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In September 2018, South Sudanese political and armed actors signed a new peace agreement after months of negotiations between parties to the defunct 2015 Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in the Republic of South Sudan (ARCSS) and other groups that had since been created. While hailed by some as a significant step forward, the deal is clearly fragile. Fighting has since continued in parts of the country and some parties have reconsidered their…

This review focuses on the evidence on Ebola preparedness in South Sudan through an anthropological lens, looking at informal and traditional health care systems. It presents the evidence on how these can be utilised for surveillance, behaviour change communication, and vaccinations in the case of an Ebola outbreak, including: establishing surveillance of these services and how healers would be able to provide alerts about possible cases in the event of an Ebola outbreak in South…

In 2005, South Sudan adopted a minimum of 25 percent women representation quota in its interim constitution. Following the independence, this quota was maintained, with the Transitional Constitution devoting three clauses to this important policy.  In 2013, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), the governing party, proposed raising this quota to increase women’s participation in public life. In the recently signed peace agreement, known as the Revitalized Agreement on the Resolution of Conflict in South Sudan (R-ARCSS), this…

The Revitalised Agreement on the Resolution of Conflict in South Sudan (R-ARCSS) signed on 12 September 2018, not only allows for a new government and security arrangements, it also provides for two new commissions to decide the number of internal states and their boundaries. In the following Q and A, RVI fellows Douglas Johnson (DJ) and Aly Verjee (AV), joined by Matthew Pritchard (MP), US Institute of Peace researcher, discuss the history of boundary-making in…

The localisation commitments within the Grand Bargain, signed in May 2016, are one of the major achievements of the World Humanitarian Summit, with the potential to drive truly transformative change across the humanitarian system. There are now 59 signatories to the Grand Bargain; of the ten workstreams, workstream two – commonly known as ‘localisation’ – commits donors and aid organisations to provide 25% of global humanitarian funding to local and national responders ‘as directly as…

South Sudan is one of the world’s most divided and unstable countries. Since achieving statehood in 2011, the country has plunged into civil war (2013-15) and become the scene of some of the worst human rights abuses on the African continent. Despite ongoing political turmoil, states and international institutions have pledged enormous resources to stabilize the country and shore up the current peace process, but have had limited influence in dealing with the effects of…

This chapter highlights practices in the wider peacebuilding field that seek similar outcomes as UN peace operations or otherwise affect the background conditions necessary for their success. It treats South Sudan as an illustrative case study that uniquely reflects processes that shape and regulate sites of conflict, chronic emergency, and limited statehood across postcolonial sub-Saharan states. The author argues that, despite the ‘view from above’, South Sudan’s independence ultimately depended on two interconnected peacebuilding frameworks:…

The euphoric birth of South Sudan was celebrated around the world – a triumph for global justice and a sign that one of the world’s most devastating wars was finally over. But the party would not last; the Republic’s freedom-fighters soon plunged their new nation back into chaos, shattering the promise of liberation and exposing the hubris of their Western backers. An epic tale of paradise won and lost, A Rope from the Sky is…

Previous research on dehumanization has been conducted primarily in Western contexts, and outside of periods of ongoing and highly violent conflict. The present study, in contrast, examines grassroots-level dehumanization between South Sudan’s two largest ethnic groups—Dinka and Nuer—during an episode of extreme interethnic violence. Using a mixed-methods approach we study levels of dehumanization and how these attitudes are related to and structured around ongoing and/or very recent extreme violence. Whereas the results demonstrated mechanistic dehumanization…

Following the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) and the subsequent independence of South Sudan in 2011, many agro-pastoralist and pastoralist areas of the country have experienced an upsurge of livestock raiding, counter raiding and cycles of revenge killing. Eastern Lakes State, in contrast to its neighbor, Western Lakes State, is an exception. Since 2011, there has been a significant reduction in violent conflict between communities in the state. Peace is the Name of Our Cattle-Camp…

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