This article examines an initiative by the USAID-funded Room to Learn South Sudan project (2013 to 2016) to encourage and enable community participation in improving education access, quality and safety. Project staff engaged parents and teachers as well as women, youth, and other community members in developing and implementing school improvement plans. These plans were informed by their participation in a “good school” visioning exercise; their interpretation of data on measures of access, quality, and…
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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.
This study asserts that women’s rights are far from being recognized in South Sudan despite its efforts to include the rights of women in the Transitional Constitution after its attainment of independence from Sudan in 2011. While the article acknowledges the traditional modernization theory and cultural sovereignty theory, it engages international human rights standards as its conceptual framework. Using documentary research methodology involving analysis of primary and secondary sources, the manuscript established that a plural…
External actors have been engaged in what is now South Sudan from the colonial era through to the present day, providing humanitarian and development assistance and exerting political pressure during and since the second civil war that has helped to protect people, legitimize the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A), broker the peace agreements leading to independence, and undergird the new state of South Sudan. After the civil war and especially at independence, many international actors…
After a long-term decline in the frequency and lethality of famines, 2017 has witnessed resurgent international concern over the issue. This paper examines the trends in famine over the last 150 years, with particular attention to the fusion of famine with forcible mass starvation. It identifies four main historic periods of famines, namely: the zenith of European colonialism; the extended World War; post-colonial totalitarianism; and post-Cold War humanitarian emergencies; and asks whether we may be…
In early 2017, the government of South Sudan declared that parts of the country had been hit by severe famine. This famine was another sign of the many ways in which a disastrous war was killing people. South Sudan had at that point been in a civil war for three years, with the humanitarian situation steadily deteriorating since war broke out in December 2013. The governing Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) and its army, the…
This paper aims to contribute to debates about humanitarian governance and insecurity in post-conflict situations. It takes the case of South Sudan to explore the relations between humanitarian agencies, the international community, and local authorities, and the ways international and local forms of power become interrelated and contested, and to what effect. The paper is based on eight months of ethnographic research in various locations in South Sudan between 2011 and 2013, in which experiences…
This article examines the role of political mandates in including or excluding civil society in the negotiation processes mediated by the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) in South Sudan and by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) in Zimbabwe. It argues that the mandates determined the issue of inclusivity by synthesizing the mediating organizations’ normative considerations and practical requirements and by enabling the organizations’ narrative of the conflict to dominate the negotiations at the expense…
The interpretation of self-determination as a vote for secession shaped the state that South Sudan has become since the 2011 referendum. Self-determination, this paper argues, is a democratic political process in which citizens determine their preferred form of statehood and nature of governance for their country. In South Sudan, however, political actors—with international support—established conditions that reduced such complex democratic processes to narrow technical matters. Equating self-determination with secession consolidated political and military domination in…
Why do some peace agreements end armed conflicts whereas others do not? Previous studies have primarily focused on the relation between warring parties and the provisions included in peace agreements. Prominent mediators, however, have emphasised the importance of stakeholders at various levels for the outcome of peace agreements. To match the experience of these negotiators we apply a level-of-analysis approach to examine the contextual circumstances under which peace agreements are concluded. While prominent within the…
In the oil fields of Thar Jath, South Sudan, increasing salinity of drinking water was observed together with human incompatibilities and rise in livestock mortalities. Hair analysis was used to characterize the toxic exposure of the population. Hair samples of volunteers from four communities with different distance from the center of the oil field (Koch 23 km, n = 24; Leer 50 km, n = 26; Nyal 110 km, n = 21; and Rumbek 220…
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