Towards Local Approaches and Inclusive Peacebuilding in South Sudan

The post-liberation peacebuilding in South Sudan, which largely drew from liberal peace theory, was employed between 2005 (after the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) and before the referendum, secession, and independence in 2011) and December 2013 (when it imploded into a civil conflict) and proved insufficient to sustain the fragile peace that briefly existed after the country’s secession from Sudan. After a protracted conflict lasting almost half a decade and the presence of multiple peace actors, the lack of a comprehensive and coordinated peacebuilding strategy proved detrimental. This failure is partly due to poor coordination between stakeholders and lack of local/domestic legitimacy, leading to insufficient peacebuilding and an aggravation of the 2013 conflict. Over the years, liberal peacebuilding strategies, which emphasize formal institution-building and statebuilding in fragile and conflict-affected environments, continue to produce mixed to poor results and fragile peace. This decline has resulted in the shifting of discourses and operations within peacebuilding, a paradigm shift that pays greater attention to localization and the local context in the conceptualization of peacebuilding objectives and strategies. This transformation promotes local ownership and inclusivity in peace processes and their dividends. The dialogue on inclusive peace has thus gained momentum, bearing a need to fully engage both states and societies in this process. The “local” in peacebuilding forms an important resource when solving root causes of conflicts, as in South Sudan, by improving awareness of the cultural and historical diversity in a given context.

Armed Group Transition from Rebel to Government

Governments and political parties with an armed history are not unusual, yet how these groups function during and after the transition from conflict has largely been ignored by the existing literature. Many former armed groups have assumed power in a variety of contexts. Whilst this process is often associated with brokered peace agreements that encourage former combatants to transform into political parties, mobilise voters, and ultimately stand for elections, this is not always the case. What is less clearly understood is how war termination by insurgent victory shapes patterns of post-war politics. This rapid literature review collates available evidence of transitions made by armed groups to government. The literature collated presents a mixed picture, with transitions mediated by an array of contextual factors that are location and group specific. Case studies are drawn from a range of contexts where armed groups have assumed some influence over government (these include those via negotiated settlement, victory and in contexts of ongoing protracted conflict). The review provides a series of readings and case studies that are of use in understanding how armed groups may transition in “post-conflict” settings.

Food security and COVID-19 in Afghanistan: a two-sided battlefront

Food security is a major element for the sustainability, stability and development of a country. However, despite fundamental efforts in fighting poverty, Afghanistan continues to struggle with food insecurity with a large proportion of its population living below the poverty line. With extreme climates, protracted conflict, and now COVID-19, food insecurity has become rampant and is on the rise in the country. Efforts have been reinforced to mitigate this issue, but a spate of obstacles which seems not to come to an end, has contributed to the deterioration of the situation. With the collaboration and efforts of international organizations, there remains a glimmer of hope to potentially reduce the gravity of the food insecurity in the country. This paper aims to highlight the efforts of Afghanistan in alleviating food insecurity with a focus on the impact of COVID-19 on this issue. It also presents recommendations that may help ameliorate the country’s food security status during and after the pandemic.

Health System Fragmentation and the Syrian Conflict

This chapter takes the analysis of the politics of health care further by exploring the way in which Syrian health care fragmented during the civil war. It reviews how Syria’s health system has been devastated by a protracted conflict that has left it politicized and fragmented, with multiple subnational health systems functioning within the country’s borders. It also cites four health systems that have emerged as a result of various geopolitical, fiscal, and humanitarian drivers, making the case for increased collaboration among the various fragments of the Syrian health system. The chapter covers the evolution of the subnational health systems and factors influencing the delivery of health care across the country. It uses the COVID-19 pandemic as a lens to highlight crucial challenges for all Syrian health systems.

