This report examines the intersection between conflict and connectivity, including social media. The report identifies five factors that shape the nexus between conflict and connectivity, including infrastructure, population density, a fluctuating economy, third party interference and digital media. The report provides a set of recommendations on how to leverage the benefits of digital technology in peacebuilding. Although dated, this report resonates with the current ban on the use of social media in the country following…
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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.
The first of two papers, this analysis explores the magnitude and ramifications of ‘communal’ violence in South Sudan in recent years and challenges those who attempt to portray it as ‘ethnic’ or due to the absence of state control. Linking the increased incidence of violence to national and inter-elite rivalries, it argues that these are playing out at the sub-national and local levels due to changes in South Sudan’s political economy, with elite power being…
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…
This paper documents experiences from the Bridge Network, a group of South Sudanese researchers, on how they conduct research in conflict setting. It outlines some of the challenges South Sudanese researchers face, including managing people’s expectations as well as convincing respondents to permit recording of interviews, and how they address these challenges. One researcher noted ‘that flexibility allowed him to manoeuvre the security context and conduct many interviews whilst maintaining high ethical standards’. Download
This Context Update Factsheet aims to support a conflict-sensitive approach to decision-making by aid actors and policy makers in South Sudan through an improved understanding of South Sudan’s context, conflict dynamics and how aid actors might interact with this context. The Conflict Sensitivity Resource Facility’s analysis covers the period January-March 2021 and is based on quantitative data reported by key informants at the settlement-level collected by REACH and additional qualitative sources. All findings presented in…
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…
The South Sudan peace agreement provides for transitional justice mechanisms aimed at fostering justice and reconciliation. They include the Commission for Truth, Reconciliation and Healing (CTRH) and the Hybrid Court for South Sudan (HCSS). Drawing on qualitative data obtained from interviews, document reviews, and archival research conducted between October 2019 and June 2020 in Addis Ababa, Kampala, and Nairobi, this study delves into the current transitional justice discourses in South Sudan with a particular focus…
This report provides an overview of the National Dialogue in South Sudan with a focus on citizen perceptions of the process. It lays out the current context in which the National Dialogue is situated, the history of past dialogues as well as the initiation and evolution of the current process. The report concludes with a series of recommendations for how to support the implementation of the National Dialogue’s resolutions and lessons learned for other participatory…
International humanitarian actors and academics continue to struggle to understand armed group conduct and how to restrain this conduct when it violates moral, legal and humanitarian norms. Armed groups that lack a visible, explicit formal hierarchical command structure, equivalent to those found in state militaries, have proved a particular puzzle. A growing body of scholarship on the strategic functions of patterns of violence and restraint has usefully moved beyond assumptions that extreme violence is indicative…
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