South Sudan

2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 503-542
Author(s):  
Jok Madut Jok

Abstract When South Sudan gained independence in 2011, the whole world rejoiced. The country marked 10 years of independence on July 9, 2021, but on that occasion, as was the case for the previous decade, its people had very little to celebrate. The country had been gripped by both state violence and deadly ethnic feuds. The intense rifts in ethnic relations emanating from this cycle have become a major risk factor for mass atrocities. This paper aims to chronicle the atrocity crimes that have happened in South Sudan in the past 12 years, what drives them, and how they can be mitigated or stopped. It will also suggest what the international community can do to assist the South Sudanese to find justice, accountability for atrocity crimes and above all, how to reduce or end violence. The paper is based on a review of reports by human rights agencies, the United Nations agencies operating in South Sudan, independent researchers, academics and think tanks. It is also based on the author’s first-hand knowledge of the context and on numerous interviews with South Sudanese. The goal, however, is not to ask: what lessons have been learned from the ongoing efforts in the country?

2020 ◽  
pp. 002234332096215
Author(s):  
Sophia Dawkins

This article examines what scholars can learn about civilian killings from newswire data in situations of non-random missingness. It contributes to this understanding by offering a unique view of the data-generation process in the South Sudanese civil war. Drawing on 40 hours of interviews with 32 human rights advocates, humanitarian workers, and journalists who produce ACLED and UCDP-GED’s source data, the article illustrates how non-random missingness leads to biases of inconsistent magnitude and direction. The article finds that newswire data for contexts like South Sudan suffer from a self-fulfilling narrative bias, where journalists select stories and human rights investigators target incidents that conform to international views of what a conflict is about. This is compounded by the way agencies allocate resources to monitor specific locations and types of violence to fit strategic priorities. These biases have two implications: first, in the most volatile conflicts, point estimates about violence using newswire data may be impossible, and most claims of precision may be false; secondly, body counts reveal little if divorced from circumstance. The article presents a challenge to political methodologists by asking whether social scientists can build better cross-national fatality measures given the biases inherent in the data-generation process.


Significance South Sudan is facing severe conflict and insecurity, a prolonged political crisis, and dire economic conditions. A peace agreement signed in August 2015 is falling apart, and fighting and violence during the past year has caused the number of South Sudanese refugees in Uganda to rise to 900,000 -- with a further 375,000 in Sudan and 287,000 in Ethiopia. Earlier this year, aid agencies declared a famine situation in several counties, and appealed for more humanitarian aid and improved access. Impacts Oil output is likely to remain at, or near, 130,000-160,000 barrels per day. Juba’s fiscal situation will remain precarious, with the government unable to secure loans from donors. Unrest and limited strikes over salary arrears could increase.


Significance South Sudan’s civil war is now in its fourth year, during which the intensity and extent of fighting has fluctuated. Despite the notional maintenance of the August 2015 peace agreement, security has deteriorated in the past year. The spread of violence has produced waves of displacement, with hundreds of thousands of South Sudanese fleeing to Uganda. Impacts The government’s fiscal position will not improve in the near term. Army units, as well as pro- and anti-government militias, will continue to be predatory towards aid. International assistance for South Sudan will overwhelmingly centre on humanitarian activities rather than longer-term development.


Author(s):  
Jürgen Rüland

The chapter details how in the last two decades the participation of academics in Indonesian foreign policymaking broadened. While in the past only a few think tanks provided input on the government’s foreign policy decisions, in the Era Reformasi many university scholars also became foreign policy stakeholders. The chapter examines how the academe localized European ideas on regionalism during the ASEAN Charter debate. While most academics strongly opted for a democratization of regional governance and the establishment of a regional human rights mechanism, the motivations differed. One group supported such reforms from a strictly normative point of view, others saw in them a leverage to increase ASEAN efficiency in the wake of the challenges posed by rising regional giants China and India. Academics localized European ideas of regionalism to a lesser extent than the government and legislators. Yet they too fused them with extant local ideas of security.


2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 298-318
Author(s):  
Roman Girma Teshome

The effectiveness of human rights adjudicative procedures partly, if not most importantly, hinges upon the adequacy of the remedies they grant and the implementation of those remedies. This assertion also holds water with regard to the international and regional monitoring bodies established to receive individual complaints related to economic, social and cultural rights (hereinafter ‘ESC rights’ or ‘socio-economic rights’). Remedies can serve two major functions: they are meant, first, to rectify the pecuniary and non-pecuniary damage sustained by the particular victim, and second, to resolve systematic problems existing in the state machinery in order to ensure the non-repetition of the act. Hence, the role of remedies is not confined to correcting the past but also shaping the future by providing reforming measures a state has to undertake. The adequacy of remedies awarded by international and regional human rights bodies is also assessed based on these two benchmarks. The present article examines these issues in relation to individual complaint procedures that deal with the violation of ESC rights, with particular reference to the case laws of the three jurisdictions selected for this work, i.e. the United Nations, Inter-American and African Human Rights Systems.


Moreana ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 46 (Number 176) (1) ◽  
pp. 175-190
Author(s):  
Bernard Bourdin

The legacy from Christianity unquestionably lies at the root of Europe, even if not exclusively. It has taken many aspects from the Middle Ages to modern times. If the Christian heritage is diversely understood and accepted within the European Union, the reason is essentially due to its political and religious significance. However, its impact in politics and religion has often been far from negative, if we will consider what secular societies have derived from Christianity: human rights, for example, and a religious affiliation which has been part and parcel of national identity. The Christian legacy has to be acknowledged through a critical analysis which does not deny the truth of the past but should support a European project built around common values.


