Southern Sudan’s past crises have mobilised consistent flows of humanitarian assistance. Recalling the humanitarian catastrophes and international interventions of the 1990s–2000s, the war that exploded in South Sudan in 2013 has been no exception. This paper shows that the SPLM/A political elite promptly incorporated these flows of external resources into its extraverted strategies of state-building. Similar to the current situation, it did so by appropriating not only material assets but also discourses, playing the ‘fragile state’ card and raising fears of governance failure and state collapse. This paper analyses two specific aspects of international support to Southern Sudan in the 1990s–2000s: the political legitimisation of the movement through the negotiation of relief delivery, and direct support to rebel local government structures. These two aspects contributed to the creation of a state that substantially overlapped with the SPLM/A structure, thanks to the movement’s capacity to capitalise on external resources, a subject worth analysing in future research.

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