The Centrality of Conflict Transformation in Solving Political Struggles and Political Violence in South Sudan

2020 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Darlington Mutanda
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
South Sudan ◽  
Ethnic Politics ◽  
Conflict Transformation ◽  
Transformation Model ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
The North ◽  
South Sudanese ◽  
Political Struggles

South Sudanese have borne the brunt of the civil wars that have engulfed the country since 1955 to the present. People are perishing at the hands of government soldiers, militias and rebel forces. Using document analysis, this article evaluates the centrality of the conflict transformation model in reducing political violence in South Sudan. Political struggles and political violence in South Sudan have significantly led to the deterioration of human security and human rights. Conflict transformation helps South Sudan in realising that there is more to their future as a country rather than power struggles largely driven by ethnic politics. The North-South divide has since diminished. This implies that tolerance should now prevail. The DinkaNuer dichotomy should be a cause for celebration rather than animosity. It is significant for the country’s political leaders to realise that ethnic differences are going to forever be part of their lives, and should therefore be a source of strength as they seek to rebuild their country. The transformation of relationships is thus essential in eliminating the so-called ‘politics of isolation’ in the country and ensuring that violence is not viewed as the solution to the problems affecting the country.

scholarly journals The need for a good enough territorial and economic governance in south Sudan

1970 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Francis Onditi ◽  
Cristina D’Alessandro
Keyword(s):  
Civil Wars ◽  
Social Vulnerability ◽  
Political System ◽  
South Sudan ◽  
Economic Governance ◽  
Peace Agreement ◽  
South Sudanese ◽  
Sustainable Peace ◽  
Peace And Conflict ◽  
Political Governance

Peace and conflict dynamics in South Sudan are intertwined with political governance, institutional capacities, and leadership. Nevertheless, in the specific South Sudanese intractable civil wars since signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2005, territorial and economic governance are also certainly strictly connected to any possible prospect of sustainable peace for the country. As such, after carefully defining these concepts, this article emphasizes that territorial governance in South Sudan relates to boundaries definition and to the division of the national territory in states with a certain degree of autonomy. The issues and divergences engendered by territorial governance are intertwined with economic governance concerns. The uneven distribution of natural resources (especially oil) produces wealth and power redistribution concerns that are at the core of contentious relations between social and ethnic groups. These circles of tensions rapidly degenerate into conflict in a context of widespread poverty, inequality, and consequent social vulnerability. The article defines and illustrates a “good enough” territorial and economic governance framework for the South Sudanese case study.Keywords: South Sudan; Governance; Resources; Territory; Political System.

scholarly journals Chosen Peoples

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Tounsel
Keyword(s):  
South Sudan ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Book Of Isaiah ◽  
Spiritual Community ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The North ◽  
South Sudanese ◽  
The Face ◽  
Mission School

On July 9, 2011, South Sudan celebrated its independence as the world's newest nation, an occasion that the country's Christian leaders claimed had been foretold in the Book of Isaiah. The Bible provided a foundation through which the South Sudanese could distinguish themselves from the Arab and Muslim Sudanese to the north and understand themselves as a spiritual community now freed from their oppressors. Less than three years later, however, new conflicts emerged along ethnic lines within South Sudan, belying the liberation theology that had supposedly reached its climactic conclusion with independence. In Chosen Peoples, Christopher Tounsel investigates the centrality of Christian worldviews to the ideological construction of South Sudan and the inability of shared religion to prevent conflict. Exploring the creation of a colonial-era mission school to halt Islam's spread up the Nile, the centrality of biblical language in South Sudanese propaganda during the Second Civil War (1983--2005), and postindependence transformations of religious thought in the face of ethnic warfare, Tounsel highlights the potential and limitations of deploying race and Christian theology to unify South Sudan.

scholarly journals Land Reform and Conflict in South Sudan: Evidence from Yei River County

2017 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Hakim Justin ◽  
Han van Dijk
Keyword(s):  
Civil Wars ◽  
Ethnic Conflict ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Land Reform ◽  
South Sudan ◽  
State Building ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Major Aspect ◽  
South Sudanese ◽  
Legal Frameworks

Following South Sudanese independence in 2011, land reform became a major aspect of state building, partly to address historical injustices and partly to avoid future conflicts around land. In the process, land became a trigger for conflicts, sometimes between communities with no histories of “ethnic conflict.” Drawing on cases in two rural areas in Yei River County in South Sudan, this paper shows that contradictions in the existing legal frameworks on land are mainly to blame for those conflicts. These contradictions are influenced, in turn, by the largely top-down approach to state building, which has tended to neglect changes in society and regarding land resulting from colonialism and civil wars.

