Governance

This report focuses on the IGAD-led mediation process from December 2013 to August 2015 to address the conflict in South Sudan. As per a project initiated, led and owned by IGAD, it identifies lessons from the South Sudan peace talks with the aim to inform future IGAD mediation efforts.

These lessons are based on interviews conducted by a team of researchers with mediators, advisers, parties and supporters as well as an analysis of internal IGAD documents concerning the South Sudan peace talks.The report highlights the commitment of IGAD to peacemaking in South Sudan, stepping in within days of the outbreak of violence on 15 December 2013 in Juba, convening an extraordinary Summit and mandating a mediation process led by highly experienced envoys.

IGAD’s resolute action helped to prevent further escalation of violence, kept the parties focused on negotiating a political settlement and produced a comprehensive peace agreement signed in August 2015. However, the August 2015 agreement failed to bring peace to South Sudan. This is because the parties lacked genuine willingness to make peace. This condition indeed characterized the South Sudan peace talks throughout. The report cautions IGAD mediators not to rush the process of negotiations. In the interests of sustainable peace, there may be no alternative to strategic patience until the parties reach a sufficient degree of consensus and reconciliation.When the talks reached a standstill in early 2015, IGAD mediators and partners applied leverage, pushing the parties to sign an agreement. This included increased diplomatic pressure, the imposition of targeted sanctions, the threat of an arms embargo and a directive mediation strategy presenting parties with an agreement on a take it or leave it basis. While this strategy produced an agreement, it undermined the parties’ ownership of the agreement, without which sustainable peace is not possible.

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.

In this brief Saferworld provides a context update about the current situation in Maridi – one of eight counties in Western Equatoria in South Sudan. Saferworld presents safety and security challenges for communities, local government, sub-national and national governments as well as the international community to consider and we provide recommendations for how best to address these challenges.

his report presents the main findings of a justice landscape assessment that the Transitional Justice Working Group (TJWG) conducted between June and July 2020. In recent years, progress towards the Hybrid Court for South Sudan, as provided for in the September 2018 peace agreement, has stalled. Protracted delays in implementing the peace agreement, ongoing insecurity, and a lack of political will to address crimes committed during the conflict have all contributed to the political impasse over the Hybrid Court. Meanwhile, several fledgling attempts to prosecute conflict-related crimes in military tribunals and national courts have emerged in recent years, suggesting that more could be done to engage existing accountability mechanisms to provide some form of justice and redress to victims. The purpose of the assessment was to provide baseline information on what is being done to address conflict-related crimes at the national and subnational level, and to stimulate thought on how to promote criminal accountability through existing mechanisms as policymakers work towards the establishment of the Hybrid Court.

The New Deal implementation in South Sudan. "A South Sudanese civil society perspective paper"

As a pilot country for the New Deal implementation, South Sudan was described as a burgeoning
young nation steadily emerging from the crisis phase on the fragility spectrum into the reform
and rebuild phase. A critical analysis however of the events two years post-independence would
have revealed the true nature of the state of the nation. By late 2012, South Sudan had
conducted its first Fragility Assessment as a country volunteer in the pilot for the New Deal,
over a period of seven months, the Government of south Sudan and development partners
began the process of developing a New Deal Compact by engaging in sub national consultations
across the country. The purpose of the compact was to create a framework of improved
partnership and mutual accountability between the Government of South Sudan and her
development partners with the aim of fulfilling South Sudan’s development vision. In December
2013, the signing of the New Deal compact came to a halt due to the shortcomings associated
with the IMF staff monitored program. Shortly after, the country lapsed into a conflict
precipitated by a political crisis within the government and the ruling party of SPLM.
This perspective paper analyses the relevance of the New Deal under the current circumstances
created by the conflict in South Sudan and assesses the shortfalls of New Deal as a framework
for aid effectiveness through literature review and perspectives harvested from a cross section
of government, civil society and development partners.
The findings of this perspective paper by no means reflect a thorough interpretation of the full
effects of the conflict in South Sudan or the complex dynamics that characterises South Sudan as
a newly independent nation affected by numerous challenges.
It identifies areas for follow up actions and recommendations for establishing concrete building
blocks necessary for the launching of the New Deal process in South Sudan situation allowing.

