This article explores the everyday politics of protecting women from war and atrocities, based on ethnographic work within the United Nations Protection of Civilians sites, South Sudan. It examines the heterogenous ways that peacekeepers and displaced people conceptualised and enacted women’s rights and protection inside the sites. Protection and gender were variously interpreted, resisted, and transformed. But sexual and gender-based violence remained rife in these makeshift ‘safe havens’. These experiences demonstrate that international peacebuilders cannot…
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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.
This article examines the forms of ‘civility’ promoted by South Sudanese NGO leaders and staff in their efforts to navigate a context of pervasive political repression. Drawing on in-depth, life-work history interviews, it shows how the careful cultivation of a ‘non-political’ identity was a way of securing space to operate in a highly militarised, politically restricted environment, of working across the divisions created by conflict, and of creating small spaces for change. The article also…
ABSTRACT This article attempts to position education not only in the peacebuilding debate but also in the larger good governance debate about what makes a resilient social contract. We subscribe in this paper to a theoretical perspective that attributes the driver of civil wars to governance deficit that is manifested in absence of resilient social contract in terms of sustained agreement between citizens and state. We then ask the key question of whether and how…
This report explores how Protection of Civilian (PoC) site residents guarantee their own safety and protection, following the handing over of the POC in Juba by the United Nations Mission in South Sudan’s (UNMISS) to the Revitalised-Transitional Government of National Unity (R-TGoNU). Read here
Abstract It is now over a decade since the proclamation of a humanitarian ‘data revolution’, with the rise of ‘innovation’ and the proliferation of ‘data solutions’ rendering data-based humanitarianism an important area of critical investigation. This article contributes to debates within the field by exploring the role of data in the provision of humanitarian assistance within camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs) across north-eastern Nigeria and South Sudan. It draws on qualitative interviews carried out…
The category of ‘inter-communal violence’ has been increasingly mobilised to interpret subnational violence in contemporary Africa. The paper contends this is an unwelcome trend that risks leaving violence unmoored from political and military systems it is enmeshed within. The paper advances an alternative framework for approaching such violence, using the cases of South Sudan and Nigeria to illustrate this framework. In purposefully weakened or deinstitutionalised systems, the paper argues, regimes tolerate, incite, or exploit forms…
As climate change increasingly affects the world, much is said about the rising amounts of aid required to support emergency response, long-term development to adapt, and peacebuilding to ensure that conflict does not undermine these efforts. Bringing these ideas together, some advocate for the addition of a separate climate change stream into the humanitarian, development, and peace/peacebuilding nexus (or triple nexus). Based on a critical literature review and synthesis, this article articulates and conceptualizes how…
Often compounding each other, current trends including climate change, environmental degradation, and increased consumption associated with unsustainable development and population growth, present serious threats to human security at global, national, and local levels. These trends are destabilizing economies, negating development gains, exacerbating gender-based violence against women and girls, and undermining global peace and security. This situation is particularly pronounced in countries like South Sudan where women and girls have often borne the brunt of multiple…
Resilience is a dominant humanitarian-development theme. Nonetheless, some humanitarian-development programmes have demonstrably negative impacts which encourage vulnerable people to actively resist these programmes. Based on 12 months ethnographic fieldwork in a Ugandan refugee settlement during 2017–18, this paper argues refugee residents articulated their refusal of humanitarian failure and corruption through active, largely non-political, resistance. I term the diverse strategies used ‘resistant resilience’, arguing that the agency central to these practices require that assumptions about resilience are…
This article analyzes the role of UN sanctions in the context of peace negotiations in South Sudan from the outbreak of the civil war in December 2013 until the signing of the peace agreement in August 2015. Drawing on the literature regarding third-party intervention in civil wars, it explores whether the UN sanctions regime—established in March 2015—was conceived as an instrument of leverage to get the parties to agree to a settlement. The article asks…
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