Education in South Sudan: focusing on inequality of provision and implications for national cohesion

This article examines the provision of basic education services after the end of the Second Sudanese Civil War in 2005, focusing on the condition of the services and its implications for national cohesion during the period after the birth of the South Sudanese state. It argues that the way basic education services were provided after the Second Sudanese Civil War has contributed to the trajectory of inequality that characterised the period before the onset of this war. This trajectory significantly deviated from the vision the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) promised during its bloody armed struggle against Sudanese regimes based in the national capital, Khartoum

Key lessons learned on international engagement

This briefing paper summarises shifts in international engagement in South Sudan from humanitarian aid to development and institution-building, and then back again to crisis response. The findings emerge from the recent report, Trajectories of international engagement with state and local actors: Evidence from South Sudan [^] , as well as other SLRC South Sudan research over the life of the programme. In the wake of South Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2005, optimism abounded that investment in state-building would produce numerous benefits including peace, stability, growth and economic opportunities. But such optimism proved to be unfounded. This paper analyses why current aid frameworks have been mostly unsuccessful in their efforts to promote sustainable institutions and peace in South Sudan. The central argument is that aid actors largely failed because they applied technical solutions to political problems. What is needed is a rethink in approaches, modalities, and time frames, and better use of contextual and political analysis, in order to avoid similar failures in the future

Livelihoods and conflict in South Sudan

More than five million people in South Sudan are currently in urgent need of humanitarian aid, with nearly one-and-a-half million displaced and another one million refugees. These figures indicate large-scale loss of lives and extreme disruption to livelihoods, which will take decades or generations to recover from. Yet livelihoods are often just expected to recover in a post-conflict environment. Findings from six years of research by SLRC do not support this argument; in some areas of South Sudan, support for livelihoods may have even been better during conflict. This briefing paper recommends a rethink in the way that aid actors approach questions of recovery and livelihood. Rather than a simplistic either/ or approach, what is needed is a much more localised and deeper analysis of conflict, inter-communal grievances and inter-communal relations

Civil Wars and State Formation: Violence and the Politics of Legitimacy in Angola, Côte d'Ivoire and South Sudan

Dominant narratives and theories developed at the turn of the 21st century to account for civil wars in Africa converged around two main ideas. First that the increase in civil wars across Africa was the expression of the weakness and collapse of state institutions. Second, guerrilla movements, once viewed as the ideological armed wings of Cold War contenders, were seen as roving bandits interested in plundering the spoils left by decaying states and primarily driven by economic or personal interests. However, recent research has challenged such accounts by looking into the day-to-day politics of civil war beyond armed groups' motives to wage war against the established order. Indeed, civil wars, while being the cause of immense suffering, contribute to shaping and producing political orders. Thus, if we are to understand how stable political institutions can be built after civil war, it is essential to study the institutions that regulate political life during conflict. This implies a need to take into account governance institutions and relations in areas beyond the control of the state. This working paper1 thus focuses on political orders put in place by armed groups, their strategies to legitimise their existence and claim to power, and on the extent to which they manage to institutionalise their military power and transform it into political domination. To this end, we take a broad perspective by looking at (dis)continuities between political orders established under rebel rule and post-war state formation. Drawing on a Weberian conception of the making of political orders as the passage from raw power (Macht) to domination (Herrschaft), we interrogate the social fabric of legitimacy in areas under rebel control during conflict and analyse how it relates to state formation in the post-conflict phase. Based on a political anthropology of governance and state practices in three different countries (Angola, Côte d'Ivoire and South Sudan) this paper provides empirical and theoretical insights into state formation in Africa as well as into domination and legitimacy. It also links to current policy debates on statebuilding and peacebuilding in fragile contexts. The paper starts with a review of the literature on civil wars and statebuilding. It then presents the analytical framework that was developed for the three case studies, which constitute the bulk of the paper

Statebuilding and legitimacy: experiences of South Sudan

In 2005, the Government of Sudan and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement / Army concluded a peace agreement, formally ending the 22-year-old civil war. Following a referendum, South Sudan seceded; donors put billions toward the new state and Sudan’s recovery, supporting – among other things – the development of new state institutions for both countries. However, in December 2013, war broke out again in South Sudan. Prevalent approaches to state building – such as those employed in Sudan and South Sudan from 2005 to 2013 – focused mainly on infrastructure and bureaucracy, based on the underlying assumption that service delivery fosters state legitimacy. Recent research, however, questions this assumption, arguing that it ignores the role that political structures, ideas and history play in legitimization or de-legitimization of the state. This report uses South Sudan as an example to interrogate people’s perceptions of the state, asking what – if not service delivery – fosters state legitimacy. This research was conducted under the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium (SLRC), a six-year, eight-country research study, led by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) in London. SLRC investigates livelihoods, access to basic services, and social protection in fragile and conflict-affected situations. The research is funded by the UK Department for International Development (DfID), Irish Aid, and the European Community (EC). The Feinstein International Center leads SLRC research in South Sudan and Uganda in addition to its participation in the Sierra Leone research

Producing knowledge on and for transitional justice : reflections on a collaborative research project

Scholars and research funding institutions have pursued North-South research partnerships as one possible redress for the divisions and inequalities that characterize research and knowledge production practices in the field of transitional justice. Policies and guidelines have been developed to shape the nature of these partnerships, to ensure mutual benefit, and to ensure a collaborative knowledge production process. However, critical reflections about the way these partnerships play out in practice are scant. In this chapter we will thus reflect on our team’s experiences in implementing what was planned as a collaborative North-South research project. We highlight questions of positionality, emotions and ethics in shaping and ‘doing’ partnerships. Drawing on a series of vignettes, extracted from a reflective conversation our project team had at the workshop that concluded our project, we make sense of these experiences within the larger debates on North-South relations in transitional justice scholarship and peacebuilding more generally