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 -…

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…

This policy and practice summary accompanies a longer report which identifies overarching lessons contributing to the effectiveness of peacebuilding in South Sudan. It aims to provide some guidance for those wishing to understand or support peacebuilding in South Sudan, particularly donor agencies and practitioners within the peacebuilding sector.

This report analyses approaches to conflict transformation and peacebuilding in South Sudan. It identifies overarching lessons from outside South Sudan, from the country’s own history, and based on the wisdom of local peacebuilders, long-term practitioners and citizens affected by their work. The reports outlines ten lessons or principles which provide some guidance to those who wish to understand or support peacebuilding in South Sudan. These are each accompanied by short case studies which explore why…

In the past few decades there has been increased feminist scholarship in the area of conflict and peacebuilding, with calls for the inclusion of previously marginalised feminist and women’s perspectives to peacebuilding as well as examination of the processes that have sanctioned these exclusions. Feminists have argued that women’s daily experiences and struggles enable them to articulate different perspectives on peacebuilding that challenges dominant male discourse on conflict and peacebuilding. Black and African feminist scholars…

Do roads literally lead to peace? While seemingly a strange question to ask, today’s peacebuilders certainly seem to think so. After decades of focus on questions of governance, today, instead, infrastructure primes in state- and peacebuilding missions in many fragile and conflict-affected societies. Peacebuilding efforts in places ranging from Somalia to Afghanistan to the Congo are, to a considerable extent, interventions in the built environment. While infrastructure has always been around in post-conflict reconstruction, today,…

This briefing  critically reflects on the ongoing peacebuilding efforts in South Sudan and suggests to adequately considering the complexity of the conflict dynamics and to taking local peace building actors into account. Download  

The Conflict Sensitivity and Peacebuilding Programming Guide is a tool for UNICEF field staff and leadership to understand, situate and operationalize conflict sensitivity and peacebuilding through UNICEF’s existing work or new initiatives in different contexts and in partnership with other stakeholders. Download

Abyei was one of the most contested areas of Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) of January 2005. Drawing on direct experience, the article examines the agreement and the experience of trying to support its implementation. It analyses the relationship between this and the overall problems of the CPA, and of peacekeeping in the newly independent South Sudan. Drawing on relevant literature, it examines the wider issues for the negotiation of peace agreements; for UN mandates,…

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