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This article analyses the nature of coordination between the various stakeholders during the design and implementation of a disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) process. It makes detailed reference to the contemporary DDR programme in South Sudan as this African country is a relevant example of significant international and local efforts to facilitate DDR coordination in a fragile and complex political and operational environment. The analyses showed that in South Sudan, coordination appeared to have been…

In the past few decades there has been increased feminist scholarship in the area of conflict and peacebuilding, with calls for the inclusion of previously marginalised feminist and women’s perspectives to peacebuilding as well as examination of the processes that have sanctioned these exclusions. Feminists have argued that women’s daily experiences and struggles enable them to articulate different perspectives on peacebuilding that challenges dominant male discourse on conflict and peacebuilding. Black and African feminist scholars…

This article forms the introduction of a special issue on the relation between dynamics of violent conflict and urbanisation in Central and Eastern Africa. The aim of this collection of articles is to contribute to a profound understanding of the role of ‘the urban’ in African conflict dynamics in order to seize their future potential as centres of stability, development, peace-building or post-conflict reconstruction. This introduction argues for the need to bridge both the ‘urban…

The aim of the study was to investigate sex differences in perpetration of low intensity intimate partner aggression in South Sudan, to compare levels of perpetration and victimisation, and further to test whether the revised gender symmetry theory (Archer, 2018) could be applicable in an African country. A questionnaire was filled in by 302 females and 118 males in South Sudan, the mean age was 22.5 years ( SD 8.4) for women, and 25.6 years…

International aid agencies often claim to give the poor and disenfranchised a voice by helping them tell their stories to others located far away. But how do aid workers conceptualize and operationalize a politics of voice within media production processes? How do ideas about giving voice to others shape aid agencies’ engagement with mainstream news organizations? This article explores two contrasting news production case studies which took place in South Sudan and Mali, involving Save…

Cattle raiding, a longstanding practice among pastoralists in South Sudan, was historically governed by cultural authorities and ritual prohibitions. However, after decades of on-and-off integration into armed forces, raiders are now heavily armed, and military-style attacks claim dozens if not hundreds of lives at a time. Beginning with the emergence of the infamous Lou Nuer “White Army” in the Bor Massacre of the early 1990s, in which Riek Machar mobilized local herders to mount a…

Do roads literally lead to peace? While seemingly a strange question to ask, today’s peacebuilders certainly seem to think so. After decades of focus on questions of governance, today, instead, infrastructure primes in state- and peacebuilding missions in many fragile and conflict-affected societies. Peacebuilding efforts in places ranging from Somalia to Afghanistan to the Congo are, to a considerable extent, interventions in the built environment. While infrastructure has always been around in post-conflict reconstruction, today,…

This article analyzes how transformations of land governance in the new Republic of South Sudan play into processes of everyday state formation. National land tenure reforms and decentralization policies have increased polarization between local public authorities in and around Yei Town, who vie for legitimacy amongst returning refugees, internally displaced people and migrants arriving in the wake of the civil war. Ambiguously worded national policies and shifts in the composition of the population provide a…

South Sudan’s Initial transitional justice planning processes sought to engage communities on roles and viabilities of local justice in supporting transitional justice initiatives and mechanisms prescribed in the August 2015 Agreement. Nonetheless, the planning processes hit a snag, when the conflict reignited in July 2016. The working paper pursues the discussion about the role that local and indigenous reconciliation and justice processes can play in current transitional justice discourses and contends that existing practices and…

Land reform has been depicted by some as an effective element of counterinsurgency strategy in nations experiencing peasant-based civil conflict. While some studies have argued that land reform reduces civilian support for insurgency, other research has demonstrated that these reforms are often undermined by brutal state repression. The study of land reform has also been driven largely by qualitative case study research, which has limited what we know about the cross-national efficacy of these reforms….

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