Fierce fighting between rebel groups in South Sudan has prompted some to wonder whether the territory is at risk of becoming a failed state upon achieving its independence from Khartoum this July.
With the South slated to take control of 75 percent of Sudan's oil fields upon secession, observers say the bloodshed is the result of a widening power vacuum in which Southern tribes and local warlordsare jockeying for influence in theterritory's nascent government.
"The main violence is South-on-South, and it has to do with who is going to benefit under the new state and how the money is going to be divided from the oil wealth," says Roberta Cohen, a non-resident senior foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.