Publications

President Salva Kiir Mayardit announced in December 2016 a national dialogue program that supposedly enables the citizens to collectively debate the future of their distraught country. The debate includes how to resolve the conflict, respond to a growing humanitarian crisis, and address the enduring ills of governance in the country.

Land tenure systems have implications for food security, access to water, natural resources, pastures and settlement during droughts and flood disasters. Although the South Sudanese Land Act 2009 recognizes both formal and customary land tenure systems, little is known in practice about the extent to which these systems promote climate...

South Sudan is economically and politically distressed. Weak institutions, mismanagement, and corruption have for years plagued the nascent Republic’s economy, bearing markedly on political processes and outcomes. Hilde Johnson (2016) and Christopher Clapham (2012) suggest such is often expected of liberators who have just become a government in a country...

As South Sudanese warring parties are set, albeit be grudgingly, to embark on implementing the peace agreement they signed in August 2015, a sense of cautious optimism is being expressed, and rightly so. Since it broke out in mid-December 2013, the war has heavily inflicted on the young nation...

There have been flurries of calls to place South Sudan under the UN trusteeship. The calls come mostly from the U.S. experts, with the most recent one coming from Hon. Kate Almquist Knopf, who testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

For nearly a decade now, several armed groups have emerged all over the country, with some of them sometimes signing agreements with the government that last only a very short time. What normally follows, as historically evident, is a cycle of rebellions and sojourning political settlements, with rebel leaders shuttling...

The Agreement on the Resolution of Conflict in the Republic of South Sudan (ARCISS) contains important provisions on transitional justice, including a mandate to put on trials those responsible for masterminding atrocities during the 2013-2015 war.

We live in an era where the need to ensure proper administration of justice has never been so imperative. However, the fulfilment of this desire, as an aspiration of every citizen, depends largely on the competence, independence, and integrity of judges as the custodians of the laws.

Seven weeks since the Transitional government of National Unity was formed, however, international development assistance to South Sudan remains shut. The countries that sponsored South Sudan’s peace process have suggested that they have not really cut aid to South Sudan, but have simply channeled it toward humanitarian programs and away...

As South Sudanese warring parties are set, albeit begrudgingly, to embark on implementing the peace agreement they signed last August, a sense of cautious optimism is being expressed, and rightly so. For over two years now, the war has heavily inflicted on the young nation untold level of damage and...