Conflict

The UN issued a report on Monday calling on the South Sudanese authorities to hold accountable the military and political figures who are supporting community-based militias in the Greater Jonglei region, in order to prevent further violence.

Organised and heavily-armed community-based militias from the Dinka, Nuer and Murle communities carried out a wave of planned and co-ordinated attacks on villages across Jonglei and the Greater Pibor Administrative Area (GPAA) between January and August 2020, according to a new human rights report jointly issued by the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

“Six months after the last devasting attack in Greater Jonglei, it must be made clear that those key figures at both local and national levels, who deliberately fuelled and exploited localized tensions, will be held accountable,” said UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet. “The risk that these community-based militias will reignite armed violence is too grave to ignore. It is of paramount importance that the Government takes effective steps to ensure that members of the security forces are prevented from supplying weapons from Government stocks to these militias,” she added.

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.

South Sudan is highly vulnerable to climate change, including flooding, droughts and, most recently, a locust infestation. Long-term climate change, like a gradual increase in temperature, and short-term changes, like increased flooding, have indirect and interlinked implications for peace and security in South Sudan.

In the context of South Sudan, as may be the case with other conflict and fragile communities, the nexus – in terms of causal relationship – between conflict and livelihoods is outstanding. The common denominator of the current conflict in South Sudan is loss of livelihood resulting from prolonged poverty and lack of alternatives to meet basic human needs. It is hypothesised that enhanced local conflict management skills, combined with resilience from improved livelihoods – all of which are seen to be fundamental to building trust both between and among local communities – will create a pathway through which the root causes of what has proven to be repeated cycles of both conflict and economic shocks in South Sudan can be addressed. Thus this programme is constructed upon a “theory of change” that emphasises the building of resource resilience and strengthening inter-communal conflict management mechanisms as a means of leading to three interrelated long-term outcomes: resilient livelihoods and food security; social cohesion; and peaceful conflict resolution. This policy brief is the second in a series of five briefs (to be published by the end of the programme) that seek to disseminate lessons learned from the project as well as to share the challenges faced by local communities in their respective peace building initiatives.

Northern Bahr el-Ghazal, like much of South Sudan, is in a protracted state of social and economic crisis, rooted in generations of armed conflict, forced resettlements, and a shift towards a cash and market economy. Since the 1980s, family units and livelihoods have been destroyed, displaced or reworked by conflict and most people have been forced to engage in precarious work for survival. Many residents have been drawn into patterns of labour migration to Sudan, trade and markets in often dependent or exploitative relationships, which have built on much older histories of conscription and enslavement. Political-economic systems have developed that exploit these processes of commodification, labour exploitation and basic insecurity.

The report uses the concepts of stress, risk and precarity as a frame of reference for understanding the fragmented and contingent futures that people in the borderland are navigating. What choices and possibilities do people have for self-development? How are these opportunities controlled and manipulated, and by whom? Who is trapped into being simply resilient and who can seek opportunity and challenge the terms of this often coercive and dangerous economy?

February 2020 saw the formation of the executive of the Revitalised Transitional Government of National Unity (RTGoNU). Since then fighting between the signatories to the Revitalised Agreement on Resolution of the Conflict in South Sudan (RARCSS) has been significantly reduced, as parties broadly respect the ceasefire. However, although the agreement largely brought an end to violence between signatories, South Sudan continues to experience significant levels of organised violence. The scope and intensity of this violence at times match – or even surpass – that of the national civil war. To describe organised violence in South Sudan, terms like cattle raiding and revenge, ethnic or tribal violence, and inter-communal violence are widely employed.

This effort does not seek to eliminate the usage of terms such as cattle raid or inter-communal violence, as the occurrence of these events and the literal meaning of these terms remains. The purpose of this document, however, is to support a diversity of organizations and personnel engaging with issues of peace and conflict in South Sudan in pursuing greater and more accurate understanding of conflict dynamics. This document proposes revised terminology, including three categories of organised violence: national, sub-national, and localised violence. To place organised violence within the proposed categories, an analytical framework is provided, based on the key characteristics of violence: purpose, severity, and tools.

Political tensions in former Western Equatoria state rose steadily throughout South Sudan’s 2013–15 civil war, culminating in clashes during the months and weeks leading up to the August 2015 Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in South Sudan (ARCSS) between President Salva Kiir and the opposition leader, Vice President Riek Machar. During the war, Western Equatoria’s populist governor, and frequent Juba critic, Joseph Bakosoro, flirted with defection from Kiir’s Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) but remained in his governor post until Kiir sacked him in the run-up to the accord. In the months following the peace deal, full conflict erupted across the state (see map).

