This report discusses the political economy of the Juba peace agreement, which was signed by the government of Sudan and a host of rebel groups in 2020. The report argues that the JPA has tried but failed to address inequality between the centres and the peripheries. This is particularly due to its power and wealth sharing formula which favours peripheral militia leaders whose main priorities are the acquisition of wealth and gathering of loyalty, at…

Focusing on the 2005-2020 period, the report discusses the political economy among South Sudanese elites. The report explores how the recent reduction in oil production and revenue has shifted the political economy, and related elite loyalty, from the one based on oil to one based on land ownership. The report argues that the new quest for land by elites is likely to lead not only to the deprivation of civilian populations of their land, but…

Inequality is a major determinant of access to food in Sudan, with power, wealth and services concentrated within a central Sudan elite, leaving much of the country marginalized, impoverished and suffering repeated emergencies. This article discusses how food aid both contributed to the state’s exclusionary development process and tried but failed to assist crisis-affected populations in its peripheries. In the 1950s, food aid explicitly aimed to support the state but from the late 1980s, emergency…

This report provides a comprehensive analysis of the current state of South Sudan. A main argument is that its political economy is fundamentally atypical: achieving independence in 2011 and dissolving into renewed civil war in 2013, South Sudan is suffering the crisis of a weak, neo-patrimonial guerrilla government, with fragmented military-political systems that stretch across its extensive borderlands. This report locates the current crisis within a longer and deeper context, and explores the power dynamics…

The paper is concerned with the unintended consequences of aid as a relation of governance: in this case, the failure of aid agencies to improve the lot of displaced Southerners living in North Sudan during the past civil war. Given the ongoing displacement of South Sudanese to Sudan some aspects of this article might again be relevant. Link to publication

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