Conflict

What started as a political conflict in South Sudan in December 2013 has created a community security crisis drawing in a range of uniformed, community and foreign security actors. At the heart of the crisis, are fundamental questions about democratic values, about accountability and justice, and about overcoming narratives of marginalisation, impunity and ethnic bias.

This conflict is a contest between social orders in which the authority of the prevailing order is being challenged. The relevance of the systems through which resources are accumulated and dispersed is also being challenged. This is a crisis of the legitimacy of the state. The state represents the formal expression of a range of highly subjective interfaces and partnerships through which power is shared and order finds expression.

This paper outlines some of those interfaces and partnerships, and the dynamics that affect them. It is by no means an exhaustive analysis but rather a tracing of threads of interaction at local, national and regional levels as a way of mapping some of the webs that connect across space and time in South Sudan. The overall approach is one that seeks to understand how South Sudan moved from fragility at independence to a full-blown crisis of internal and external sovereignty in December 2013. The paper is divided into sections addressing different aspects of state behaviour – the search for internal legitimacy; the search for security; and the search for economic growth and development. These sections provide an overview of the domestic context and key dynamics determining the national agenda. After the internal focus, the paper provides an overview of regional relationships that affect South Sudan’s internal and external political behaviour.

The main argument presented here is that the current crisis in South Sudan is the result of challenges to the internal legitimacy of the SPLM as part of the state formation process and the expression of sovereign authority. The current configuration of power in Juba has proven an astute capacity to build and break alliances across different interests and to dominate the narrative in a way that limits response options. This is not a nascent government anymore but one which is demonstrating how it wants to run internal affairs and how it will exercise sovereign authority. The narrative of this internal legitimacy is based on overcoming the threat of rebels and a coup; it is a narrative firmly rooted in the politics of ethnicity and the focused use of coercion, and which seeks to reinforce the centrality of the party as liberator and guarantor of order. But for the South Sudanese state (and by extension the ruling SPLM), the ability to exercise sovereign authority remains dependent on managing increasingly competitive external relations.

When the dust has settled on this latest crisis, the question that remains will be one of the level of violence which is acceptable for a state to employ against its citizens under extreme circumstances. The current crisis in South Sudan is reshaping not only internal relationships between the organs of state and the people but also the parameters of relationships between the government and international actors in the region and beyond. These are highly lucrative relationships at all levels leaving much still to be fought over. This crisis has become a civil war in which the state is beginning to deal with its legitimacy and sovereignty issues within a deeply fragmented country and highly competitive regional political economy.

Introduction
This report presents findings from a survey of 677 households in four towns in South Sudan – Nimule, Torit, Wau and Yei. The survey gathered data on respondent perceptions of and experiences with HLP disputes.
South Sudan is currently experiencing a crisis of displacement on a scale that not been seen since the height of the previous civil war in the mid-1990s. In just five years, the current conflict has displaced two in five of all South Sudanese in the country.
Public authorities and development partners should address problems of housing, land and property (HLP) as they relate to displaced populations as an integral component of the emergency response. This would encourage safe, voluntary and dignified returns and prepare the ground for more substantial return and resettlement efforts in the future.

This article analyses the teaching and learning of South Sudan history from 1955–2005 in secondary schools in South Sudan with a specific focus on national unity. The article argues that the national narrative of South Sudan is still closely tied to enemy images of the former enemy of Sudan in the north, while internal ethnic tensions are suppressed and excluded from the official national narrative taught in the classroom.

Across the African continent, 268 million people practice pastoralism, both as a way of life and a livelihood strategy, contributing between 10 to 44 percent of the GDP of African countries. In recent years, this adaptive animal production system has faced growing external threats due to issues such as climate change, political instability, agricultural expansion, and rural ban-ditry that have transformed the rangelands in which they operate. From Mali to South Sudan, governments, regional bodies, peacebuilders, development agencies, environmentalists, economists, and security forces are actively attempting to address the sources of violence and instability that affect both pastoral communities and the rural societies with whom they share resources and landscapes.

These interventions are often shaped by differing assumptions about the source and nature of these conflicts, despite the avail-ability of extensive research and analysis. Though the local dynamics of conflict vary across different contexts, a number of trends and debates appear throughout the literature on pastoralism and conflict. This review draws on several hundred sources to synthesize the major points of consensus and divergence in the existing literature and identify relevant research gaps. This anal-ysis presents data from across Sudano-Sahelian West and Central Africa, to link comparable findings that are often presented in isolation.

Although conflicts over land and water resources in the Sudano-Sahel have long been a political concern and were a major point of contention in the colonial and post-independence eras, they have gained prominence in recent years due to the ongoing spread of violence, instability, and displacement across the region. Latent tensions over resource access and control, which his-torically only occasionally led to violence, have now erupted in some cases into cycles of mass killings and reprisals. In Nigeria, escalating rural banditry and reprisal violence between farmers and pastoralists has left thousands dead and many more dis-placed. In central Mali, the escalation of these conflicts culminated in the massacre of 160 members of the Fulani ethno-linguis-tic and traditionally pastoralist group in Ogossagou in March of 2019, as well as ensuing reprisal violence. And, across Sudan, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic (CAR), conflicts relating to livestock migration and cattle theft have played a critical and destabilizing role in internal insurgencies and cross-border conflict. For these reasons and more, conflict dynamics relating to pastoralism and pastoral communities have become a shared policy priority throughout the region.

