This chapter highlights practices in the wider peacebuilding field that seek similar outcomes as UN peace operations or otherwise affect the background conditions necessary for their success. It treats South Sudan as an illustrative case study that uniquely reflects processes that shape and regulate sites of conflict, chronic emergency, and limited statehood across postcolonial sub-Saharan states. The author argues that, despite the ‘view from above’, South Sudan’s independence ultimately depended on two interconnected peacebuilding frameworks:…
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CSRF Research Repository
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After several months of political and diplomatic shuttling by mediators, South Sudan finally has a peace deal. Broadly, the new agreement recognises the evolution of the conflict and no longer considers the civil war as binary duel between the two protagonists but rather as involving many actors. It also accepts that Uganda and Sudan, the closest allies to the various conflict parties, play an instrumental role in realising a lasting and sustainable peace agreement. The…
This rapid review provides a synthesis of evaluations and learning reviews of cash-based programming in South Sudan. There is evidence that in South Sudan the cash-based programming help poor households address food needs and nutrition; and by injecting funds from vouchers, paid work, or grants into the local economy affect local markets. These cash based programmes are changing Sudanese society by affecting traditional kinship relationships and social safety networks; and affecting livelihood strategies as people…
The five-year-old civil war in South Sudan is an unparalleled humanitarian and security crisis, causing the largest exodus of refugees on the African continent since the Rwandan genocide and leaving over a third of the population displaced and two-thirds severely food insecure. Beyond the human toll on South Sudan’s long-suffering citizens, the country’s unraveling underscores the shifting political and security fault lines in the Horn of Africa. This Special Report surveys the region’s various interstate…
Publication Summary Based on interviews with various informants, this paper attempts to evaluate the implementation status of the security arrangement provisions of the Agreement on the Resolution of Conflict in South Sudan (ARCSS), as well as its future implications for the Security Sector Reforms (SSR) endeavor in South Sudan. Most of the respondents, who are mostly military experts and were intimately involved in the implementation of the security arrangement provisions of ARCISS, opined that the…
The dynamics of peace and conflict are fundamentally shaped by a politics of scaling difference. Based on the insight that difference is widely associated with both the causes of and cures for violent conflict, this article explores how practices of scaling mediate this duality. Drawing on South Sudan and Kosovo, it is argued that the governance of conflict is characterized by efforts to skilfully accommodate diversity, straddling the line between recognizing, reinforcing, and reconfiguring difference…
Southern Sudan’s past crises have mobilised consistent flows of humanitarian assistance. Recalling the humanitarian catastrophes and international interventions of the 1990s–2000s, the war that exploded in South Sudan in 2013 has been no exception. This paper shows that the SPLM/A political elite promptly incorporated these flows of external resources into its extraverted strategies of state-building. Similar to the current situation, it did so by appropriating not only material assets but also discourses, playing the ‘fragile…
This report outlines findings from an endline study conducted in September 2017, to explore what change, if any, had occurred in how women and girls participate in the camp life and camp governance and how they relate to their perceptions of safety, as a result of these pilot strategies. At the time of the endline study, Bentiu PoC site hosted 115,020 IDPs (20,067 households), of whom females made up 50 percent and children under 5…
Soon after South Sudan achieved independence in 2011, its political landscape grew increasingly volatile. It became almost impossible for international and regional actors to address one crisis before another more serious one erupted. This article combines cultural, political, economic and social factors into a comprehensive framework to explain the role of the political elites in transforming fear and politicized anger into violent and deadly conflicts. The theoretical framework of the security dilemma model is applied…
By focusing on the case study of the negotiations over social service tax in Northern Bahr el-Ghazal state, this article provides insights on state formation processes, inter-governmental negotiations and citizen-state relations in South Sudan. This is achieved by considering the economic and political developments that have shaped local and state level negotiations, such as the 2010 elections, the 2012 half of oil exploration and the 2013 decline into civil war. The analysis is further enriched…
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