Somatechnics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-200
Author(s):  
Natalie Kouri-Towe

In 2015, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid Toronto (QuAIA Toronto) announced that it was retiring. This article examines the challenges of queer solidarity through a reflection on the dynamics between desire, attachment and adaptation in political activism. Tracing the origins and sites of contestation over QuAIA Toronto's participation in the Toronto Pride parade, I ask: what does it mean for a group to fashion its own end? Throughout, I interrogate how gestures of solidarity risk reinforcing the very systems that activists desire to resist. I begin by situating contemporary queer activism in the ideological and temporal frameworks of neoliberalism and homonationalism. Next, I turn to the attempts to ban QuAIA Toronto and the term ‘Israeli apartheid’ from the Pride parade to examine the relationship between nationalism and sexual citizenship. Lastly, I examine how the terms of sexual rights discourse require visible sexual subjects to make individual rights claims, and weighing this risk against political strategy, I highlight how queer solidarities are caught in a paradox symptomatic of our times: neoliberalism has commodified human rights discourses and instrumentalised sexualities to serve the interests of hegemonic power and obfuscate state violence. Thinking through the strategies that worked and failed in QuAIA Toronto's seven years of organising, I frame the paper though a proposal to consider political death as a productive possibility for social movement survival in the 21stcentury.


Author(s):  
Josh Kun

Ever since the 1968 student movements and the events surrounding the Tlatelolco massacre, Mexico City rock bands have openly engaged with the intersection of music and memory. Their songs offer audiences a medium through which to come to terms with the events of the past as a means of praising a broken world, to borrow the poet Adam Zagajewski’s phrase. Contemporary songs such as Saúl Hernández’s “Fuerte” are a twenty-first-century voicing of the ceaseless revolutionary spirit that John Gibler has called “Mexico unconquered,” a current of rebellion and social hunger for justice that runs in the veins of Mexican history. They are the latest additions to what we might think about as “the Mexico unconquered songbook”: musical critiques of impunity and state violence that are rooted in the weaponry of memory, refusing to focus solely on the present and instead making connections with the political past. What Octavio Paz described as a “swash of blood” that swept across “the international subculture of the young” during the events in Tlatelolco Plaza on October 2, 1968, now becomes a refrain of musical memory and political consciousness that extends across eras and generations. That famous phrase of Paz’s is a reminder that these most recent Mexican musical interventions, these most recent formations of a Mexican subculture of the young, maintain a historically tested relationship to blood, death, loss, and violence.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 190-197
Author(s):  
Luh Putu Desy Puspaningrat ◽  
Gusti Putu Candra ◽  
Putu Dian Prima Kusuma Dewi ◽  
I Made Sundayana ◽  
Indrie Lutfiana

Substitution is still a threat to the failure of ARV therapy so that no matter how small it must be noted and monitored in ARV therapy. The aims  was analysis risk factor substitution ARV first line in therapy ARV. This study was an analytic longitudinal study with retrospective secondary data analysis in a cohort of patients receiving ARV therapy at the District General Hospital of Buleleng District for the period of 2006-2015 and secondary data from medical records of PLHA patients receiving ART.  Result in this study that the percentage of first-line ARV substitution events is 9.88% (119/1204) who received ARV therapy for the past 11 years. Risk factors that increase the risk of substitution in ARV therapy patients are zidovudine (aOR 4.29 CI 1.31 -2.65 p 0.01), nevirapine (aOR1.86 CI 2.15 - 8.59 p 0.01) and functional working status (aOR 1.46 CI 1.13 - 1.98 p 0.01). 


2018 ◽  
pp. 91-110
Author(s):  
Tatiana Kochanova

Тhe subject of this study is the young Republic of South Sudan (RSS), the “young” – both in terms of the age of an independent state, and in terms of its demographic potential. RSS, as a member of the United Nations and as a sovereign state, appeared on the world map in 2011, but, possessing super-rich natural resources, has not yet gained sustainable development, moreover, it fell into a deep military-political crisis. Like most countries of the African continent, South Sudan had real demographic capacity, but the authorities were unable to extract any “demographic dividends” from the truly main national resource for the development of the country’s economy, moreover, the number of refugees of young working age is constantly growing. Through the example of South Sudan, which so hard achieved separation of the South from the North and failed to take advantage of the conquered democratic values, the article explores the understudied problem of modification of the consciousness of the younger generation, dictated both by the specifics of the deep historical and cultural tradition of the South Sudanese nationalities and by new trends in global evolutionary processes. Studying the stories from the lives of multi-member families affected during the military-political conflict in the RSS, the author, based on the facts, strongly criticizes the ineffective, even often vicious, youth policy of the South Sudanese government. On the other hand, analyzing the origins, nature, basic traditional moral and sociocultural aspects of child employment in the region, the researcher finds a reasoned explanation of the cause for such a policy of universal child mobilization and tries to define this phenomenon that has not been studied in the scientific literature before. Summarizing the study of the causes of a humanitarian catastrophe in the RSS, the author, in addition to generally accepted factors that influenced the current situation (such as: the intervention of major world financial players in the affairs of a sovereign state, national discord, the struggle for power and resources), also highlights the subjective and not always correct work of the world information agencies and other mass media and, of course, the incompetent state policy of the leadership of the RSS in the Youth Field. Relying on the positive events of the past few months to resolve the conflict in the RSS, the author is still trying to predict in the foreseeable future the time for growth and development of the Republic of South Sudan, with the proviso that it can happen only in case of the inclusion of restraining leverage and expansion of the range of priorities of the main national resource – the youth.


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