In high-conflict scenarios, humanitarian needs often surpass resources, and humanitarians are faced with ongoing challenges of whom to prioritise and where to work. This process is often referred to as ‘targeting’, but this article uses the concept of ‘triage’ to emphasise how prioritisation is a continuous and political process, rather than a one-off exercise to find the best match between needs and programme objectives. This study focused on South Sudan, exploring the formal and informal…
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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.
Localisation, as it aims to shift power in the humanitarian system, will involve the increased inclusion of local faith actors, those national and local faith-affiliated groups and organisations that are often first, and last, responders in crises and have been responding in humanitarian contexts for many years, but often in parallel to humanitarian coordination mechanisms. In primary research in South Sudan with local faith actors and international humanitarian actors, this article aims to examine the…
Qualitative empirical enquiries into dynamics of security and insecurity often include a blind spot that bear theoretical ramifications because only those areas and respondents that allow for relatively safe fieldwork are studied. To transparently articulate the spheres of projection that creep into our knowledge production, we propose a distinction between inner and outer circles as highly fluid but separate geographical, socio-political and methodological spaces. Drawing on fieldwork in the Central African Republic and South Sudan,…
This article explores the unintended consequences associated with the protection of civilians (PoC) mandate in United Nations peacekeeping. Drawing primarily on two case studies – the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) and South Sudan (UNMISS) – we advance three lines of argument. First, the gravitational pull of PoC can distract missions from other, often interdependent, priorities. Second, the implementation of PoC can distort intended impacts. Third, these distractions and distortions can combine to produce…
Do states circumvent embargoes by supplying weapons across borders to sanctioned countries? We report evidence that arms imports systematically increase in the neighborhood of conflict states under an embargo. Using several alternative research-design specifications, we contend that this pattern is consistent with arms exporters shifting the arms trade to neighbors of conflict states under sanctions, where it is easier to move arms clandestinely across the border. Despite the lack of direct evidence of clandestine cross-border…
The surge in acute food insecurity due to conflict calls for sound evidence-based policy-making. Unfortunately, the knowledge on behaviors of households when they face a food shortage in these situations is under-reported in the literature. The paper contributes to the covering of this gap by presenting the food consumption and livelihood-based coping mechanisms used by households in Western Bahr el Ghazal in South Sudan, distinguishing between rural areas and the Wau Protection of Civilian camp….
African borderlands – such as those between South Sudan, Uganda and Congo – are often presented by analysts as places of agency and economic opportunity, in contrast to hardened, securitized borders elsewhere. We emphasize, however, that even such relatively porous international borders can nevertheless be the focus of significant unease for borderland communities. Crossing borders can enable safety for those fleeing conflict or trading prospects for business people, but it can also engender anxieties around…
This study examined how good governance could be a means to peaceful co-existence in Eastern Equatoria State, South Sudan. The study was anchored on three theories of; good governance, collaborative governance and democratic peace. The key findings of the study were that bad governance and poor leadership hinder peaceful coexistence, participation of citizens in decision making processes, awareness of citizens in existing policies and legislations, the rule of law, and use of available resources to…
Peace is a fundamental component of community development, personal growth, and the survival of our planet. At the heart of every faith community, and culture, lies a need to advance peaceful co-existence to enhance productive, meaningful lives and sustainable societies; participation and inclusion can also start from the point of understanding a conflict, from conflict analysis. Since the independence of Sudan in 1956, South Sudan has been in war, till 2005 when the Comprehensive Peace…
This article discusses the concepts of failure of states, fragility of states, and the prospects of peace in South Sudan. The article focuses specifically on judicial structural deformities in South Sudan under the qualitative and normative research methodologies, with structural functionalism as theoretical framework. Where preceding works had concentrated their South Sudanese peace-building recommendations on power-sharing mechanisms, this contribution emphasizes a long-term postviolence focus on the building of governance structures. The work recommends that while…
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