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…
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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…
Land is often a critical aspect of conflict: it may be a root cause or trigger conflicts or may become an issue as the conflict progresses. Conflicts lead to forced evictions; the people who are displaced by conflict need somewhere to live and some land to farm or to graze their animals, often leading to further disputes over the use of land and other resources. This publication – which also refers to South Sudan -…
Since the start of South Sudan’s internal armed conflict in December 2013, hundreds of people, mostly men, have been detained under the authority of the National Security Service (NSS) and Military Intelligence Directorate in various detention facilities across the capital city, Juba and subjected to torture and other forms of ill-treatment. Others have been forcefully disappeared. Many of those who have been detained have been held under the category of “political detainees” on allegations that…
Like the rest of the world, South Sudanese in Kenya were shocked when the Kenyan police started storming their residences, arresting and detaining many of them in police center in Nairobi, Nakuru, Lodwar, Eldoret, and Nyeri, among others. This came following a strongly worded statement by Kenya’s Cabinet Secretary for the Interior, Fred Matiangi, concerning what he described as “illegal immigrants,” or foreigners working in Kenya without employment permits. In a government’s initiative that reflects…
South Sudan’s secession was either an unavoidable outcome of a post-colonial betrayal of political promises or a surprising result of muddled and contradictory developments during which, at crucial points, dynamics nonetheless aligned. It was, this chapter argues, because of these contradictions that South Sudan came into being: from its colonial past through a series of rebellions with competing ambitions, via the contradictory 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (that supported both Sudan’s unity and southern autonomy), to…
The 2005 United Nations agreement on the ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) populations from atrocities was intended to set acceptable boundaries to ‘humanitarian intervention’, but it is still extremely controversial and vulnerable in a world of increasing nationalism and illiberalism. Can the European Union help to ‘rescue’ R2P? This paper analyses how the EU has responded in three mass atrocity situations: Central African Republic (2012–14); the treatment of the Rohingya minority in Myanmar (2017–), and inter-ethnic…
This article investigates the implications of women’s exclusion for the nature and durability of peace processes, and whether factors that undermine peace consolidation post-settlement might be prevented through more inclusive peacemaking. It examines the Sudan-South Sudan peace process that produced the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, the roles women played in peacemaking and their exclusion from official negotiations, and the sources of insecurity post-CPA. South Sudan’s peace process shows that the exclusion of women can be…
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…
The Republic of South Sudan, the world’s “youngest country,” gained independence from Sudan following decades of civil war in 2011, with fanfare, high hopes, and great expectations. The Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A), the primary military force that fought for independence, transformed into the political rulers of the new country and lost its vision of a free and prosperous nation. Within two years of independence, the country has quickly degenerated into internecine warfare with fifty…
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