Abstract South Sudan’s latest peace deal has been lauded as a milestone in the country’s long road to peace and stability. The Revitalised Agreement for the Resolution of Conflict in South Sudan (R-ARCSS) outlines power-sharing arrangements between rivals President Salva Kiir and main rebel/opposition leader Riek Machar, and provides a blueprint for a sustainable peace and democratic transition. Despite this welcome development, South Sudan’s revitalised peace process has been marred by delays, uncertainty, divisions and…
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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.
Introduction Transitional Justice Mechanisms, including the establishment of a Hybrid Court for South Sudan (HCSS), were incorporated as part of the September 2018 Revitalised Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in South Sudan (R-ARCSS). Chapter Five of the R-ARCSS was a blueprint for the state to deal with its past, address impunity, and to foster state stability and peace. However, the political and military elites continue to resist the establishment of the HCSS because…
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…
South Sudan has experienced an upsurge in armed violence since March 2020. While not yet threatening the newly formed revitalized Transitional Government of National Unity, the new fighting in various parts of the country has the potential to severely hamper the already fragile transitional process the country is currently undertaking. In this policy brief, Christopher Oringa from the Institute of Peace, Development and Security Studies at the University of Juba analyses and contextualises the recent…
The horrific violations committed in South Sudan’s civil war led to the establishment of mechanisms ensuring the prosecution of serious crimes and reconciliation within communities shattered by war. Through a peace deal, three mutually supportive but independent institutions of transitional justice were formed: The Commission for Truth, Reconciliation and Healing, The Hybrid Court for South Sudan and The Compensation and Reparation Authority. This article examines the extent to which these mechanisms can achieve their respective…
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…
Abstract This paper takes a localized conflict over a non-demarcated stretch of the Uganda–South Sudan boundary in 2014 as a starting point for examining the history of territorial state formation on either side of this border since its colonial creation in 1914. It argues that the conflict was an outcome of the long-term constitution of local government territories as patches of the state, making the international border simultaneously a boundary of the local state. Some…
Across the African continent, 268 million people practice pastoralism, both as a way of life and a livelihood strategy, contributing between 10 to 44 percent of the GDP of African countries. In recent years, this adaptive animal production system has faced growing external threats due to issues such as climate change, political instability, agricultural expansion, and rural ban-ditry that have transformed the rangelands in which they operate. From Mali to South Sudan, governments, regional bodies,…
The Politics of Numbers: On Security Sector Reform in South Sudan, 2005-2020 is the first comprehensive study of what has happened to South Sudan’s military forces since the end of the Sudanese second civil war in 2005. Based on extensive fieldwork in the country, the report argues that all of the international community’s efforts to create a unified armed forces in South Sudan have paradoxically only escalated the process of fracturing that led to the current…
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