When South Sudan became a separate state in 2011, its northern boundary with the Republic of Sudan became an international border, the longest and most contentious in the region. At the westernmost extremity of Sudan, Kafia Kingi is a key meeting point between the two countries. This mineral-rich area is currently under the administration of South Darfur state, in Sudan, but is due to be returned to Raga County, in South Sudan, under the terms of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement.
The Kafia Kingi Enclave was first published in 2010, in the run-up to the January 2011 referendum on self-determination for South Sudan. Based on extensive archival research and hundreds of interviews in Sudan, it tells the story of the people of Kafia Kingi and Raga, and describes the choices they face today. The Kafia Kingi Enclave is available from the RVI website as a free-to-download digital edition. Print edition in English and Arabic available from Amazon.

Over the past four decades, most South Sudanese people have begun buying staple foods rather than eating self-grown grains and tubers. This is part of a wider move towards markets, closely connected to South Sudan’s first encounters with modernity in the nineteenth century, as well as the conflicts and mass displacements of the past fifty years.

This move has deeply affected food systems, diminishing the availability of indigenous grains and impoverishing many people’s diets. South Sudanese farmers are growing cereals and tubers commercially, while traders are importing grain across its borders from neighbouring countries, deepening South Sudan’s integration into a regional grain economy. These imported staples are diversifying South Sudanese diets, as well as changing consumption habits and food preparation methods.

This report examines how South Sudanese tastes and imports are changing from the perspective of consumers and traders living in the capital, Juba. Going beyond issues of food security and crises, it scrutinizes the religious and cultural significance of food, as well as how shifting tastes and imports can provide clear, unspectacular explanations for everyday suffering and violence

On August 25, Transitional Justice Working Group of South Sudan, Human Rights Watch, and Institute for Security Studies held a webinar for the African Union (AU) Peace and Security Council (PSC) members and other officials to discuss the urgency for the establishment of the AU Hybrid Court for South Sudan, as a key factor to ensuring long term stability and accountability for serious crimes in South Sudan.

The initiative came on the heels of a joint letter, signed by 24 South Sudanese, regional and international civil society organizations calling upon the AU PSC to take concrete action to enable the immediate creation of the Hybrid Court on South Sudan (HCSS). In preparation for the webinar, Human Rights Watch published a question and answer document on the three accountability mechanisms provided for in South Sudan’s 2015 and 2018 peace agreements and the rationale for the AU’s unilateral establishment of the hybrid court, available here. On the day of the webinar, the panelists – who represented perspectives from AU officials as well as South Sudanese and international lawyers and activists –presented on accountability mechanisms agreed to by the parties to the conflict and opportunities and challenges to achieving accountability to break the cycles of violence and impunity in South Sudan.

This rapid review synthesises evidence on gender as a causal factor in different inter and intra state conflicts. It focuses on evidence from the year 2000 onwards, identifying specific case examples and describing how gender acted as a causal factor in each case. This may include, for example, the influence of the impact of ‘thwarted masculinities’, gender based violence (GBV) as a driver, or the influence of hegemonic masculinity in motivations for joining armed groups. The case studies presented in the report (Iraq, Northern Uganda, Colombia, Nepal. Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Sudan and South Sudan, and Kosovo) are the best evidenced in the literature identified to demonstrate the links between gender norms and conflict, and the ways that gender drivers are linked with causal factors.

The justice versus peace dichotomy or lack thereof has spawned both legal practice and international law literature for decades. As the debate pertains to the application of transitional justice specifically against the backdrop of mass political violence or civil wars, some jurists, legal practitioners and other scholars suggest that, on the one hand, justice and peace are mutually exclusive concepts. This implies that neither peace nor justice can be pursued without adversely impacting or displacing the other. Others, on the other hand, maintain that peace and justice are mutually reinforcing virtues, suggesting that the pursuit of one serves to augment the other. While the third school of thought acknowledges that both peace and justice are indispensable virtues for a dignified human life, it contends that an overreliance on the pursuit of justice at all costs is detrimental for sustainable peace. As well, it argues that justice should not be sacrificed on the altar of peace. In this regard, the third way proposes that the stringent standards of pursuing peace and justice should be relaxed in the interest of a balanced solution. Cognizant of the fact that South Sudan is a deeply divided and polarized country, this piece suggests that the most appropriate vehicle for pursuing transitional justice in South Sudan is in the form of truth, reconciliation and healing (TRH) and, perhaps, compensation but not through criminal prosecutions of the actions of key players in the recently concluded conflict. Failure to observe the delicacy of balancing peace and justice only operates to fester the conflict. That is in part because key actors in a mass political conflict are cushioned by their (ethnic) constituencies and in part because, generally, justice deferred solely for the sake of peace may actually breed more insecurity just as sacrificing peace for the sake of justice only yields incendiary results.