LSE’s Naomi Pendle paints an informative and insightful portrait of the challenges of reconciliation in South Sudan. Download
Entries by Naomi Pendle
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…
Armed, cattle-herding men in Africa are often assumed to be at a relational and spatial distance from the ‘legitimate’ armed forces of the government. The vision constructed of the South Sudanese government in 2005 by the Comprehensive Peace Agreement removed legitimacy from non-government armed groups including localised, armed, defence forces that protected communities and cattle. Yet, militarised cattle-herding men of South Sudan have had various relationships with the governing Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Movement/Army over the…
By the start of 2014, violent conflict had erupted across much of South Sudan following initial violence in Juba on 15 December 2013. The speed with which the fighting has spread raises questions regarding the impact of national-level politics on violence at the local level. This article develops a framework in which violent conflict can be comprehended as a response to the interruption of the negotiation of the balance of power between groups; the negotiation…