This memo summarises research on local agreements and community level mediation undertaken by the Conflict Research Programme (CRP) in five sites – DRC, Iraq, Somalia, South Sudan, and Syria in collaboration with the Political Settlements Research Programme (PSRP) and the Center for Security Studies in Zurich, Switzerland. The overall conclusion is that local talks and community-level mediation can contribute to a peace logic. They are more likely to contribute to do so if they involve…
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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 memo summarises research on security and justice from CRP’s five sites – DRC, Iraq, Somalia, South Sudan, and Syria – plus additional research on Sudan. Findings suggests that standard strategies for security and justice reform are routinely undermined by the dynamics of conflict. Security Sector Reform (SSR) and Disarmament, Demobilisation, and Reintegration (DDR) policies often end up providing a mechanism through which different factions engaged in conflict can compete for funding, status, and participation…
This paper examines how land governance – or the rules, processes, and structures through which decisions are made about access to land and its use, the manner in which the decisions are implemented and enforced, and the way that competing interests in land are managed – has interacted with the conflict in South Sudan. A theme running through the paper is that control over decisions relating to land, as much as control over the land…
South Sudan’s rotten state finances are derailing the young country from its already fraught path to peace and stability after a brutal civil war. Top officials hold the country’s oil riches close, barring scrutiny of spending and allowing rampant misappropriation of funds. This slush-fund governance is at the heart of South Sudan’s system of winner-take-all politics and helps explain why so much went so wrong so quickly after independence in 2011. The peace deal signed…
This report presents the results of a conflict assessment carried out in Maban County, South Sudan in October-November 2020 by the Danish Refugee Council’s Peacebuilding unit (also known as Danish Demining Group – DDG). Maban County in Upper Nile State is a complex area that has a long history of conflict and is of key strategic importance in South Sudan’s wars. This situation was further complicated by the arrival of refugees in 2011 from the…
Do states circumvent embargoes by supplying weapons across borders to sanctioned countries? We report evidence that arms imports systematically increase in the neighborhood of conflict states under an embargo. Using several alternative research-design specifications, we contend that this pattern is consistent with arms exporters shifting the arms trade to neighbors of conflict states under sanctions, where it is easier to move arms clandestinely across the border. Despite the lack of direct evidence of clandestine cross-border…
This report examines the intersection between conflict and connectivity, including social media. The report identifies five factors that shape the nexus between conflict and connectivity, including infrastructure, population density, a fluctuating economy, third party interference and digital media. The report provides a set of recommendations on how to leverage the benefits of digital technology in peacebuilding. Although dated, this report resonates with the current ban on the use of social media in the country following…
The first of two papers, this analysis explores the magnitude and ramifications of ‘communal’ violence in South Sudan in recent years and challenges those who attempt to portray it as ‘ethnic’ or due to the absence of state control. Linking the increased incidence of violence to national and inter-elite rivalries, it argues that these are playing out at the sub-national and local levels due to changes in South Sudan’s political economy, with elite power being…
African borderlands – such as those between South Sudan, Uganda and Congo – are often presented by analysts as places of agency and economic opportunity, in contrast to hardened, securitized borders elsewhere. We emphasize, however, that even such relatively porous international borders can nevertheless be the focus of significant unease for borderland communities. Crossing borders can enable safety for those fleeing conflict or trading prospects for business people, but it can also engender anxieties around…
This study examined how good governance could be a means to peaceful co-existence in Eastern Equatoria State, South Sudan. The study was anchored on three theories of; good governance, collaborative governance and democratic peace. The key findings of the study were that bad governance and poor leadership hinder peaceful coexistence, participation of citizens in decision making processes, awareness of citizens in existing policies and legislations, the rule of law, and use of available resources to…
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