Popular explanations for the outbreak of a new civil war in South Sudan have centred on ethnic factors and leadership personalities. This article demonstrates that the conflict is rooted in deep cleavages within the ruling political party, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM). When internal tensions came to a head in late 2013, a combination of neopatrimonial politics, a weak state structure and legacies of violence from the previous civil war allowed this to escalate…
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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.
The paper locates the crisis of the post-colonial Sudan in its historical context and discusses the institutional legacy of colonialism and how that has affected citizenship in Sudan and South Sudan. It argues that the colonial project made a legal distinction, especially in how citizenship was defined. Link to publication
South Sudan is a prime example of how governance arrangements can either achieve and maintain peace, or become the trigger for civil war. South Sudan’s experience shows that the appropriateness of constitutional provisions to a local context remains key, and that the time-tested elements of good governance still matter: devolution and separation of powers, appropriate government and electoral systems, and strong institutions. In nations as ethnically diverse as South Sudan, decentralization is necessary for effective…
This article considers the 2005–12 Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) programme in South Sudan. Current DDR practice centres on ex-combatants’ reintegration through encouraging entrepreneurship and selfemployment and thereby their willingness to take risks and responsibility. However, South Sudan’s DDR programme invisibilizes and obscures the excombatants’ endogenous capacity to adapt and generate an income. Based on in-depth interviews with participants of the DDR programme and key stakeholders, the article argues that DDR interventions seldom capture the…
The question of the future status of Abyei remains a deeply contested issue between Sudan and the independent South Sudan. The connection between the political violence in Abyei and eruption of the two civil wars in Sudan is sparsely documented, but this history reveals the character of the Abyei problem. This article provides an analysis of the role of political violence in the emergence of the dispute around the status of Abyei. It charts the…
The Torit Mutiny of August 1955 in southern Sudan did not trigger a civil war, but state violence and disorder escalated over the following years. We explore how the outlook and strategies of the government officials who inherited the state apparatus of the Anglo-Egyptian condominium contributed to this development. They perpetuated authoritarian and violent government practices based on a legalistic distinction between citizen and outlaw, while justifying their actions as part of a developmentalist and…
South Sudan obtained independence in July 2011 as a kleptocracy – a militarized, corrupt neo-patrimonial system of governance. By the time of independence, the South Sudanese “political marketplace” was so expensive that the country’s comparatively copious revenue was consumed by the military-political patronage system, with almost nothing left for public services, development or institution building. The efforts of national technocrats and foreign donors produced bubbles of institutional integrity but the system as a whole was…
This article compares two cases of securitization along South Sudan’s border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo. By comparing how a security concern – the presence of the Lord’s Resistance Army – was interpreted and responded to, the article shows that border security practices in two borderscapes are improvised, contradictory and contested, and serve to establish authority rather than actually securing the border. This is apparent on three levels: (a) through the multiplicity of…
This briefing seeks to explain the root causes of the ongoing crisis, focusing on divisions within the governing party and issues of military integration. Download
This article addresses the social and political implications of wartime and post-war resource capture in South Sudan. It argues that predation by armed groups during the second civil war (1983–2005) initiated a process of dominant class formation, and demonstrates how, through various strategies of resource capture and kinship networks, commanders from the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) and other factions formed a new aristocracy – a “dominant class” that thinks of itself as “the best”….
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