Pope Francis visiting South Sudan. Photograph Source: Alfadil Attiya Abuanja – CC BY-SA 4.0

Nearly two years after Pope Francis’s unprecedented ecumenical pilgrimage to South Sudan, the country is once again sliding towards violence, underscoring the futility of moral attention without political follow-through.

The February 2023 visit, undertaken alongside the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, and the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, Iain Greenshields, was meant to jolt not just South Sudan’s leaders but the international community into action.

It carried extraordinary symbolic weight in a country where churches really do wield moral and social authority. But without any sustained enforcement, real incentives, or evidence of accountability, the visit now badly risks becoming yet another of those global moments in the sun that illuminate only briefly.

The danger appears not that South Sudan has been forgotten because no one cares. It is that care was never properly organised into pressure. South Sudan’s tragedy is not invisibility so much as displacement.

It is also overshadowed by larger crises. Global attention is consumed daily by the barbed-wire brocade of Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan to the north, and Ethiopia. Compared with these, South Sudan slips quietly down the list. As one Sudanese exile remarked in Leeds after the 2023 visit, “this is a story too often heard across South Sudan.”

If ever there were a chronic but “non-breaking” conflict, this is it. Violence in the still-young, landlocked country is typically localised and cyclical rather than dramatic enough to command international attention. Yet this pattern has long been recognised. International officials warned years ago that “the current cycle of revenge will get the people of this country........

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