Historicizing Race, Ethnicity, and the Crisis of Citizenship in Sudan and South Sudan

2019 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 591-606
Author(s):  
Amir Idris
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Differences ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
State Formation ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
South Sudan ◽  
Ethnic Identities ◽  
Discursive Construction ◽  
The South ◽  
The North ◽  
Race Ethnicity

This article critically outlines the discursive construction of racial and ethnic identities in Sudan and South Sudan, arguing its legacy is essential to understand the entanglement of state-formation, nationalism, citizenship, and political violence in both countries. Race and ethnicity were central to the colonial, nationalist, and postcolonial projects of inventing the "North" and the "South" as self-contained entities, and the politicization of race and ethnicity after independence is largely a product of "Orientalizing" cultural differences through colonial administrative rules and postcolonial policies.

Will the Time of Growth and Development of the Young Republic of South Sudan Come?

2018 ◽  
pp. 91-110
Author(s):  
Tatiana Kochanova
Keyword(s):  
Growth And Development ◽  
South Sudan ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
The South ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
Independent State ◽  
South Sudanese ◽  
The World ◽  
National Resource

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.

‘A Welsh Lancashire’? Monmouthshire Catholics in the Eighteenth Century

1979 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 176-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
The West ◽  
The North ◽  
South Wales ◽  
Jesuit Mission ◽  
Charles Ii ◽  
Popish Plot

In the seventeenth century, one of the Catholic strongholds of Britain had lain on the southern Welsh borders, in those areas of north Monmouthshire and southern Herefordshire dependant on the Marquis of Worcester at Raglan, and looking to the Jesuit mission at Cwm. Abergavenny and Monmouth had been largely Catholic towns, while the north Monmouthshire countryside still merited the attention of fifteen priests in the 1670s—after the Civil Wars, and the damaging conversion to Protestantism of the heir of Raglan in 1667. Conspicuous Catholic strength caused fear, and the ‘Popish Plot’ was the excuse for a uniquely violent reaction, in which the Jesuit mission was all but destroyed. What happened after that is less clear. In 1780, Berington wrote that ‘In many [counties], particularly in the west, in south Wales, and some of the Midland counties, there is scarcely a Catholic to be found’. Modern histories tend to reflect this, perhaps because of available evidence. The archives of the Western Vicariate were destroyed in a riot in Bath in 1780, and a recent work like J. H. Aveling's The Handle and the Axe relies heavily on sources and examples from the north of England. This attitude is epitomised by Bossy's remark on the distribution of priests in 1773: ‘In Wales, the mission had collapsed’. However, the question of Catholic survival in eighteenth-century Wales is important. In earlier assessments of Catholic strength (by landholding, or number of recusants gaoled as a proportion of population) Monmouthshire had achieved the rare feat of exceeding the zeal of Lancashire, and Herefordshire was not far behind. If this simply ceased to exist, there was an almost incredible success for the ‘short, sharp’ persecution under Charles II. If, however, the area remained a Catholic fortress, then recent historians of recusancy have unjustifiably neglected it.

