It’s been more than five years since conflict broke out in the world’s newest country, and South Sudan still remains fractured. Despite the signing of a new peace agreement in 2018, fighting continues. Estimates place the total conflict death toll at over 380,000 while the number of refugees currently stands at more than 2.5 million people with almost another 2 million internally displaced. Severe famine remains a constant threat, and both within the country and the diaspora, hate speech continues to add fuel to the fire.
The rise and fall and rise again of violence in South Sudan prompted the need for an update to our first South Sudan Hate Speech Lexicon. Social Media and Conflict in South Sudan II: A Lexicon of Hate Speech Terms 2017 – 2018 combines cutting-edge social media analysis with local expertise to record the evolution of hate speech terms amid the continuing conflict and to identify their social and political context. This Lexicon aims to inform governments, social media companies, NGOs, and more on the dangerous role online hate speech is playing in South Sudan while also alerting South Sudanese social media users both in-country and in the diaspora on the tangible harm of using specific inflammatory language.