Peter Biar Age, Wife, Children, Biography » StarsUnfolded

Some Lesser Known Facts About Peter Biar

• Peter Biar was born in the town of Bor, South Sudan.

• When he was 6 years old, he was forced to leave the country. He was one of more than 100,000 children who became part of the Red Army of South Sudan.

• In 1989, he first went to a refugee camp in Ethiopia. In 1992, he traveled to Kenya through Sudan, where he spent most of the decade in a refugee camp.

• At the age of 16, he was one of approximately 4,000 “Lost Boys of Sudan” who were resettled as refugees in the United States.

• In 2009, after completing his Master of Public Administration in International Development from Harvard University, Biar returned to his country and became the World Bank’s In-Country Economist and advised the government on the economic development of the country.

• In September 2010, he founded South Sudan Wrestling Entertainment and became its CEO. The organization hosted wrestling tournaments across the country to unite young people and celebrate the unique culture of South Sudan.

• In 2011, after South Sudan gained independence, Peter joined the Government as Senior Advisor to the Minister of National Security, where he served as the Coordinator of Policy and Strategy in the Office of the Minister of National Security in the Office of the President of South Sudan.

• During that time, Biar also served as the Co-Country Director and later as a Senior Advisor for the International Growth Centre (IGC), an economic policy institute affiliated with the London School of Economics and the University of Oxford.

• In January 2012, Peter Biar founded the Center for Strategic Analyses and Research (C-SAR), an independent policy think tank in Juba.

• In 2016, for his work and achievements in South Sudan, he was named both an Atlantic Council Millennium Fellow and an Archbishop Desmond Tutu Leadership Fellow. In the year, he also received the Crans Montana Forum’s New Leader for Tomorrow Award from the former President of Mali, Moussa Traoré, at a ceremony in Brussels, Belgium

• In 2017, he co-founded the South Sudan Young Leaders Forum (SSYLF) to bring together young leaders from across South Sudan. Peter Biar additionally helped establish a national veterans’ association called the Red Army Foundation.

• From 2017 to 2018, Peter served as a political economy analyst for UNICEF.

• On July 28, 2018, National Security Service (NSS) officials arrested Biar at the Juba International Airport when he was flying to the town of Awiel for Martyrs’ Day celebrations organized by the Red Army Foundation. He was not provided with a warrant or a written or verbal explanation for his arrest.

• After the arrest, he was transported directly from the airport to the notorious Blue House prison, where NSS is headquartered, without being brought before a judge.

• Until March 2019, about eight months after his arrest, he was not formally charged and taken to court. In the prison, Peter Biar was kept in inhuman conditions, where they gave him very little food or medical care, even when he was sick. His family and lawyer refused to meet him. His bail was also denied many times.

• In October 2018, several detainees protested against the rights violations occurring in the Blue House prison. Peter did not participate in the protest and also urged the participants to put down their weapons.

• During the ongoing protest, he gave a telephonic interview with Voice of America in which he discussed basic facts of the ongoing protest at Blue House Prison. The protest ended when the prisoners agreed to surrender their weapons, and Biar helped negotiate the surrender.

• After the protest, he was cut off entirely from the outside world. In June 2019, he was sentenced to two years in prison.

• In January 2020, Peter was pardoned by the South Sudanese government and was released from prison on 4 January 2020.

• In June 2020, Peter Biar was told by senior officials in South Sudan that President Salva Kiir had ordered the National Security Service to either kidnap or kill him in Kenya. Because of this threat, he and his family were forced to go into hiding for several weeks until the United States government granted them emergency visas. On 23 July 2020, Peter Biar and his family left Kenya and moved to Washington, D.C.

• On 5 March 2024, he was named in a complaint by the US Department of Justice, which charged him and an associate with three counts of illegally exporting weapons to South Sudan through another country. The complaint said that Peter used these arms to conduct a coup and wanted to remove the government of South Sudan.

• In February 2026, Peter Biar and his associate Abraham Chol Keech admitted that they had planned to break U.S. weapons export laws. Biar was sentenced to 46 months, and Keech was given 41 months sentence.
  

  Peter Biar (right) with Abraham Chol Keech (left)

• Peter Biar has written many articles on the situation in South Sudan. In January 2013, he co-wrote an article for SSRN Electronic Journal entitled “South Sudan’s Capability Trap: Building a State with Disruptive Innovation. In 2015, he published an article with the International Peace Institute titled “State Formation, Humanitarianism, and Institutional Capabilities in South Sudan.

• In January 2016, Peter Biar co-authored a book titled Considering the State: Perspectives on South Sudan’s Subdivision and Federalism Debate.

• At the time of his arrest in July 2018, Ajak was pursuing his PhD in Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge, Trinity College.

• His doctoral thesis at the University of Cambridge was on South Sudan, Building on Sand: The Sudan People’s Liberation Movement Army and State Formation in South Sudan. He completed his PhD after his release from prison in 2020 and became the first South Sudanese national to hold a PhD from Cambridge.