Previous research on dehumanization has been conducted primarily in Western contexts, and outside of periods of ongoing and highly violent conflict. The present study, in contrast, examines grassroots-level dehumanization between South Sudan’s two largest ethnic groups—Dinka and Nuer—during an episode of extreme interethnic violence. Using a mixed-methods approach we study levels of dehumanization and how these attitudes are related to and structured around ongoing and/or very recent extreme violence. Whereas the results demonstrated mechanistic dehumanization…
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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.
This study examined the conflict in South Sudan, which started in December 2013 due to political dissatisfaction between President Salva Kiir and his then Vice President Riek Machar. When South Sudan got independence in 2011 through a referendum where more-than 98 percent of the population supported secession from Sudan, the country became a case study for potential secessions in Africa. However, the euphoria of independence quickly evaporated, and immediately replaced by violent conflict. Thus, the…
An active conflict in South Sudan in late 2013/early 2014 dis-placed approximately 2 million people over the course of several months. In May 2015, the International Rescue Committee and UNICEF conducted a mixed-methods case study of the impact of that acute emergency on integrated community case management (iCCM) of childhood illness programming in Payinjiar County, Unity State. The objective was to document the operations of an iCCM program during an acute crisis and to assess…
This article investigates the implications of women’s exclusion for the nature and durability of peace processes, and whether factors that undermine peace consolidation post-settlement might be prevented through more inclusive peacemaking. It examines the Sudan-South Sudan peace process that produced the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, the roles women played in peacemaking and their exclusion from official negotiations, and the sources of insecurity post-CPA. South Sudan’s peace process shows that the exclusion of women can be…
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 article uses Arend Lijphart’s notion of ‘power-sharing consociationalism’ to understand the mutually reinforcing conflict system and the barriers to resolving such conflicts in South Sudan. ‘Consociationalism’ has been affirmed as an ideal approach for resolving conflicts in ethnically divided societies, but in South Sudan, the formal institutions of power sharing have not delivered sustainable peace. Analysis in this article reveals that the implementation of the various ‘peace agreements’ and ‘deals’ deviated from classical ‘consociationalism’….
Soon after South Sudan achieved independence in 2011, its political landscape grew increasingly volatile. It became almost impossible for international and regional actors to address one crisis before another more serious one erupted. This article combines cultural, political, economic and social factors into a comprehensive framework to explain the role of the political elites in transforming fear and politicized anger into violent and deadly conflicts. The theoretical framework of the security dilemma model is applied…
This essay contributes to the comparative ethnography of play by reporting on children’s descriptions of play in Bor, South Sudan. By situating play within the socio-political and economic structures that organize Bor Town society it describes children’s everyday lives, critical imaginations, and experiences in a place where playfulness has been neglected by a focus on armed violence. By attending to the playful side of children’s lives in Bor, this essay does not set out to…
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…
Mass population displacements put additional stress on the ecosystems and often lead to conflicts with the host communities, especially in the case of large refugee or Internally Displaced Person (IDP) camps. Therefore, there is need for the assessment of environmental impacts and, based on this, the sustainable management of natural resources between host and refugee communities. We propose a method based on high (Landsat 5,7 and 8) and very high (WorldView-2) resolution Earth Observation data…
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