This article explores assumptions that humanitarian actors carry in their response to violent conflict. As such, it identifies challenges that humanitarians encounter that undermine an effective reduction of violence, and the assumptions that undermine civilian protection. This reflection is accompanied by implications and recommendations for practice and policy for humanitarian actors to address the threat of violence. Read more here

This article discusses the implication of rural radicalism on safety and security in urban settings. Using the experiences of the 2013 conflict, the article argues that the use of armed rural youth, employed to protect the government in urban areas from opposition forces, has forced them to exploit the opportunity to settling scores against urban dwellers over political and economic marginalization of rural masses. The article provides nuances on how understanding of security inequality between…

This report focuses on a new pattern of violence along generational lines in Pibor. The report found that fighting among age sets have resulted in widespread intra-communal violence, with a wider implications on aid delivery. The report shares some suggestions on how local and international partners can collaborate in addressing the root causes of conflict and to foster peace in Pibor. Read more here

Based on research conducted over a two-year period (2022-2024), this report examines how communities directly and indirectly engage with armed actors in a context marred with conflict and violence. The report finds that engagement with armed actors is influenced by many conditions, challenges, opportunities and risks. Finally, the report provides insights on how to leverage such engagement in a way that can reduce violence and contribute to greater complementarity between humanitarian, protection, and peacebuilding interventions….

This blog by Sean McGovern and Abraham Diing Akoi, is based on a recently published research report on social media and violence. The blog explores the intersection between the use of social media, including WhatsApp, in times of conflict and violence. Using the case of South Sudan, the blog identifies how communities have used WhatsApp in both positive and negative ways during conflict. The blog provides some recommendations on how to mitigate the detrimental effects…

This report offers a consolidated account of MSF’s experience in South Sudan since 9 July 2011. In so doing, it seeks to serve as a record and reminder of the human toll of violence, since independence, as seen by MSF – through its staff and patients. It is based on interviews with more than 100 of MSF’s South Sudanese staff, operational research, internal reports, and public communications over the last decade. It also draws on…

The Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition (SHCC) identified 18 incidents of violence against or obstruction of health care in South Sudan in 2020, compared to three such incidents in 2019. The violence affected mainly health workers working for local and INGO health providers. The increasing number of incidents are claimed to stem from mounting local violence and ongoing conflict that resulted in clashes between opposing forces during which health workers were injured or killed. Download

South Sudan is in a state of profound economic transition, heavily influenced by conflict and large-scale population displacement and return. This transition has fundamentally changed the way in which people live, particularly their relationship with work and money.  Young people, particularly women, have generally suffered disproportionately as they try to navigate this rapidly changing and often exploitative political economy. This report summarizes these broader trends and outlines how young men often have little option but…

Abstract This article explores the links between African artefacts in European museum collections and the slave and ivory trade in Sudan in the nineteenth century. It examines how ‘ethnographic’ collections were acquired from southern Sudan and how this process was entangled with the expansion of predatory commerce. Presenting evidence from contemporary travel accounts, museum archives and from the examination of objects themselves, the author argues that the nineteenth-century trade in artefacts from South Sudan was…

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…

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