This paper outlines the United Nations’ integrated response to complex humanitarian emergencies and the different types of interactions that may occur between militaries and civilian organisations involved in them. It uses a recent UK deployment to South Sudan as an example, drawing on the experience to highlight areas of particular interest to healthcare workers. It identifies several domains that should usefully be developed for both civilians and military personnel in these environments—including sharing our expertise…
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CSRF Research Repository
The CSRF Research Repository aims to support greater contextual knowledge for policy makers, programme managers, and implementers by providing a searchable repository of research, analysis, and resources, and providing periodic updates on new research and analysis.
The South Sudan intermittent conflicts and civil wars have attracted national, regional, and international interventions. Dominated by politically led conventional ideologies of peace approaches that revolve around suppression, negotiation, and mediation, such approaches have not achieved sustainable peace in the region. The case for societal customs presented here demonstrates a contrary view. Historically, the Nilotic Lwo ethnic groups of South Sudan, that is, Dinka and Nuer, have fought each other but utilised their customs in…
This article discusses the relationship between education and armed conflict in Sudan and South Sudan, and particularly the role of teachers in peace and reconciliation efforts. The periods covered are the North-South civil war from 1955 to 2005, the interim period between 2005 and 2011 with the Comprehensive Peace Agreement and the current civil war in South Sudan which started two years after South Sudan’s independence in 2013. The article shows that teachers are not…
Scholars have long argued that local conflicts need to be integrated into the analysis of civil war and peacebuilding. Yet, systematic research of the linkages between communal violence and civil war is sparse. This contribution connects communal violence research to the stabilization and peacekeeping debate. To further a more systematic analysis of communal conflicts, the author distinguishes various types and their linkages to civil war and peacebuilding. In South Sudan, large-scale communal conflicts—communal wars—precede the…
The signing of the Revitalized Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in South Sudan (RARCSS) in September 2018 raised debate not only about its added value to the 2015 Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in South Sudan (ARCSS) but also the effectiveness of style of mediation pursued by mediators. Although there are divergent views on whether the RARCSS will deliver sustainable peace or reach the same fate of ARCSS, these views can…
This paper draws on a qualitative study (n = 52) and applies a political ecology of health framework to examine men’s perceptions of women’s reproductive health in South Sudan. The findings suggest that political practices of place making configure men’s views of women’s reproductive roles in this new nation state. In particular, masculinity intertwines with fears of losing traditional culture, and with lingering concerns about sovereignty to underpin men’s deep aversion to modern family planning methods. In…
After its hard-won independence in 2011, South Sudan slid quickly into violent conflict and became a theatre of enormous human suffering. This article attempts to answer the question of what went wrong, and what prospects exist for South Sudanese to forge a resilient social contract to build and sustain peace. It employs an analytical framework postulating three drivers of such a contract, at the heart of which is how core issues of conflict that underpin…
Primary school textbooks can provide space for learning about peace and inclusion but can also reinforce messages of inequality and division. This article describes a thematic analysis of South Sudan’s textbooks for pupils in Grade 4 Social Studies, English, and Christian Religious Education. The analysis uses a conceptual framework that positions education as having multiple potential overlapping roles in relation to conflict—victim, accomplice, and transformer—to show that the textbooks’ content contains some motions toward social…
The dynamic quality of protracted intra‐state conflicts is a factor that complicates and sometimes confounds the efforts of peacemakers. Building on this insight, and given the prevalence of conflicts of this type in the contemporary international system, this paper takes up a central question: how can peacemakers adapt to changing dynamics along the parameters of a protracted intra‐state conflict in order to cultivate effective resolution of the conflict? Inspired by the theme of this special…
The conflict in South Sudan, unlike the other conflicts, does not touch upon issues of state sovereignty or regime change. It is predominately a civil war with a regional dimension. The BRICS response to this crisis is mostly cooperative and multilateral aiming to seek a negotiated peace agreement. Of the BRICS group China has been the most pro-active actor facilitating peace talks and sending peacekeepers to the country. This follows directly from its multibillion-dollar investments…
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