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The MAAPSS Update No. 6 provides an overview of the developments taking place in Upper Nile State. The beginning of the year saw the appointment of a Shilluk governor for Upper Nile, Budhok Ayang Kur, and his Padang Dinka deputy, James Tor Monybuny. Their appointments have sent shockwaves through the state, and greatly increased instability in Malakal and the surrounding area. Download

This Conflict Sensitivity Analysis (CSA) was requested by the Inter-Cluster Coordination Group in October 2020 and examines the conflict sensitivity implications of the transition of UN Protection of Civilian sites in Bentiu, Unity State, and Malakal, Upper Nile State, from sites under the protection of United Nations Mission in South Sudan to camps for  internally displaced persons (IDPs) under the jurisdiction of the Government of the Republic of South Sudan.

This report explores the dynamics of local conflict and governance through the recent civil war across South Sudan, using five ‘case study’ locations: Gogrial, Malakal, Leer, Nimule, and Abyei. Evident through this research was that, while public authority – both formal and informal – and political marketplace dynamics, varied considerably across the five research sites, a number of important commonalities also emerged in some or all locations, regarding their evolving roles through the conflict(s) and…

The R-ARCSS was designed as an all-encompassing package of measures that would help end the civil war in South Sudan. Yet, in reality it does not efficiently address some of the root causes of the conflict. More than addressing those in a manner that connects both bottom-up and top-down drivers of tension, it focuses on elements of a power-sharing agreement and paves the way for resource sharing arrangements. This brief examines how and why grievances…

On the 4 September 2020, the Special Representative of the Secretary General (SRSG) in South Sudan announced in a press conference that UNMISS had begun to ‘progressively withdraw its troops and police from the Bor and Wau PoCs’, and to redesignate the sites ‘no longer PoC sites but camps for internally displaced people (IDP) under the jurisdiction of the government’ (UNMISS 4 September 2020). Later on in September UNMISS also removed its troops and police…

Background: Decades of war left the Republic of South Sudan with a fragile health system that has remained deprived of resources since the country’s independence. The authors describe the coverage of interventions for women’s and children’s health in Upper Nile and Unity states, and explore factors that affected service provision during aprotracted conflict. Methods: The authors conducted a case study using a desk review of publicly available literature since 2013 and a secondary analysis of…

Taking the Ethiopia-South Sudan borderlands as a case study, Rethinking Aid in Borderland Spaces: The case of Akobo argues that the traditional modalities of the aid industry are not fit for purpose in a world where transnationalism is a daily reality for communities, even—perhaps even especially—in the most geographically remote locations. The transnational networks that shape much of daily life operate outside of the control of state actors, and understanding and engaging with them therefore requires an…

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…

The protection of civilians (PoC) mandate of the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS), was established in 2011, coinciding with the country’s independence. Since then, the public discourse on UNMISS has called into question the capacity of the mission to fully meet the expectations created by this mandate in practice. In this chapter the authors explore this issue by investigating the following questions: 1) how can the discrepancy between UNMISS and its mandate be…

Malakal County’s population was estimated at 126,500 individuals during the 2008 census but was estimated to have grown in subsequent years before conflict erupted, with Malakal Town considered the second largest city in South Sudan prior to the 2013 conflict. According to a head-count conducted by IOM in February 2018, the population at the time measured only nine per cent of its pre-conflict size. The PoC site had peaked at just under 48,000 individuals in…

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