Beginning in 2018 and escalating in 2020 and 2021, communities in Tonj East have experienced increased exposure to
conflict-related shocks, resulting in the regulation of mobility and disruption of livelihoods. Such shocks have impacted
livelihoods and coping capacity and have had acute consequences on food insecurity in the county.
Conflict shocks – driven by an interplay between political dynamics at the national and sub-national levels and inter- and
intra-communal dynamics – are reported to have increasingly affected towns and settlements across the county, manifesting
in the destruction of homesteads, property, and service provision facilities. They have also resulted in an exponentially
greater number of people displacing from or within Tonj East since 2018. Integrated Phase Classification (IPC) analysis
suggests that such shocks have been particularly detrimental to agriculture-based livelihoods strategies, with violent events
either targeting crops or disrupting cultivation cycles.
REACH assessment findings from September 2022, corroborated by data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event
Database project (ACLED), suggest that conflict-related shocks in Tonj East have most often occurred at a time of year – the
early and late rainy season (June to July and October to November) – when cattle are nearby settlements, and are relied on
for consumption coping during the concurrent lean season. This suggests that conflict-shocks may be having their greatest
proximate impact on food access and coping capacity when communities face their largest consumption gaps.