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Abstract Over the past two decades, the rangelands of Eastern Africa have experienced sweeping changes associated with growing human populations, shifting land use, expanding livestock marketing and trade, and greater investment by domestic and global capital. These trends have coincided with several large shocks that were turning points for how rangeland inhabitants make a living. As livelihoods in the region’s rangelands transform in seemingly paradoxical directions, away from customary pastoralist production systems, greater insight is…

Breaking Out of the Borderlands is the second report by Dr Nicki Kindersley and Joseph Diing Majok on South Sudan’s changing borderland economy. The first report in the series—Monetized Livelihoods and militarized Labour in South Sudan’s Borderlands—described the protracted state of social and economic crisis that has gripped the borderland region of Northern Bahr el-Ghazal. Breaking Out of the Borderlands takes the phenomena described in the authors’ earlier work—the monetization of land, life and work…

This study assesses the macro-fiscal framework for jobs in South Sudan, working with the limited macro-fiscal data available on the fiscal years 2019 and 2020. The macroeconomic environment can hardly be more difficult for South Sudanese looking to make a living. For workers, the dramatic contraction of non-oil output since the beginning of the conflict reflected a loss of job activities and a breakdown in market demand. A 60-fold increase in prices since before the…

The population dynamics presented in this paper have serious implications for South Sudan’s human development and political stability. Using census data and UN estimates, this briefing paper highlights South Sudan’s recent demographic patterns and trends, starting in 2008 into 2050. The projections presented are based on an exponential growth regime, and the analysis seeks to provide key insights for the aid community to stimulate their thinking on the nature and level of support likely to…

This research project was commissioned in response to a growing concern among civil society, faith-based organisations, affected communities, and refugees about the negative impact of logging on local communities in South Sudan, particularly in the Equatorian Region and Greater Bahr El Ghazal. It was envisaged that through the initial research and deeper understanding of the issues involved, opportunities for engagement would be identified to inform strategic programming in a subsequent phase. This document therefore is…

Abstract This analysis draws from security and state spending data to measure the human security experience in South Sudan. The results show amore volatile security environment following independence. Defence expenditure and human security, as measured in the number of insecurity episodes, are unrelated. Descriptive evidence indicates that human security and security expenditure tend to vary unpredictablyover time, a signal that security sector spending is unresponsive to the country’s security predicaments. The Ordinary Least Squares (OLS)…

Sudanese, South Sudanese, and African refugee communities in Cairo, Egypt have raised the issue of gang violence as a major concern for their communities for over a decade. Despite the damaging effects violence has on refugee communities, humanitarian organizations in Cairo have only launched a limited number of interventions to address gang violence due its complicated and sensitive nature. This report analyzes Sudanese and South Sudanese gang violence, focusing on how conceptions of masculinity reproduce…

This policy brief rings alarm bells for the parties to the R-ARCSS, its guarantors,and civil society actors that unless certain actions are urgently taken, reforms under the revitalized peace agreement may fail to yield positive change in facilitating South Sudan’s transition to constitutional democracy, peace and national unity. What follows is a summary of main strands of the analysis and recommendations: •The R-ARCSS is a viable framework that could silence the guns and usher in…

Definition: This article revisits debates about the root causes of civil wars with the aim of providing a coherent framework for addressing such drivers and building sustainable peace. It is argued in this article that the civil war is better explained by the absence of resilient social contract rather than the dominant theoretical perspectives that attribute causation of civil wars to grievances or greed. The resilient social contract framework with its three postulated drivers is…

Executive Summary South Sudan’s peace process remains in intensive care, its health dependent on continual attention from its external sponsors, namely neighboring governments and the international community. This is not sustainable. At worst, it provides opportunities for the military and political elite to continue to run the country in pursuit of their own interests. At best, it buys time to create a more substantial peace process that can enact more far-reaching change. This policy brief…

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