Summary

South Sudan’s checkpoints have become a defining feature of the country’s political economy, shaping how power is exercised, resources are distributed and markets function. Based on fieldwork conducted across several states between 2025 and 2026, alongside interviews with political, humanitarian and security actors, the research traces the historical development of checkpoints from the colonial era to the present day. The analysis argues that checkpoints are not simply barriers to trade or temporary distortions that can be removed through reform. In the context of state withdrawal, economic collapse and declining humanitarian support, they have become the principal means through which currency enters many local economies. Checkpoints act simultaneously as sites of revenue extraction, market creation, survival and political contestation. While they enable state and elite predation, they also provide communities with resources and opportunities to resist exclusion. Contemporary conflict in South Sudan is increasingly fought over the control of circulation, making checkpoints central to both governance and war.

Key Findings

  • Checkpoints have become the principal engine of marketisation in a country largely abandoned by both the state and the humanitarian sector. They bring currency into local economies and often act as focal points around which markets and settlements develop.
  • The number of checkpoints roughly doubled along many of South Sudan’s major transport routes between 2011 and 2025, while some waterways experienced even more dramatic increases. Their proliferation is driven by elite revenue capture, the survival needs of unpaid security personnel and the growth of community-run checkpoints.
  • Checkpoints are not simply instruments of state control. They also function as spaces where citizens negotiate with, contest and sometimes appropriate state power, often through community-managed systems of taxation and redistribution.
  • Community-run checkpoints resist state predation only by mimicking it. They re-embed trade and exchange within local social and political relationships, but rely on similar logics of taxation, extraction and control.
  • Contemporary conflict in South Sudan is increasingly fought over circulation rather than territory. Control of roads, rivers and border crossings enables revenue extraction, the financing of armed groups and the selective restriction of population movement and access to resources.
  • Checkpoints cannot be neatly categorised as state or non-state, licit or illicit. National, state, county, military, private and community interests frequently overlap, creating complex systems of revenue sharing and governance.

Policy Implications

  • Efforts to remove checkpoints should recognise that they are embedded in South Sudan’s political and economic structures rather than functioning as isolated abnormalities. Their persistence reflects deeper patterns of governance, conflict and resource distribution.
  • Government commitments to eliminate checkpoints are best understood within broader struggles over who controls revenue extraction. The removal of checkpoints may lead to their reconfiguration or transfer to other government-affiliated actors rather than their disappearance.
  • Humanitarian resources are deeply embedded in South Sudan’s political economy. Aid delivery, taxation, diversion and access negotiations form part of wider systems of power and conflict rather than operating outside them.
  • Humanitarian demands for exemption from checkpoint taxation can create unintended effects by establishing a special category of untaxed goods, potentially increasing the costs of commercial trade and complicating cash-based assistance approaches.
  • Restrictions on humanitarian access should be understood not simply as logistical obstacles but as mechanisms through which armed actors wage war, influence population movements and shape control over resources and territory.
  • Policymakers and humanitarian actors may need to engage with checkpoints as durable institutions that structure governance, conflict and economic life, rather than assuming they can be negotiated away through technical reforms alone.

This policy brief is a part of the Contested Borderlands Elite Trajectories (CBET) project