Women in South Sudan

Author(s):  
Christopher Tounsel

Since the late 19th-century, Southern Sudanese have experienced Anglo-Egyptian colonialism (1899–1956), national independence with Northern Sudan (1956), two civil wars that resulted in South Sudanese independence (1955–1972, 1983–2005), a civil war within the new nation (2013–2018), and the conclusion of that conflict (2018). Southern Sudanese women’s experiences within, and contributions to, this stream of cataclysmic events has been harrowing and significant. This tumultuous history is rife with harsh realities. Women and girls have consistently had unequal access to education compared to their male counterparts, been subjected to sexual violence, marginalized from the political sphere, and faced a multitude of socioeconomic constraints and hardships. Many social scientists, furthermore, have argued that women’s vulnerabilities have increased as the result of lengthy militarized violence. However, in the midst of these realities, women have found ways to make important contributions not only as mothers, wives, and daughters but also as soldiers, teachers, activists, agriculturalists, and in various other positions during each of the postcolonial liberation wars. While women’s political participation has been encouraged since South Sudan’s 2011 independence, war, sexual violence, and socioeconomic inequalities have kept the female population in a vulnerable position.

Author(s):  
William D. Ferguson

Why do some societies achieve high standards of living, relatively broad access to education and quality health care, serviceable infrastructure, predictable and largely impersonal legal procedures, and relatively accessible avenues to peaceful political expression, while others stagnate with guarded islands of extravagant wealth, surrounded by oceans of poverty, corrupt autocratic systems, and simmering conflicts—or even full-blown civil wars? Why, did South Korea, a dictatorship that faced devastating war from 1950-1954, and whose 1960 GDP per capita was half that of Mexico and twice that of India, have, by 2015, a per capita GDP that exceeded Mexico’s by a factor of three and India’s by a factor of 17—in addition to a largely peaceful transition to democracy? How might a society, trapped in stagnation, corruption, and repression, initiate and sustain processes of economic and political development?


Refuge ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 19-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amani El Jack

Education plays a significant role in informing the way people develop gender values, identities, relationships, and stereotypes. The education of refugees, however, takes place in multiple and diverse settings. Drawing on a decade of field research in Kenya, Sudan, Uganda, and North America, I examine the promises and challenges of education for refugees and argue that southern Sudanese refugee women and girls experience gendered and unequal access to education in protracted refugee sites such as the Kakuma refugee camp, as well as in resettled destinations such as Massachusetts. Many of these refugees, who are commonly referred to as the “lost boys and girls,” did not experience schooling in the context of a stable family life; that is why they often reiterate the Sudanese proverb, “Education is my mother and father.” I argue that tertiary education is crucial because it promotes self-reliance. It enables refugees, particularly women, to gain knowledge, voice, and skills which will give them access to better employment opportunities and earnings and thus enhance their equality and independence. Indeed, education provides a context within which to understand and make visible the changing nature of gender relationships of power.


Author(s):  
Anna-Maria Hartmann

In Alexander Ross’s Mel Heliconium (1642) and Pansebeia (1653), the ancient gods and the stories surrounding them are the product of the greatly successful civil theology of the Roman Empire. Ross’s first mythography was written to intervene, on the royalist and Laudian side, in the political and religious conflicts of the Civil Wars. In such times, the virtuous Romans and their use of religion could provide a positive example for governing England. Ross’s portrayal of Roman religion dissociates it from the disreputable beginnings of paganism and emphasizes its monotheism, rationality, moral superiority, and charity. In their undisputed political wisdom, ideal princes of the Roman Empire championed religion because they knew that this would stabilize their reign and keep people in order through the fear of God. Ross’s mythographical work attempts to re-create the ancient function of the fables, by using them to restore the people’s fear of God and king.


Author(s):  
Siobhan Keenan

The Progresses, Processions, and Royal Entries of King Charles I, 1625–1642 is the first book-length study of the history, and the political and cultural significance, of the progresses, public processions, and royal entries of Charles I. As well as offering a much fuller account of the king’s progresses and progress entertainments than currently exists, this study throws new light on one of the most vexed topics in early Stuart historiography—the question of Charles I’s accessibility to his subjects and their concerns, and the part that this may, or may not, have played in the conflicts which culminated in the English civil wars and Charles’s overthrow. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book opens with an introduction to the early modern culture of royal progresses and public ceremonial as inherited and practised by Charles I. Part I explores the question of the king’s accessibility and engagement with his subjects further through case studies of Charles’s ‘great’ progresses in 1633, 1634, and 1636. Part II turns attention to royal public ceremonial culture in Caroline London, focusing on Charles’s royal entry on 25 November 1641. More widely travelled than his ancestors, Progresses reveals a monarch who was only too well aware of the value of public ceremonial and who did not eschew it, even if he was not always willing to engage in ceremonial dialogue with his people or able to deploy the power of public display to curry support for his policies as successfully as his Tudor and Stuart predecessors.


