Anthropology and History

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 businesspeople, but it can also engender anxieties around the unchecked spread of insecurity, disease and economic exploitation. Understanding this ambiguous construction of borders in the minds of their inhabitants requires us, we argue, to look beyond statist or globalizing discourses and to appreciate the moral economies of borderlands, and how they have been discursively and epistemologically negotiated over time. Narratives around witchcraft and the occult represent, we argue, a novel and revealing lens through which to do so and our study draws on years of fieldwork and archival research to underline how cartographies of witchcraft in this region are, and have long been, entangled with the construction of state political geographies, internal as well as international.

The Sudan Handbook, based on the Rift Valley Institute's successful Sudan Field Course, is an authoritative and accessible introduction to Sudan, written and edited by outstanding Sudanese and South Sudanese scholars and recognized international experts.

The Handbook covers Sudan, South Sudan and the North-South borderlands though a set of essays by leading specialists, including Abdelrahman Ali Mohammed, Peter Woodward, Gerard Prunier, Jerome Tubiana, Derek Welsby, and Ahmad Sikainga. It offers an authoritative introduction to both countries, rooted in a historical account of the development of the state.

The book is not limited to history and politics. It includes chapters on Sudanese popular music, the oil industry, and the archaeology of the early states on the Nile. The text is accompanied by purpose-drawn maps, a glossary, capsule biographies, a chronology. and a bibliography.

The Sudan Handbook grew out of the RVI’s annual Sudan and South Sudan Course. According to Randall Fegley, writing in African Affairs, it is one of ‘a tiny minority of rare reference works that can be pulled off the shelf as a compendium of facts or read cover to cover as a collection of well-written narratives’. He notes the Rift Valley Institute's ‘tremendous influence on academics, policy makers, activists, and field workers’. Tom Porteous of Human Rights Watch, writing on the Lawfare website, welcomes the RVI’s efforts ‘to collect, preserve, and transmit knowledge and understanding of Sudan’s ground-truth’. A reviewer from South Sudan, Peter Run, writing in the Australasian Review of African Studies, comments on what he describes as a 'succinct and comprehensive text'. He highlights the ‘insightful analysis’ of oil and its influence on the Sudanese political economy and notes the timeliness of the discussion of ‘the clash between the traditional mechanism of conflict resolution and the state’s judicial system’.

This master thesis examines the role local churches played in building cohesion in advance of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement.

This research examines engagement in diaspora philanthropy through the lens of Lost Boys of Sudan and their founding of small international nonprofit service organizations based in the United States. The authors seek to understand refugees’ motivations to take upon themselves leadership roles in their local United States communities and in the provision of goods and services to their homeland, South Sudan. By becoming founders of international service nonprofits, Lost Boys make meaning of their experiences and are able to motivate local support in their United States communities to give to distant communities in South Sudan.

Speech of the Chairman and Commander in Chief Dr John Garang de Mabior, to the First SPLM/SPLA National Convention 2nd April 1994.

Zande folklore is particularly rich in tales of animal and bird life, which unlike most African animal myths, are a combination of accurate observation and ingenious fabrication.

This guide is a compilation of some of the forms of descriptive analysis that WFP and partners have undertaken since 1994.

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 inseparable from a history of enslavement and extraction. This evidence from Sudan illuminates the relationship between collecting artefacts in Africa and other markets. It shows how collecting interests intersected with Ottoman and European imperial networks in Sudan and helps to better understand the history of African collections in European museums.

This report is an account of the Wunlit meeting in the words of the original participants, conducted in the light of the continuing state of conflict in South Sudan and the relevance of the history of peace-making to the current political situation.

The sustained movement of people, goods and ideas across the African Red Sea Region has been and continues to be so intense that it binds together communities throughout the region in a unified multifaceted socio-economic system that transcends ethnic, linguistic and political divides.

Where people went, viruses, bacteria and parasites followed. As a result, this region—comprised of present-day Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Djibouti and Somaliland—should be treated as a single disease environment.

This report examines the history of epidemic disease in this region in order to shed light on the current COVID-19 pandemic and its likely course. Rather than attempt to be comprehensive, this study focuses on three diseases that have caused at least one serious regional epidemic over the past two hundred years: Cholera, smallpox and syphilis.

The courses of these epidemics have been shaped by political violence and structural poverty. These two forces combined have led to an intensification of human migration across the region and to the growth of cities, creating new patterns of disease transmission and potential nodes of infection.

Over the last two centuries, the regional disease burden has shifted. Previously, risk was shared across various segments of society. At present, however, there are new social classes that are uniquely exposed to contagious infectious diseases, including refugees and internally displaced people living in camps and settlements, and the urban poor.

This uneven disease exposure will likely structure the course of the current COVID-19 pandemic. High-risk groups also tend to suffer from malnutrition or undernutrition and other previously under-control diseases rendering them even more vulnerable as COVID-19 spreads through the region.