within communities. Measures such as internet shutdowns often fail to resolve these issues and can instead worsen instability by limiting access to information and weakening communication channels.

At the same time, the digital exclusion of women undermines broader peacebuilding efforts, as inclusive participation is essential for long-term stability. Legal and policy frameworks, particularly those governing digital spaces, must be carefully designed to protect citizens’ rights rather than restrict them. Ultimately, the information environment should be understood and treated as critical national infrastructure, central to both peace and security.

Workshop on Strategic Collaboration to Mitigate Hate Speech and Misinformation organized  by the Ministry of Peace Building and facilitated by Digital Rights Frontlines.

Building Peace Through Information Systems

South Sudan’s path to lasting peace depends on more than ending violence. It requires the creation of social systems that serve the whole population, the elimination of structural violence in all its forms, and the constructive resolution of conflict through institutions that citizens can trust.

An information environment shaped by unchecked disinformation, exclusion of women and girls, unprotected civil society actors and legal frameworks that surveil rather than serve citizens is structural violence, and will continue to fuel instability. But one that enables access, participation, and accountability can strengthen peace. 

Digital rights, properly understood, are not distinct from human rights or from peacebuilding, they are its digital expression. In South Sudan today, protecting those rights is not optional. It is essential to building positive peace that lasts.

Download Full Research Paper Here: Digital Rights and the Conditions for Positive Peace in South Sudan