Entries by Simon Harragin

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…

The aim of this chapter is to cast an anthropological eye over the issues of local knowledge, famine relief, and development theory, using the case of southern Sudan to reveal structural weaknesses in the ways local people are seen and represented in conventional development discourse. Information produced by anthropologists has often been praised but subsequently ignored by development practitioners (Saleem-Murdock 1990). Anthropologists have done little to resist being pushed aside on matters of policy as…