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 period of the Sudanese second civil war, 1983-1986, just prior to Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS), and analyses the historical structure of the political economy of humanitarianism. It analyses this period – as opposed to the more common contemporary comparison with OLS – because the historical parallels between this period and the current civil war are pertinent to contemporary humanitarian practice. From such an analysis we can learn much about the way that conflict dynamics structure patterns of access and displacement in South Sudan today.

In both periods, control of humanitarian access, and therefore distribution of relief supplies, is contested by a sovereign state and armed groups. In both civil wars, it is thus inevitable that the state and armed groups in question will attempt to shape where aid goes, and that this shaping will partly determine the course of the conflict.

Historically, such shaping has taken a variety of forms. Most obviously, during the second civil war, it has taken the form of aid diversion to fund and feed fighters. However, this paper contends that aid diversion is over-emphasised as the primary form of the relationship between aid and conflict, and that one instead needs to understand aid as part of a broader political economy of plunder and redistribution that typifies southern Sudan during times of war. Controlling access to aid has been one instrument amongst many that the governments and armed groups of Sudan and South Sudan have used to wage war and extract economic resources from a population that is strategically pauperised by state power.