UNDERSTANDING HUMANITARIAN ACCESS AND THE PROTECTION OF CIVILIANS IN AN ERA OF DEPOLITICIZED WAR

This report is based on fieldwork in Unity, Jonglei, and Upper Nile states from August-December 2020. Due to access issues for research related to Covid-19, some of this research was conducted remotely. The report surveys the humanitarian access issues produced by conflict in 2020 through a series of focused case studies. These case studies are not intended to be comprehensive, but are rather thematic, and indicate some of the broader political-economic structures in which humanitarian access issues are embedded, how they are intertwined with issues of civilian protection, and how such issues are perceived by communities and armed-non-state-actors in South Sudan.