Governance

South Sudan’s political culture, including its current civil war, is international. This is due to the country’s history of mass migration and displacement, particularly during the last two civil wars from the early 1960s. By the end of the last century, approximately four million of its roughly ten million estimated residents had fled across South Sudan’s borders. Although many regional refugees returned to South Sudan following the CPA in 2005 and independence in 2011, the renewed conflict that began in December 2013 and was reignited in the centre of Juba in July 2016, has forced at least 1.5 million residents to flee once more.

As such, every community across South Sudan is part of a regional and global network. Many politicians, NGO workers, businesspeople and civil servants are themselves returnees or dual nationals. South Sudan’s communities and families have long moved money and goods through international and internal networks. Today, however, as the current civil war spreads and fragments, this transnational network is under significant stress.
South Sudan’s refugee communities have, and have always had, considerable influence on the way that the country’s civil wars evolve. In this study, through research undertaken both in South Sudan and in one of the most active global South Sudanese communities in Australia, the team has attempted to take a broader perspective to understand the nature of this impact—and the mechanisms through which it is felt—more comprehensively.

Recent political developments in the Sudan dominate street conversations and various social media outlets in Juba, South Sudan. The Sudanese revolutionary forces that brought an end to a 30-year rule of President Omar Al Bashir find a lot of sympathy and support among the ordinary South Sudanese citizens, who, at one point before their own independence, suffered Al Bashir’s misrule. They have been on the receiving end of the brutal and genocidal policies of President Al Bashir, informed largely by his extremist Islamic inclinations. Like their Sudanese counterparts, South Sudanese have been celebrating the departure of Al Bashir, with hopes of a possibility of a renewed bond defined by improved social, political, cultural, and economic relations with South Sudan raised in the Sudan.

This briefing argues that, if a leveraged focus on SDG 16 was necessary before COVID-19, it is imperative now – not just insalvaging the 2030 Agenda in the places where it matters most, but also in damping down the potential for far greater and more durable violent conflict.