‘Protection of Civilians’ (PoC) has been a dominant focus of United Nations (UN) peacekeeping missions in recent decades. At the same time, ‘Protection of Civilians’ is a contested and ambiguous concept, with its practical meanings often established in the realities of implementation. The paper explores the concept of ‘protection of civilians’ and its related impact on the everyday experiences of those seeking safety. Using the case of ‘protection of civilian’s (POC) sites in South Sudan,…
Entries by Zoe Cormack
Abstract This article explores the links between African artefacts in European museum collections and the slave and ivory trade in Sudan in the nineteenth century. It examines how ‘ethnographic’ collections were acquired from southern Sudan and how this process was entangled with the expansion of predatory commerce. Presenting evidence from contemporary travel accounts, museum archives and from the examination of objects themselves, the author argues that the nineteenth-century trade in artefacts from South Sudan was…
This article examines an attempt to build a memorial to local victims of civil war in South Sudan. The memorial commemorates the mass execution of civilians in 1964, close to the town of Gogrial in a rural part of South Sudan. During this massacre, local people were killed and their bodies piled up into a macabre structure by the side of the road, as a warning against supporting the Anya-Nya insurgency. This is an example…
This article argues, drawing on research in a Dinka-speaking part of South Sudan, that conflicts over local boundaries are rooted in the existence of different border paradigms and in subsequent attempts to resolve, sometimes violently, competing moral claims on the landscape. Link to publication