Scholars have long argued that local conflicts need to be integrated into the analysis of civil war and peacebuilding. Yet, systematic research of the linkages between communal violence and civil war is sparse. This contribution connects communal violence research to the stabilization and peacekeeping debate. To further a more systematic analysis of communal conflicts, the author distinguishes various types and their linkages to civil war and peacebuilding. In South Sudan, large-scale communal conflicts—communal wars—precede the country’s civil war and are likely to succeed it. Their protracted and fundamentally political nature means that they cannot be addressed as ‘local conflicts’ in isolation from national politics and state institutions. The author argues that military force may temporarily stabilize a conflict zone but the horizontal linkages between urban and rural communal conflicts and their vertical linkages to national political processes require concerted efforts on the national and the sub-state level to avoid renewed conflict cycles and contribute to lasting stability.

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