In the last 5 years, the conflict in South Sudan has displaced 4 million people and placed 7 million in need of humanitarian assistance. Everyone concerned has had their lives torn apart with adolescent girls suffering worst. Their physical safety, their health and their future prospects are all threatened in ways that differ from the risks faced by adolescent boys and adults. Often, too, just because they are young and female, their rights and needs…
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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.
South Sudan’s civil war has spread across the country, fuelling economic collapse and food shortages, and sending millions of residents fleeing across its borders. Although the former Northern Bahr el-Ghazal State has escaped the worst excesses of the current conflict—in part because it is a supposed heartland of South Sudan’s ruling politicalmilitary elites—it is also deeply affected by, and embedded in, the current war. Politics, power and chiefship in famine and war investigates how customary…
The 2015 UN High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations (HIPPO) stressed two major themes that Secretary-General António Guterres continues to focus on: first, the primacy of politics in peacekeeping, which he raised in his September 2017 remarks at the Security Council open debate on peacekeeping; and second, the core obligation of peacekeepers and the entire UN to protect civilians, a continuous theme of his tenure. Yet protecting civilians and pursuing political strategies, the defining tasks…
Contemporary debates about humanitarianism in South Sudan focus on the pressing problems of the present, with access issues and violence against humanitarians understandably at the forefront of donor and humanitarian concerns. While valuable and comprehensible, this focus on the present has meant that the ways in which aid shapes conflict in the long term have not been discussed, and are not well understood by humanitarian actors in South Sudan. This paper focuses on a particular…
South Sudan has experienced decades of protracted conflicts, some of which might have been caused in part or exacerbated by climate change and variability. Climate change causes scarcity of resources and forces communities to raid their neighbors or migrate to a new area to look for opportunities, which brings new arrivals into competition with the landowners, leading to conflicts (Homer – Dixon, 1994; Raleigh & Kniveton, 2012; Tiitmamer et al., 2017). Local level climate induced…
This article explores how the humanitarian presence and programs in the disputed border area of Abyei between Sudan and South Sudan can be understood as a buffer between conflicting parties, rather than as mere assistance to a displaced population. It aims to contribute to debates about the spatial impact of humanitarian governance and the politicization of aid in protracted crisis contexts, and specifically in relation to territorial disputes and border struggles. It is based on…
The report is a part of a global initiative to highlight the challenges of out-of-school children (OOSC) and builds on a study of out-of-school children in South Sudan that was initiated in 2013, updating the data to reflect the acute conflict that has occurred in the country since then. The study was funded as part of the Global and Regional Activities program. Download here
In July 2011, South Sudan was granted independence and became the world’s newest country. Yet just two-and-a-half years after this momentous decision, the country was in the grips of renewed civil war and political strife. Hilde F. Johnson served as Special Representative of the Secretary-General and Head of the United Nations Mission in the Republic of South Sudan from July 2011 until July 2014 and, as such, she was witness to the many challenges which…
This article analyses the nature of coordination between the various stakeholders during the design and implementation of a disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) process. It makes detailed reference to the contemporary DDR programme in South Sudan as this African country is a relevant example of significant international and local efforts to facilitate DDR coordination in a fragile and complex political and operational environment. The analyses showed that in South Sudan, coordination appeared to have been…
This research was conducted by Dr. Edward Thomas, Ranga Gworo of the Conflict Sensitivity Resource Facility (CSRF) and Kiden Grace Wani of the World Food Programme (WFP) in February and March 2018, and funded by the UK, Swiss, Canadian and Netherlands Donor Missions in South Sudan. Cash-based programmes can help poor households address food insecurity, and to better manage by themselves some of the risks they face. Evidence from around the world suggests that this…
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