The Western Equatoria war theatre consists of three primary armed groups with independent command and control. All of the groups share some origins in the Arrow Boys, a network of community defence militias mobilized to combat the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and unwanted cattle herders. Two factions—one in Mundri under Wesley Welebe, the other, more dispersed, under Alfred Fatuyo—have declared their allegiance to the SPLM-in- Opposition (SPLM–IO). After the peace accord, Machar appointed both Welebe and Fatuyo major generals. A third group, led by defected security officers, rejected the SPLM–IO and signed a peace deal aimed at reintegration into the armed forces in April 2016.

The ambiguous and unresolved inclusion of the armed groups in the ARCSS—or their exclusion from it—continues drive the conflict. Both Fatuyo and Welebe maintained links to the SPLM–IO throughout the war. Whereas Fatuyo clearly did not join the opposition movement until after the peace accord, Welebe’s ties to the group were stronger.

Anti-government grievances are widespread and often expressed as opposition to the Dinka ethnic group, and its political elite, specifically. While partially rooted in longstanding animosities, such sentiment has intensified since independence, with accusations that the SPLM’s Bahr al Ghazal Dinka elite promised shared power but then championed tribal interest. Equatorians primarily cite redirected national revenue, impunity for incursions by armed cattle herders, land-grabbing, and political marginalization. (According to the paramount chief of the Azande, Wilson Hassan Peni, the Azande did not have an officer at the rank of major general at the beginning of 2015. The Azande are one of several ethnic groups claiming to be the third-largest in South Sudan behind the Dinka and Nuer.) Western Equatoria is an opposition stronghold, but the armed groups are poorly supplied and often retreat in the face of government counter-insurgency. Some early community support for the armed leaders has waned even as government military abuses amplify resentments. Community elites are divided on the wisdom and feasibility of seeking an armed solution or aligning politically with Machar. Humanitarian consequences in the war theatres have been devastating, since the counter-insurgency strategy of security hardliners seeks to punish entire communities and depopulate rebel strongholds. Armed-group withdrawals from government attack have left civilian populations vulnerable.

In the aftermath of the peace deal, Western Equatoria in particular turned into a stage for contesting the new disposition of power in the country; the conflict must be understood in the context of the new power framework created by the ARCSS.

Sudanese, South Sudanese, and African refugee communities in Cairo, Egypt have raised the issue of gang violence as a major concern for their communities for over a decade. Despite the damaging effects violence has on refugee communities, humanitarian organizations in Cairo have only launched a limited number of interventions to address gang violence due its complicated and sensitive nature.

This report analyzes Sudanese and South Sudanese gang violence, focusing on how conceptions of masculinity reproduce violence and influence young people as they opt to join neighborhood groups. The report explores refugee communities’ grassroots efforts to reduce violence and shows how these efforts, while fragmented due to a lack of support, have positive tangible effects. Lastly, the report analyzes whether evidence-based models for violence prevention fit the local context and makes recommendations for how humanitarian organizations could use these models to support and strengthen refugee community violence prevention efforts.

This paper takes a localized conflict over a non-demarcated stretch of the Uganda–South Sudan boundary in 2014 as a starting point for examining the history of territorial state formation on either side of this border since its colonial creation in 1914. It argues that the conflict was an outcome of the long-term constitution of local government territories as patches of the state, making the international border simultaneously a boundary of the local state. Some scholars have seen the limited control of central governments over their borderlands and the intensification of local territorialities as signs of African state fragmentation and failure. But the article argues that this local territoriality should instead be seen as an outcome of ongoing state-formation processes in which state territory has been co-produced through local engagement and appropriation. The paper is thus of wider relevance beyond African or postcolonial history, firstly in contributing a spatial approach to studies of state formation which have sought to replace centre–periphery models with an emphasis on the centrality of the local state. Secondly it advances the broader field of borderlands studies by arguing that international boundaries have been shaped by processes of internal territorialisation as well as by the specific dynamics of cross-border relations and governance. Thirdly it advocates a historical and processual approach to understanding territory, arguing that the patchwork of these states has been fabricated and reworked over the past century, entangling multiple, changing forms and scales of territory in the ongoing constitution of state boundaries.

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.