scholarly journals The humanitarian protectorate of South Sudan? Understanding insecurity for humanitarians in a political economy of aid

2017 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 349-370
Author(s):  
Bram J. Jansen
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
South Sudan ◽  
Humanitarian Aid ◽  
State Building ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Security Threats ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
Conflict Situations ◽  
The Everyday

ABSTRACTThis paper aims to contribute to debates about humanitarian governance and insecurity in post-conflict situations. It takes the case of South Sudan to explore the relations between humanitarian agencies, the international community, and local authorities, and the ways international and local forms of power become interrelated and contested, and to what effect. The paper is based on eight months of ethnographic research in various locations in South Sudan between 2011 and 2013, in which experiences with and approaches to insecurity among humanitarian aid actors were studied. The research found that many security threats can be understood in relation to the everyday practices of negotiating and maintaining humanitarian access. Perceiving this insecurity as violation or abuse of a moral and practical humanitarianism neglects how humanitarian aid in practice was embedded in broader state building processes. This paper posits instead that much insecurity for humanitarian actors is a symptom of the blurring of international and local forms of power, and this mediates the development of a humanitarian protectorate.

In a “Half-dark, Half-light Zone”: Mobility, Precarity, and Moral Ambiguity in Vietnam's Urban Waste Economy

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Minh T.N. Nguyen
Keyword(s):  
Mobile Network ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Urban Waste ◽  
The Public ◽  
Moral Ambiguity ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
State Agents

AbstractThis article discusses the everyday practices of a mobile network of migrant waste traders originating from northern Vietnam, locating them in an expanding urban waste economy spanning across major urban centres. Based on ethnographic research, I explore how the expansion of the network is foregrounded by the traders’ dealing with the precarious nature of waste trading, which is rooted in the social ambiguity of waste and migrants working with waste in the urban order. Characterised by waste traders as a “half-dark, half-light zone”, the waste economy is unevenly regulated, made up of highly personalised ties, and relatively hidden from the public. It is therefore rife with opportunities for accumulating wealth, but also full of dangers for the waste traders, whose occupation of marginal urban spaces makes them easy targets of both rent-seeking state agents and rogue actors. While demonstrating resilience, their practices suggest tactics of engaging with power that involve a great deal of moral ambiguity, which I argue is central to the increasing precaritisation of labour and the economy in Vietnam today.

Doubts grow over reforms for Africa's fragile states

2015 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Democratic Republic Of Congo ◽  
South Sudan ◽  
Humanitarian Aid ◽  
State Building ◽  
African Union ◽  
Infrastructure Development ◽  
Fragile States ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Development Goals

Subject International state-building aid and interventions in Africa. Significance The five most 'fragile' states in the 2014 Fragile States Index are in Africa: South Sudan, Somalia, the Central African Republic (CAR), the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Sudan. Of these, South Sudan and Somalia in particular have been subject to major international efforts at 'state-building'. Meanwhile the DRC, Sudan and to some extent the CAR have for many years hosted high levels of humanitarian aid and large UN, African Union (AU) or sub-regional peace-keeping missions. Yet doubts are growing over the assumptions and effectiveness of international state-building aid and interventions. Impacts Countries in or emerging from long-running conflicts will remain vulnerable to fragmentation and perform worst on global development goals. Infrastructure development in the most conflict-affected countries will remain stunted, sometimes retarding regional linkage schemes. Despite generalised prescriptions for state-building, the specific context will be the decisive factor in success of any interventions.

THE STRATEGIC INSTRUMENTALIZATION OF LAND TENURE IN ‘STATE-BUILDING’: THE CASE OF JUBA, SOUTH SUDAN

Africa ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 83 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naseem Badiey
Keyword(s):  
Institutional Change ◽  
Land Tenure ◽  
South Sudan ◽  
State Building ◽  
The Political ◽  
Peace Agreement ◽  
Local Dynamics ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
South Sudanese ◽  
The Town

ABSTRACTDebates over land tenure have been instrumental to state-building in South Sudan since the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA). Focusing on the local dynamics of post-conflict reconstruction in the town of Juba, this article argues that amidst the political and institutional change inaugurated by the transition from war to peace, debates over land provided a basis for the negotiation of the South Sudanese state. Actors at a variety of levels employed competing interpretations of rights to land as state-building strategies – as tools towards promoting particular visions of the state and of citizenship.

