Summary:
- The emerging picture and activities of youth in South Sudan challenges and transcends the uncritical conceptions and imagery of young South Sudanese as a characteristically violent, dangerous and criminal constituency.
- Although they are precluded from social, economic, cultural and political structures of power, young people continue to create and consolidate spaces to excercise and exhibit their agency.
- Knowing that a significant population is offline, youth peace activists in South Sudan have painted wall murals depicting COVID-19 preventive measures, including paintings of people wearing facemasks or washing their hands.
- The COVID-19 crisis is characteristically paradoxical; it exposes the brazen failures of extant formal leadership structures on the one hand, and enables leadership emergence from the least expected constituencies on the other hand.