Ethnicity, Democratization, and Political Dramas: Insights into Ethnic Politics in Mauritania

2001 ◽  
Vol 29 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 26-30
Author(s):  
Cédric Jourde
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Differences ◽  
Ethnic Politics ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
Ethnic Violence ◽  
Political Regime ◽  
Ethnic Communities ◽  
Political Arena ◽  
Group Solidarity ◽  
Ethnic Tensions ◽  
Political Struggles

Since the establishment of party politics in colonial Mauritania, and especially since independence in 1960, the Mauritanian political arena has been marked by ethnic tensions. The best example is certainly the ethnic violence that occurred at the end of the 1980s between the Arab-Berbers (Bidhan) and the “Black Africans.” But in Mauritania, as in other countries marked by ethnic tensions and conflicts, it would be an analytical mistake to overlook other forms of group solidarity and other forms of conflict. Often, tensions based on ethnic differences unfold in conjunction with political struggles within ethnic communities, with accommodation across ethnic boundaries, and with debates about the type of political regime. These dynamics must be taken into account if we are to understand the significance of ethnicity as a political variable.

Abstract P366: Examining the Impact of Captivity in Men and Women on the Slaves Returning to South Sudan

Circulation ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 129 (suppl_1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Feldman ◽  
Cholene Espinoza ◽  
Brian J Beckord ◽  
Niketa Kumar ◽  
William Chaplin ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Blood Pressure ◽  
Cardiovascular Health ◽  
South Sudan ◽  
Independent State ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
South Sudanese ◽  
Normal Ranges ◽  
Health Assessments ◽  
In Captivity ◽  
The Impact

Background: South Sudan became an independent state on July 9 2011, after having endured two civil wars with Republic of the Sudan lasting 51 years. Over the 51 years approximately 300,000 South Sudanese were abducted and in held in captivity in the Republic of the Sudan. The South Sudanese abductees suffered abuse and deprivation. Presently it is estimated that 35,000 are still in captivity. Assessing the health status of returning South Sudanese citizens immediately after their return is imperative. The aim of this report is to examine the effect of captivity on heart rate, (HR), systolic blood pressure (SBP), diastolic blood pressure (DBP), and basic chemistry panel between men and women. Methods: In March of 2013, an American medical team performed health assessments for 48 hours in the state of Bahr el Gazal located in the northwest region of South Sudan. All returnees received health assessments within four days of their return. Health assessments defined as returnees’ demographics, along with their full history and physical examination. During physical exam height, weight, SBP, DBP, and HR, electrolytes and blood urea nitrogen (BUN) were recorded and analyzed. Results: Analysis was run on 186 participants, 50.5% (94) male, and 49.5% (92) female. Females were significantly younger at age of abduction, whereas men spent a significantly longer time in captivity (Table). SBP and DBP were significantly higher in males compared to females, even after adjusting for Age (p = 0.002, p = 0.036). HR was significantly less in males compared with females, even when adjusting for age (p < 0.001). BUN was significantly lower in females compared to males adjusting for age (p < 0.001) Conclusion: Although a majority of measurements in both men and women slaves returning to South Sudan fell within normal ranges, it is crucial to continue to monitor this group’s cardiovascular health because their deprivation while in captivity may have significantly impacted their health and risk for long term cardiovascular disease.

Concluding Reflections

2020 ◽  
pp. 320-344
Author(s):  
Alex De Waal
Keyword(s):  
Agenda Setting ◽  
South Sudan ◽  
Peace Agreement ◽  
Strategic Ambiguity ◽  
Peace Processes ◽  
South Sudanese ◽  
Theories Of Change ◽  
Core Issues

This chapter draws upon the contributions to this volume and adds additional reflections on peacemaking in Sudan and South Sudan, to draw out some patterns and general conclusions. It frames the analysis within the theories of change implicit in international and domestic Sudanese approaches to peacemaking. The principal argument is that peace processes should be seen as an extension of politics, characterized by strategic ambiguity, pursuing parallel tracks, and positioning for future opportunities that cannot be identified in advance. By contrast, international peacemakers’ theories of change are structured to achieve a singular unified settlement, or to pursue external interests. Sudanese/South Sudanese civic actors’ strategies go beyond ‘inclusion’ to agenda setting and generating coalitions for change. These differences are illustrated with reference to how the Comprehensive Peace Agreement managed its core issues (economy and security) and its marginal or excluded issues (Abyei, the ‘two areas’ and Darfur).

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