Duration of Intrastate Wars of Attrition: The Causal Impact of Military Build-Ups

Scientific knowledge on the effectiveness of governmental military build-ups to terminate intrastate conflicts is sparse and inconclusive. Developing a war-of-attrition framework, we derive the impact of governments' armaments on the duration of these conflicts: military build-ups, as reflected in inflows of major conventional weapons, enable the government to inflict costs onto its adversaries, forcing them to withdraw earlier from the conflict. This type of weapons is required in particular to project military power over larger distances and to fight rebels in remote areas. Using SIPRI arms transfer data for the first time in a disaggregated dyadic design, covering 418 government-rebel group dyads in 134 conflicts, we empirically corroborate the formal model's predictions. As endogeneity issues might arise when governments procure arms in anticipation of a protracted conflict, we ensure causal identification with an instrumental variable survival approach based on the Aalen additive hazards model.

High altitude epidemic malaria in Bamian province, central Afghanistan

We report an epidemic of Plasmodium falciparum malaria in the remote valley of Bamian [altitude 2250 m-2400 m] in the central highl and s of Afghanistan. A team of malaria experts from the World Health Organization and HealthNet International carried out the investigation. A total of 215 peripheral blood smears were obtained and 63 cases of malaria [90.5% P. falciparum, the remainder P. vivax] were confirmed. The study revealed that areas vulnerable to malaria in Afghanistan are more widespread than previously recognized. The area had been malaria-free until recently, when the disease appears to have been introduced as a consequence of protracted conflict and resultant population movement, and transmitted locally during the short summer months. The outbreak led to severe morbidity and high mortality in a province having only a few poorly-provisioned health care facilities

Militarised Authoritarian State and Informal Institutions: Zulm and Rasookh in Downtown Srinagar

Kashmir is in a situation of protracted conflict. The paper offers an examination of daily life in the downtown of Srinagar, the region's capital. The conceptual focus is on the role of informal institutions, here defined as ordered patterns of behavior, in this setting. A particular concern with how these informal institutions explains how the different residents make sense of the generalized condition of what they term zulm. Zulm refers to the experience of living with, enduring, and engaging with the administration of the militarized authoritarian Indian state, and can be disaggregated into a series of informal institutions deployed by citizens of downtown Srinagar. Based on the ethnographic fieldwork, the paper looks at how differently situated individuals use these institutions – often in the form of networks, economic relationships, connections – to challenge and sustain relations with state structures. The particular focus is given to the informal institution of rasookh. This thesis makes a contribution to the neo- institutionalist debate within conflict studies by drawing on the social side of the informal institutions. It also contributes to the regional studies literature on South Asia by documenting at close quarters the experience of protracted conflict in Kashmir.

Mental Health Crisis in Somalia: a Review and a Way Forward

Background: Somalia has been without an effective government since the collapse of the military regime in 1991. Years of conflict, disasters, and insecurity have all contributed to very low scores for most health indicators due to poor governance, protracted conflict, underdevelopment, economic decline, poverty, social and gender inequality, and environmental degradation. The three-decade long protracted conflict has led to widespread psychosocial trauma, social deprivation and substance abuse with devastating consequences on mental health. A WHO study showed Somalia has one of the highest rates of mental illness in the world. The main aim of this study is to assist policy makers in setting priorities for the design and delivery of interventions to promote mental health and psychosocial wellbeing in Somalia. Methods: The study uses a systematic mapping technique (from January 1991 to May 2020) and data collected from public domain, to collect, collate, and present mental health data mainly from WHO’s Global Health Observatory. Since there is no primary database for Somalia’s public health research, the bibliographic databases used for mental health in this study included Medline, PubMed, CINAHL, PsycINFO, and Google Scholar. Data were extracted using techniques for web data mining for public health. Results: Systematic mapping of mental health-related issues in Somalia showed that policy-related determinants and mental health services dominated (74.4%), followed by the disaster-related determinants and women’s health consequences (39.3%). The ratio of the number of beds for mental health in general hospitals (per 100,000 population) in Somalia in 2017 is 0.5 compared to the Eastern Mediterranean region (EMR) at 6.4 and globally at 24. One of the biggest casualties of the civil war was loss of essential human resources in healthcare as most either fled the country or were part of the victims of the war. Conclusions: The vast scale of the mental health problems in Somalia and the priority setting guidelines for interventions to address the issues outlined in this paper, prompt a dire need that the Somali government and its national/international partners should prioritize and emphasize the need to invest in the prevention and the treatment of mental illness across the country.