South Sudanese women are going beyond gender norms to cope with multiple crises

The links between gender, mass violence, climate change, and human mobility are complex and interrelated. In South Sudan, where four in five people endure extreme poverty, and 70 per cent of the population needs humanitarian assistance, women and girls bear the brunt of the country’s multiple challenges. These include a combination of environmental extremes, conflict, and sexual and gender violence, often resulting in displacement. As Marisa O. Ensor argues here and in her recent paper, these women and girls have nevertheless persisted in making their voices heard even if it means defying deeply rooted patriarchal gender norms

Displaced Girlhood: Gendered Dimensions of Coping and Social Change among Conflict-Affected South Sudanese Youth

As wartime inhabitants, female children have often been presented as paradigmatic non-agents, victims of a toxic mixture of violent circumstances and oppressive cultural practices. Child- and gender-sensitive approaches, on the other hand, have embraced a more balanced recognition of displaced girls’ active, if often constrained, efforts to cope with adverse circumstances. In South Sudan, a young country mired in unresolved conflict and forced displacement, girls must navigate multiple and complex challenges. Drawing on fieldwork conducted among South Sudanese refugees in Uganda and returnees in South Sudan, I examine ways in which gender shapes local realities of conflict, displacement, return, and reintegration, focusing on the often-overlooked experiences of girls and female youth. Study findings evidence displaced girls’ remarkable determination and resourcefulness as they struggle to overcome a persistently turbulent climate of social instability, deprivation, and conflict.En temps de guerre, les filles sont souvent présentées comme non-agents paradigmatiques, victimes d’un mélange toxique de circonstances violentes et de pratiques culturelles oppressives. D’autre part, des approches adaptées au genre et à l’enfant font place à une reconnaissance plus équilibrée des efforts énergiques, quoique souvent limités, déployés par les filles déplacées pour surmonter des circonstances défavorables. Au Sud-Soudan, un jeune pays aux prises avec des conflits non résolus et des déplacements forcés, les filles doivent affronter de multiples et complexes défis. S’appuyant sur des recherches sur le terrain menées auprès de réfugiés sud-soudanais en Ouganda et de rapatriés au Sud-Soudan, l’auteur examine comment le genre façonne les réalités locales du conflit, du déplacement, du retour et de la réintégration en se concentrant sur les expérien- ces souvent négligées des filles et des jeunes femmes. Les résultats de l’étude montrent la détermination et l’originalité remarquables des filles déplacées qui luttent pour surmonter un environnement toujours turbulent d’instabilité sociale, de privation et de conflit

Gender in the Climate-Conflict Nexus: "Forgotten" Variables, Alternative Securities, and Hidden Power Dimensions

The literature on the security implications of climate change, and in particular on potential climate-conflict linkages, is burgeoning. Up until now, gender considerations have only played a marginal role in this research area. This is despite growing awareness of intersections between protecting women’s rights, building peace and security, and addressing environmental changes. This article advances the claim that adopting a gender perspective is integral for understanding the conflict implications of climate change. We substantiate this claim via three main points. First, gender is an essential, yet insufficiently considered intervening variable between climate change and conflict. Gender roles and identities as well as gendered power structures are important in facilitating or preventing climate-related conflicts. Second, climate change does affect armed conflicts and social unrest, but a gender perspective alters and expands the notion of what conflict can look like, and whose security is at stake. Such a perspective supports research inquiries that are grounded in everyday risks and that document alternative experiences of insecurity. Third, gender-differentiated vulnerabilities to both climate change and conflict stem from inequities within local power structures and socio-cultural norms and practices, including those related to social reproductive labor. Recognition of these power dynamics is key to understanding and promoting resilience to conflict and climate change. The overall lessons drawn for these three arguments is that gender concerns need to move center stage in future research and policy on climate change and conflicts

Educación y autosuficiencia en Egipto

La educación tiene la facultad de animar a los refugiados urbanos a maximizar sus posibilidades, compensar su posición de desventaja respecto a los ciudadanos locales y construir un futuro más seguro

Understanding migrant children: Conceptualizations, approaches, and issues

[no abstract provided]https://fount.aucegypt.edu/faculty_book_chapters/1041/thumbnail.jp

Teaching Cultural Memory in South Sudan: Education’s Role in Creating Negative and Positive Peace

Post-conflict education has the potential to foster reconciliation and contribute both to negative and to positive peace. Whereas negative peace-building establishes the absence of violence, a positive peace requires that parties resolve the underlying issues that fuelled the conflict in the first place. At the same time, because education is always culturally embedded and politically delivered, it can also serve as a destabilizing force when sensitive issues and the memory of a shared violent past are inadequately addressed. As South Sudan heads towards independence on 9 July 2011, concerns about the soon-to-be new country’s ill-prepared social and economic post-war environment are many, and include its limited capacity to satisfy the educational needs of its population. The long-term outcomes of the reconstruction process, and the very viability of South Sudan as an independent nation, will be influenced by the success of national educational programming in developing the capacity of the population. At the same time, given the ethnic-based character of the conflict, the new curriculum policy must also contribute to the formation and transmission of collective identity, social cohesion, and a sense of shared citizenship. Drawing on research among South Sudanese communities in South Sudan and in the diaspora, this paper explores the role of education in general, and the pedagogy of teaching cultural memory in particular, in their capacity to promote – or to erode – reconciliation, peace and nation-building in the world’s newest nation

Climate Disasters, Mass Violence, and Human Mobility in South Sudan: Through a Gender Lens

This article examines the links between gender, mass violence, climate change, and displacement in South Sudan. I argue for risk-informed gender-sensitive strategies that incorporate local capacities and sources of resilience. When civil war engulfed South Sudan again in 2013, egregious human rights violations, including sexual and gender-based violence, were perpetrated with near complete impunity. As the national army was divided along Dinka-Nuer ethnic lines, soldiers from each faction turned against each other in a deadly pattern of revenge and counter-revenge attacks that soon spread across the national territory. Inter-communal conflicts also intensified, often centering on competition over land for pasture, cattle raiding, and the abduction of women and children. Additionally, environmental challenges, including both droughts and severe flooding, as well as locust swarms, have resulted in widespread crop loss and property damage. Famine was declared in 2017, with current conditions classified as widespread acute food insecurity and acute malnutrition. The intersection of these multiple crises has displaced nearly 4 million people. Despite these seemingly insurmountable challenges, South Sudanese women have made significant strides in their push for inclusion in national peace processes

Unaccompanied young asylum seekers stuck in transit in Indonesia: intimate relationships, exploitation and resilience

Missbach A, Tanu D. Unaccompanied young asylum seekers stuck in transit in Indonesia: intimate relationships, exploitation and resilience. In: Ensor MO, Goździak EM, eds. Children and forced migration: durable solutions durch transient years. Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan; 2017: 303-324