This report provides a status update on the Warrap State, with specific reference to – among others – political changes, governor Manhiem Bol Malek’s approach, elections, and difficulties at the border. Read more here
Entries by Joshua Craze
This reports provides a status update on the conflict in Western Equatoria, specifically referring to the political factors: divided cabinet, border dilemmas, and cattle-related issues. Read more here
Despite many high-profile interventions, Abyei remains mired in a violent impasse. Conflict between the Ngok and Twic Dinka continues, and the territory’s political future remains in limbo. Attacked from Both Sides: Abyei’s Existential Dilemma—a new Situation Update from the Small Arms Survey’s Human Security Baseline Assessment for Sudan and South Sudan (HSBA) project—discusses the causes for the deadlock surrounding this politically fractured territory, and the catastrophic effect conflict has on its civilians. Read more…
Focusing on the 2005-2020 period, the report discusses the political economy among South Sudanese elites. The report explores how the recent reduction in oil production and revenue has shifted the political economy, and related elite loyalty, from the one based on oil to one based on land ownership. The report argues that the new quest for land by elites is likely to lead not only to the deprivation of civilian populations of their land, but…
In Warrap state, home to South Sudanese President Salva Kiir and much of the country’s political and military elite, many hoped that the signing of a peace agreement in 2018 would bring an end to the violence that had scarred their country for the previous five years. Instead, in Warrap, violence intensified, and pitted communities against each other in increasingly brutal tit-for-tat attacks that targeted women, children, homes, and the very capacities of communities to…
Upper Nile is in chaos. A once durable alliance between the national government in Juba and the Padang Dinka in Malakal has given way to a much more uncertain situation, in which the regime of South Sudanese President Salva Kiir sets feuding elites against each other. Disorder has proved an effective tool of rule. In Upper Nile, Kiir’s regime has successfully peeled off Eastern Nuer commanders once loyal to Riek Machar’s Sudan People’s Liberation Army…
A literary essay that tells the story of southern Sudan since 1983, and the emergence of a dominant military class in the country, sustained by international support and the indifference of the diplomatic corps. Link to publication
The Politics of Numbers: On Security Sector Reform in South Sudan, 2005-2020 is the first comprehensive study of what has happened to South Sudan’s military forces since the end of the Sudanese second civil war in 2005. Based on extensive fieldwork in the country, the report argues that all of the international community’s efforts to create a unified armed forces in South Sudan have paradoxically only escalated the process of fracturing that led to the current…
The civil war that began in South Sudan in December 2013 has had dire consequences for the Shilluk of Upper Nile. Attacks by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) and allied militia forces have forcibly displaced tens of thousands of people. Many of those displaced have fled to Sudan—just as they did during the second civil war (1983–2005)—where they eke out an uncertain existence. On the east bank of the White Nile, where there was…
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…