This article discusses a selection of state emblems, national symbols and national identity in Southern Sudan. The emblems and symbols are used to provide meaning to a nation in the making and serve as pillars for common national identification to guide the formation of national identity. In essence, they represent the top-down process of politically dominant societal actors’ attempt to effect nation building by seeking to promote their desired type of national identity. Drawing on…
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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.
The dynamics of peace and conflict are fundamentally shaped by a politics of scaling difference. Based on the insight that difference is widely associated with both the causes of and cures for violent conflict, this article explores how practices of scaling mediate this duality. Drawing on South Sudan and Kosovo, it is argued that the governance of conflict is characterized by efforts to skilfully accommodate diversity, straddling the line between recognizing, reinforcing, and reconfiguring difference…
This chapter argues that preventing mass atrocities in Africa requires addressing the root causes of conflicts. It focuses on the experience of Sudan–South Sudan, which is, in many ways, a microcosm of Africa. The chapter argues that a crisis of identity lies at the heart of conflicts in the two Sudans, reflecting their failure to manage diversity constructively. As in all such conflicts, the root cause is not the mere existence of differences, but the…
Decades of militarized, violent conflict and elite wealth acquisition have created a common rupture in shared landscapes between communities of the western Dinka and Nuer (South Sudan). Through the remaking of these landscapes, governments and their wars have indirectly reshaped political identities and relationships. Networks of complex relationships have used this space for migration, marriage, trade and burial. Since the government wars of the 1980s, people from both Dinka and Nuer communities have participated in…
Moving beyond the current fixation on “state construction,” the interdisciplinary work gathered here explores regulatory authority in South Sudan’s borderlands from both contemporary and historical perspectives. Taken together, these studies show how emerging governance practices challenge the bounded categorizations of “state” and “non-state.” Link to publication
Based on fieldwork conducted among young South Sudanese refugees in Egypt and Uganda and returnees in South Sudan, this essay examines the various identities and cultural orientations imported and reconstructed by returnee youth now living in Juba, the capital of South Sudan, after years of exile. Download
The civil war that has intermittently raged in the Sudan since independence in 1956 is, according to Francis Deng, a conflict of contrasting and seemingly incompatible identities in the Northern and Southern parts of the country. Identity is seen as a function of how people identify themselves and are identified in racial, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and religious terms. The identity question related to how such concepts determine or influence participation and distribution in the political,…
This report examines a series of conflict triggers that shed light on the spike in deadly violence in 2009. It highlights three of the primary conflict cycles in Jonglei and adjoining areas across the border in Upper Nile over the past year: those involving the Dinka, Lou Nuer, Jikany Nuer, and Murle communities. In doing so, it looks at factors both causing and exacerbating the violence, as well as the politicisation of conflict, the possibility…
This article examines a structural opposition between the sphere of military/government (the ‘hakuma’) and the sphere of ‘home’. It argues that to be a ‘youth’ in Southern Sudan means to inhabit the tensions of the space between these spheres. While attempting to resist capture by either sphere, youth have used their recruitment by the military to invest in their home or family sphere. Their aspiration to ‘responsibility’ illustrates not generational rebellion, but the moral continuity…
The purpose of this article is to highlight the critical role of ethnic, cultural and religious diversity in peacebuilding and constitution-making in post-conflict Sudan. Link to publication
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