Armed Group Fragmentation and the Proliferation of Violence Entrepreneurs in South Sudan's War Economy

This systematic literature review examines the research problem of how armed group fragmentation in South Sudan's protracted conflict has catalysed a resilient war economy dominated by autonomous 'violence entrepreneurs', a dynamic inadequately captured by conventional computational conflict models. Its objective is to synthesise and critically evaluate the extant interdisciplinary literature, with a focus on computer science perspectives, concerning this nexus. Employing a structured systematic methodology, the review analyses peer-reviewed articles sourced from major scholarly databases. Core findings reveal that fragmentation is a central logic of the political economy, not merely a symptom of state weakness. Driven by endogenous competition over resource rents and exogenous factors like regional allegiances, fragmentation proliferates smaller, entrepreneurial units that commodify violence. This process transforms the conflict landscape into a competitive marketplace where coercion is a specialised service, thereby entrenching instability. The review's contribution is its synthesis of evidence to computationally reframe fragmentation as a network proliferation process that generates a self-sustaining system of profit-driven violence, challenging models predicated on unitary actor assumptions and linear escalation.