SUDAN AND SOUTH SUDAN IN 2015 - Naseem Badiey. The State of Post-conflict Reconstruction: Land, Urban Development and State-Building in Juba, Southern Sudan. Woodbridge, U.K.: James Currey, 2014. xv + 207 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Abbreviations. Tables. Appendix. Bibliography. Index. $90.00. Cloth. ISBN: 978–1847010940. - Laura N. Beny and Sondra Hale, eds. Sudan’s Killing Fields: Political Violence and Fragmentation. Trenton, N.J.: Red Sea Press, 2015. xi + 307 pp. Map. Bibliography. Index. $39.95. Paper. ISBN: 978–1569023853. - James Copnall. A Poisonous Thorn in Our Hearts: Sudan and South Sudan’s Bitter and Incomplete Divorce. London: Hurst, 2014. xxii + 316 pp. Maps. Abbreviations. Index. £19.99. Paper. ISBN: 978–1849043304. - Katarzyna Grabska. Gender, Home and Identity: Nuer Repatriation to Southern Sudan. Woodbridge, U.K.: James Currey, 2014. xv + 223 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Abbreviations. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. $80.00. Cloth. ISBN: 978–1847010995. - Matthew LeRiche and Matthew Arnold. South Sudan: From Revolution to Independence. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. xvii + 288 pp. Maps. Index. $37.50. Cloth. ISBN: 978–1849041959. - Mark Fathi Massoud. Law’s Fragile State: Colonial, Authoritarian, and Humanitarian Legacies in Sudan. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. xxii + 277 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Tables. Appendixes. Bibliography. Index. $99.00. Cloth. ISBN: 978–1107026070. - Edward Thomas. South Sudan: A Slow Liberation. London: Zed, 2015. xiii + 321 pp. Maps. Tables. Bibliography. Index. $27.95. Paper. ISBN: 978–1783604043. - Christopher Vaughan, Mareike Schomerus, and Lotje DeVries, eds. The Borderlands of South Sudan: Authority and Identity in Contemporary and Historical Perspectives. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. xiii + 237 pp. Maps. Table. Abbreviations. Index. $105.00. Cloth. ISBN: 978–1137340887.

2015 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-234
Author(s):  
M. W. Daly
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
South Sudan ◽  
State Building ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
Southern Sudan ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Historical Perspectives ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Killing Fields

scholarly journals Zapatista autonomy and the making of alter-native politics

Focaal ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 (72) ◽  
pp. 51-63
Author(s):  
Sabrina Melenotte
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
Humanitarian Aid ◽  
International Aid ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Autonomy ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
Economic Dependency ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Good Government

Since 1994, the Zapatista political autonomy project has been claiming that “another world is possible”. This experience has influenced many intellectuals of contemporary radical social movements who see in the indigenous organization a new political alter-native. I will first explore some of the current theories on Zapatism and the crossing of some of authors into anarchist thought. The second part of the article draws on an ethnography conducted in the municipality of Chenalhó, in the highlands of Chiapas, to emphasize some of the everyday practices inside the self-proclaimed “autonomous municipality” of Polhó. As opposed to irenic theories on Zapatism, this article describes a peculiar process of autonomy and brings out some contradictions between the political discourse and the day-to-day practices of the autonomous power, focusing on three specific points linked to economic and political constraints in a context of political violence: the economic dependency on humanitarian aid and the “bureaucratic habitus”; the new “autonomous” leadership it involved, between “good government” and “good management”; and the internal divisions due to the return of some displaced members and the exit of international aid.

Striking Factory and Strike of Consciousness in the Work of S. M. Eisenstein

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elen Vogman
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Body Movements ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Everyday Work ◽  
Political Model

The Soviet Union of the 1920s produces and supports multiple connections between the policy of work in factories and the research in medical, neurological, and collective physiology. The theatrical and cinematic work of S. M. Eisenstein forms a specific prism where these interconnections appear in a spectrum of concrete attempts to engage the factory as an aesthetic and political model. The factory as a concrete topos which Eisenstein exploits in Gas Masks and Strike questions the interrelations between the human body and machine in a new iconology of a striking factory. For the duration of the Strike, the factory is represented beyond any functionality: the workers’ body movements and gestures are all the more expressive the less they have to do with their everyday work. This modulated status of production appears in Capital, Eisenstein’s unfulfilled project to realize Marx’s political economy with methods of inner monologue invented by Joyce. This last project transfigures the factory strike into the structure of cinematographic thinking where the neuro-sensorial stimuli constantly strike the logic of the everyday consciousness in the non-personal, polyphonic, and intimate monologue.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document