2021 ◽  
pp. 135406882110238
Author(s):  
Olga Zelinska ◽  
Joshua K Dubrow

Whereas social scientists have devised various ways to measure representation gaps between the political elite and the masses across nations and time, few datasets can be used to measure this gap for particular social groups. Minding the gap between what parties social groups vote for and what parties actually attain seats in parliament can reveal the position of social groups in the political power structure. We help to fill this gap with a new publicly available dataset, Party Representation of Social Groups (PaReSoGo), consisting of 25 countries and 150 country-years, and a method for its construction. We used the European Social Survey 2002–2016 and ParlGov data for this time span to create a Dissimilarity Index. To demonstrate the utility and flexibility in the combination of cross-national surveys and administrative data, we chose social groups of gender, age, and education, as well as intersectional groups based on gender and age, and attitudinal groups. We conclude this research note with empirical illustrations of PaReSoGo’s use.


Author(s):  
Laura Rossouw ◽  
Hana Ross

Menstrual hygiene management and health is increasingly gaining policy importance in a bid to promote dignity, gender equality and reproductive health. Effective and adequate menstrual hygiene management requires women and girls to have access to their menstrual health materials and products of choice, but also extends into having private, clean and safe spaces for using these materials. The paper provides empirical evidence of the inequality in menstrual hygiene management in Kinshasa (DRC), Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Rajasthan (India), Indonesia, Nigeria and Uganda using concentration indices and decomposition methods. There is consistent evidence of wealth-related inequality in the conditions of menstrual hygiene management spaces as well as access to sanitary pads across all countries. Wealth, education, the rural-urban divide and infrastructural limitations of the household are major contributors to these inequalities. While wealth is identified as one of the key drivers of unequal access to menstrual hygiene management, other socio-economic, environmental and household factors require urgent policy attention. This specifically includes the lack of safe MHM spaces which threaten the health and dignity of women and girls.


2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (11) ◽  
pp. 1290-1308 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandrine Ricci ◽  
Manon Bergeron

Québec university communities are facing intensified pressure to address the incidence of sexual violence on campus. The ESSIMU ( Enquête Sexualité, Sécurité et Interactions en Milieu Universitaire) survey (2016) revealed that one third of respondents (students and employees from six universities, all genders combined) reported having experienced at least one form of sexual violence since arriving at university, committed by someone affiliated with the same university. As the issue is becoming increasingly institutionalized, a process that often erodes activism, this article highlights the role feminist activism has played in placing sexual violence on university campuses on the political agenda. From the dual perspective of feminist activists and researchers on the ESSIMU team, the article explores the backdrop of this mobilization, and the network of feminist resistance that fostered the ESSIMU study, itself a significant contribution to the increased recognition of sexual violence in universities. It also considers the role of university and government institutions in (re)producing such violence and the role of media in making it a public issue.


1994 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Virginia Guedea

Beginning in 1808 the people started to play a prominent role in the political life of Mexico. This article examines the significant growth of popular political participation in the City of Mexico during the period 1808-1812. In particular, it analyzes the substantial role that the people played in the elections of 1812, a role they would continue to play in the early years of the new nation.


1982 ◽  
Vol 164 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madeleine Arnot

The ways in which male hegemony in education has and has not been addressed in educational research concerning women and girls in schools are considered. Two bodies of research in the British sociology of education — the cultural tradition and the political economy tradition — are discussed in terms of the ways in which they address the question of gender. The radical theories of social and cultural reproduction of class structure are then considered. It is argued that it is necessary to include a consideration of gender reproduction in any theory of class reproduction, whether the perspective is from a social or a cultural model. A theory of the production of gender differences inside and outside the schools is contrasted with prevailing reproduction theories. The paper concludes with a call for further research in the field of women's education that will both recognize the existence of class and male hegemony in the schools and will at the same time acknowledge that the constant need to reimpose hegemony entails both struggle and the possibility for change.


1994 ◽  
Vol 19 (04) ◽  
pp. 829-852 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Frohmann ◽  
Elizabeth Mertz

As scholars and activists have addressed the problem of violence against women in the past 25 years, their efforts have increasingly attuned us to the multiple dimensions of the issue. Early activists hoped to change the structure of power relations in our society, as well as the political ideology that tolerated violence against women, through legislation, education, direct action, and direct services. This activism resulted in a plethora of changes to the legal codes and protocols relating to rape and battering. Today, social scientists and legal scholars are evaluating the effects of these reforms, questioning anew the ability of law by itself to redress societal inequalities. As they uncover the limitations of legal reforms enacted in the past two decades, scholars are turning—or returning—to ask about the social and cultural contexts within which laws are formulated, enforced, and interpreted.


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