NAIROBI, Kenya — For the first time in months, after killing scores if not hundreds of each other’s men, Sudan and South Sudan are back at the negotiating table, wrangled into peace talks by an increasingly worried international coalition, including the United States and China, that was terrified that the two countries were on the brink of a cataclysmic war.

It was less than two months ago that Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, ridiculed South Sudan’s government in Juba as a measly “insect” that needed to be swatted away. Since then, the two sides have announced that they pulled out of Abyei, a disputed area. On Thursday, Barnaba Marial Benjamin, South Sudan’s information minister, said the negotiations, taking place in Ethiopia, were “going well.”

Guns flashing one day. Smiles the next. Sudan analysts say that is simply how it is going to be with these two feuding neighbors. Though Sudan and South Sudan may never descend to a full-fledged war, partly because of all the international attention, they will probably never achieve full-fledged peace either.

“I do not see things improving much and basically think that the current style of destructive but low-level violence will be the order of the day,” said John O. Voll, a professor of Islamic history at Georgetown University and a longtime Sudan specialist.