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As the global community strives to achieve Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 2) of ending hunger, progress is being fundamentally undermined by conflict. This report seeks to understand: i) how conflict affects different individuals’, groups’ and communities’ experience of hunger and food insecurity differently; ii) the different mechanisms by which conflict affects food security across the different pillars; and iii) what opportunities remain for mitigating the impacts of conflict on hunger. South Sudan is one of…

The area that is today’s South Sudan was once a marginalized region in the Republic of Sudan administered by tribal chiefs during the British colonial period (1899-1955). In the 1950s, marginalization gave rise to the Anyanya I rebellion, spearheaded by southern Sudanese separatists and resulting in the First Sudanese Civil War (1955-1972). The war ended after the 1972 Addis Ababa Agreement, only for another civil war to break out in 1983 instigated by the Sudan…

South Sudan, in the midst of conflict since 2011, is facing one of the world’s most challenging humanitarian operations. Further, the vastness of the country, the dispersed population, and the limits on transportation and telecommunications services make it difficult to gather and analyze data. South Sudan uses the Integrated Phase Classification system(IPC) to determine the severity of food security and nutrition crises. Throughout the crisis, the IPC system has shown innovation and ingenuity to address…

Misreporting is a well-known challenge for researchers in social sciences. This issue is especially prevalent if incentives for misreporting exist, for example, to claim certain benefits or hide illegal behavior. Internally displaced persons are a population that is highly dependent on aid receipts and, thus, have strong incentives to underreport consumption levels. To improve reporting for such vulnerable populations, this paper proposes to integrate “honesty primes” into the consumption module of the questionnaire. Honesty primes…

Climate change poses global risks (World Economic Forum, 2016, IPCC, 2014). These risks adversely affect women in developing countries because of their little capacity to adapt (Brody et al, 2008). Previous studies show that women are more vulnerable to climate change than men for a variety of reasons, including illiteracy, low socioeconomic skills, inadequate access to assets, and social isolation, among others (Ahmad and Fajber, 2009; Archer 2003; UNISDR, 2008; Neumayer and Plumper, 2007). Thus,…

This article uses Arend Lijphart’s notion of ‘power-sharing consociationalism’ to understand the mutually reinforcing conflict system and the barriers to resolving such conflicts in South Sudan. ‘Consociationalism’ has been affirmed as an ideal approach for resolving conflicts in ethnically divided societies, but in South Sudan, the formal institutions of power sharing have not delivered sustainable peace. Analysis in this article reveals that the implementation of the various ‘peace agreements’ and ‘deals’ deviated from classical ‘consociationalism’….

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…

Inequality is a major determinant of access to food in Sudan, with power, wealth and services concentrated within a central Sudan elite, leaving much of the country marginalized, impoverished and suffering repeated emergencies. This article discusses how food aid both contributed to the state’s exclusionary development process and tried but failed to assist crisis-affected populations in its peripheries. In the 1950s, food aid explicitly aimed to support the state but from the late 1980s, emergency…

As part of HelpAge International’s project on advancing the rights and protection of conflict-affected older South Sudanese migrants in Ethiopia, Uganda and South Sudan, HelpAge commissioned the Humanitarian Policy Group (HPG) to conduct a study on older South Sudanese displaced by conflict, both within South Sudan and across the border in Uganda and Ethiopia. This study takes stock of the progress made and remaining challenges faced by those responding to forced displacement, both in addressing…

Could the civil war in South Sudan have been prevented? Could some of the violence and misery caused by the war have been avoided? Those questions are academic in some ways, as so much damage has been done. But in other ways, seeking answers is vital because patterns of violence in the 21st century suggest there will be more wars that resemble the South Sudan conflict: (a) fought within a country’s borders, (b) fought between…

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