When considering South Sudan’s prospects for 2050, perhaps the largest unknown is the potential impact of technology on the country’s economy, social relations and politics. Technology provides ever-evolving possibilities to transform the economy and the aid sector and to mitigate challenges related to climate change and demographic growth. There is little accurate data on use of technology in South Sudan. As such, this note relies on estimates of technology use and emerging regional and global technological developments, more often posing questions rather than providing specific predictions about the implications of future technology use.

This Better Aid Forum briefing paper on technology and innovation is the first publication of the BAF briefing paper series.

The Conflict Sensitivity Resource Facility’s (CSRF) Better Aid Forum (BAF) is a series of events and discussions with different stakeholders to consider the long-term objectives and ambitions of the aid sector in South Sudan. It focuses beyond the timeframes of ongoing political and security dynamics in order to drive collective analysis about the approaches and principles that should underpin international engagement in South Sudan over the longer term.

In June 2019, a two-day event, the Better Aid Forum Experts Meeting, was held in Nairobi to reflect on findings from the Better Aid Forum process thus far, and debate how long-term trends may shape South Sudan’s context over the coming decades – and what this means for aid. The CSRF commissioned a number of input briefing papers that consider long-term trends underway in South Sudan, regionally, and globally that are likely to play a role in shaping South Sudan’s future.

In protracted crises in which formal governance structures are weak to nonexistent, people depend
heavily on local systems—both social and economic—to get by, often more than they depend on external
aid. Communities themselves are often the first responders in a crisis, reacting long before the arrival of
humanitarian actors. Research on resilience across a range of contexts demonstrates the importance of social
connections, particularly in times of crisis, in enabling populations to manage shocks and stresses.
Social connectedness manifests in many forms: Communities may rely on their immediate neighbors,
extended family or clan chieftains for food, access to economic opportunities, and psychosocial support, or
to negotiate safe passage when fleeing from a conflict or when later returning to their communities of origin.
It is thus critical that aid actors understand how social connections and external assistance interact to better
help conflict-affected populations cope and recover.
However, social connectedness is not always a source of household resilience. Social connectedness is
inherently linked to social hierarchies and power dynamics. “Connectedness” for some households may imply
marginalization or exclusion for others. By considering social connectedness throughout program cycles,
including in design, implementation, and evaluation phases, aid actors can more holistically understand bases
of household vulnerability as well as sources of resilience during crises. These nuanced insights can be used
to ensure that formal assistance reaches households in most need, including ones that may be excluded from
local support systems, to better achieve recovery and resilience outcomes. Equally, by understanding social
connectedness, aid actors may be able to strengthen, or at the very least not undermine local support systems.
This report is the last in a series from the Currency of Connections research initiative between Mercy Corps
and the Feinstein International Center at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, at Tufts
University with support from the Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA). The series is based on
mixed methods research conducted among resident, internally displaced, and refugee communities in South
Sudan and Uganda. This report employs a sequential exploratory mixed method design to:
1 Investigate the ways in which households rely on their social connections in the context of protracted
conflict and instability, highlighting the ways in which external interventions influence these local systems
of coping and support;
2 Explore the linkages between households’ social connectedness and resilience by constructing and testing
a contextualized quantitative measure of social connectedness.

This rapid literature review finds that the medium- to long-term effects of Covid-19 on geopolitics in East Africa are unknown. In the immediate term, the pandemic is likely to put stress on economies and healthcare systems, and thereby have the potential to exacerbate regional conflicts. It is also likely lead to East African countries re-evaluating their relationships with other countries in the region and further afield as they seek financial help from abroad (e.g. debt relief), and to build more resilience to global shocks. This rapid literature review outlines the main geopolitical issues in the region and notes where authors have suggested Covid-19 may lead to a change. For the purposes of this review, East Africa is taken to include Sudan, South Sudan, Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia. This literature review notes the main issues for the region, and where Covid-19 has been posited to have an effect. The evidence base for this question is weak as most analyses of East African geopolitics pre-date Covid-19. This literature review has therefore included policy briefs, blogs and news articles alongside peer-reviewed articles and longer reports. Nevertheless, discussions of the effects of Covid-19 are focused on the short-term effects on health systems and economies, with some discussion of internal politics (e.g. increased authoritarianism or instability). Where longer-term geopolitics are mentioned, discussion is brief and conclusions are tentative.