43 research outputs found

    Making family: the journey into exile of a South Sudan refugee part 1 #LSEreturn

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    Through the story of Chol, LSE’s Naomi Pendle explores the meaning of exile and the lived experience of being a refugee through cycles of displacement and return. In the first article of this two-part series, Pendle tells us how Chol rebuilt home after years spent in exile

    When COVID-19 is irrelevant for South Sudanese

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    For many people in rural South Sudan, the health impacts of COVID-19 have been invisible, in contrast to more apparent dangers. Pandemic responses and news internationally have also fuelled suspicion towards COVID vaccines. If vaccine uptake on a global scale is needed to live with the virus, understanding these attitudes is vital for building trust towards global health interventions

    Politics, prophets and armed mobilizations: competition and continuity over registers of authority in South Sudan’s conflicts

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    Spiritual and divine authorities play a prominent role in mobilizing armed violence. This article provides a micro-history of a contemporary Nuer prophetess (guan kuoth) in South Sudan who mobilized hundreds of armed men including in support of current anti-government rebellions. The article grapples with apparent paradoxes in her approach to kume (a broadly defined notion of government) and customary law. This prophetess rejects logics of authority associated with the kume. At the same time, she champions the continuity of the language and imaginaries of customary authority that are deeply associated with government registers of authority in this context. The article argues that at the heart of the prophetess’s approach is her attempt to overturn historic government initiatives that separated the political and religious nature of institutions, and to assert that governance without government is possible. Previous attempts to govern without the divine have interrupted the customary law’s ability to offer healing including from the spiritual and physical dangers of killing. Her ability to mobilize people to arms is partly based on political claims to reconstitute the divine authority behind the customary law

    The ‘Nuer of Dinka money’ and the demands of the dead: contesting the moral limits of monetised politics in South Sudan

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    This article critiques explanations of South Sudan’s armed conflicts since 2013 that have relied on over-simplified theories of identity or monetised politics. Instead, this article explores the renegotiation of the meanings of monetary exchanges in politics and the inter-linked remaking of political identities. Warring coalitions in South Sudan have mobilised support using different notions of political communities and divergent ideas about the role of money in defining relationships. Some political communities have faced moral condemnation for their apparent willingness to form alliances in exchange for money. The article specifically discusses the emergence of the derogatory term ‘Nuer weu’ (‘Nuer of Dinka money’) among the South Sudan armed opposition. Alternatively, other political visions have presented gifts of money as a way to reinvent naturalised, kinship-based political communities, as well as social obligations of revenge and hierarchical norms of giving. The remaking of identity and the moral limits of monetary gifts in politics cannot only mobilise forces to war but also have implications for the moral limits of peace. The article ends by discussing one commander’s alternative visions of how elite money in politics could be made consistent with wartime moral norms by providing salaries for the dead

    A South Sudanese peace?

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    In Juba on the evening of Monday 11th July 2016, as the previous days of gun battles subsided, South Sudanese firemen came to the streets to collect lorry loads of bodies. They also washed away the blood that coloured the streets, leaving only traces where the blood had seeped into the sandy roads. The specificity of those who had fallen was disregarded. Family members crowded to the hospital to find their own, but they could not even access the bodies to count if their loved ones had died. The hospital had no money for fuel for the generator to power electric lighting to see individual faces amongst the piles of deceased. There was no refrigeration

    "The dead are just to drink from": recycling ideas of revenge amongst the western Dinka, South Sudan

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    Governments in South Sudan have long built their authority on their ability to fashion changing regimes of revenge and compensation, war and peace. Governments’ capture of these regimes has resulted in the secularisation of compensation despite the ongoing spiritual consequences of lethal violence. This article explores these issues by focusing on the western Dinka of Greater Gogrial. In recent years, they have been closely linked to the highest levels of government through familial networks and comradeship. Violent revenge amongst the western Dinka is best understood not as revealing the absence of institutions of government, but as a consequence of the projection of governments’ powers over the details of local, normative codes and sanctions. In this age of post-state violence with automatic weapons, oil-wealthy elites and ambiguous rights, government authority and intention has often been erratic. As government authority now backs up these regimes of compensation and revenge, governments’ shifting nature has reshaped their meaning. In the last decade, the declining political space for peace and the disruption of the cattle economy has undermined the current value of compensation and its ability to appease the spiritual and moral demands for revenge. It has even distorted regimes to the extent that children become legitimate targets for revenge. The article is informed by archival sources and based on ethnographic research amongst the western Dinka (South Sudan) between 2010 and 2013, and further research in South Sudan until 2015

    When COVID is irrelevant for South Sudanese

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    For many people in rural South Sudan, the health impacts of COVID have been invisible, in contrast to more apparent dangers. Pandemic responses and news internationally have also fuelled suspicion towards COVID vaccines. If vaccine uptake on a global scale is needed to live with the virus, understanding these attitudes is vital for building trust towards global health interventions, says Naomi Pendle (LSE)

    Talk of truth, reconciliation and justice in South Sudan

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    LSE’s Naomi Pendle paints an informative and insightful portrait of the challenges of reconciliation in South Sudan

    “They are now community police”: Negotiating the boundaries and nature of the Government in South Sudan through the identity of militarised cattle-keepers

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    Armed, cattle-herding men in Africa are often assumed to be at a relational and spatial distance from the ‘legitimate’ armed forces of the government. The vision constructed of the South Sudanese government in 2005 by the Comprehensive Peace Agreement removed legitimacy from non-government armed groups including localised, armed, defence forces that protected communities and cattle. Yet, militarised cattle-herding men of South Sudan have had various relationships with the governing Sudan Peoples’Liberation Movement/Army over the last thirty years, blurring the government – non government boundary. With tens of thousands killed since December 2013 in South Sudan, questions are being asked about options for justice especially for governing elites. A contextual understanding of the armed forces and their relationship to government over time is needed to understand the genesis and apparent legitimacy of this violence
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