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Article
Hiding in plain sight: IDP’s protection strategies after closing Juba’s protection of civilian sites
This article examines how former Protection of Civilian site (PoCs) residents are staying safe and protecting themselves after the United Nations Mission in South Sudan's (UNMISS) handing over of the PoCs to the Revitalised-Transitional Government of National Unity (R-TGoNU).
Article
Negotiating faith in exile: learning from displacements from and into Arua, North West Uganda
Humanitarians have recently championed faith actors as valuable resources in delivering humanitarian aid. This paper explores how faith has been entangled within the dynamics of two spatially connected crises: Ugandans fleeing post-Amin reprisals in the mid-1980s, and South Sudanese fleeing…
Article
Protection and containment: surviving COVID-19 in Palabek refugee settlement, Northern Uganda
Humanitarian assistance is framed around ‘protection’. Deciding whom to protect and against what is not straightforward, particularly during a pandemic. This article critically explores containment and protection by focusing on refugee self-protection in Uganda.
Article
Community self-protection, public authority and the safety of strangers in Bor and Ler, South Sudan
Protection is not simply something done or delivered to people by states, humanitarian organisations and armed peacekeepers. We use interview data from communities in Bor and Ler, South Sudan, long affected by conflict, to show how attention to the relationship…
Article
Humanitarian protection activities and the safety of strangers in the DRC, Syria and South Sudan
Many contemporary humanitarian organisations derive their legitimacy from their claims to protect civilians. Yet, what these organisations do in its name includes a diverse and contested range of activities that are often far from what global publics and affected populations…
Article
The safety of strangers: the realities and politics of protecting civilians in times of war
Recent wars have brutally shown that civilians are not safe. This is despite high-level global commitments and multi-billion-dollar humanitarian spending to keep civilian strangers protected. The high civilian death tolls in recent armed conflicts are prompting new questions about how…
Corruption and “culture” in anthropology and in Nigeria
This article examines the publication and reception of a book about corruption in Nigeria as a form of ethnographic evidence that is useful to interrogate the fraught relationship between the concepts of culture and corruption. The evidence points to multiple…
Conserving Nature, Transforming Authority: Eviction and Development at the Margins of the State The Niokolo-Koba National Park, Senegal
This dissertation examines two distinct but interrelated processes of displacement experienced by the evictees of the Niokolo-Koba National Park, based on fieldwork (2004-2005) in the Tambacounda region of South-Eastern Senegal.
Research paper
When kleptocracy becomes insolvent: Brute causes of the civil war in South Sudan
South Sudan obtained independence in July 2011 as a kleptocracy – a militarized, corrupt neo-patrimonial system of governance. By the time of independence, the South Sudanese “political marketplace” was so expensive that the country’s comparatively copious revenue was consumed by…
Research paper
‘And Then He Switched off the Phone’: Mobile Phones, Participation and Political Accountability in South Sudan’s Western Equatoria State
This paper investigates the impact of mobile phones in situations of political contestation or conflict. According to theory, mobile phones could play a positive role in building a more accountable government, and with that, contribute to statebuilding. We examine to…
Report
A Hard Homecoming: Lessons Learned from the Reception Center Process in Northern Uganda: An Independent Study
This independent report has been commissioned by USAID and UNICEF to examine assumptions and evidence about the needs and experiences of children and adults who have been forced to serve under the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), and have subsequently escaped,…
A summons to the magistrates’ courts in South Africa and Uganda
The expansive literature on law and justice across Africa emphasizes why people do not use lower state courts. Consequently, a striking lack of attention is paid to how and why people do engage with lower state courts. Drawing on a…
Research paper
Public Authority and Conservation in Areas of Armed Conflict: Virunga National Park as a ‘State within a State’ in Eastern Congo
Much research on nature conservation in war-torn regions focuses on the destructive impact of violent conflict on protected areas, and argues that transnational actors should step up their support for those areas to mitigate the risks that conflict poses to…
Research paper
Crisis responses, opportunity, and public authority during Covid-19’s first wave in Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and South Sudan
Discussions on African responses to Covid-19 have focused on the state and its international backers. Far less is known about a wider range of public authorities, including chiefs, humanitarians, criminal gangs, and armed groups. This paper investigates how the pandemic…
Research paper
Relationships Matter: Persistent Armed Conflict – A Case of Negotiated Authority and Survival
Many of the armed conflicts that have taken place over the past 25 years have been explained as a means by which greedy rebels and elites profit from natural resource rents. Accordingly, much of the research conducted in the field…
Book chapter
Civil Society and Peacebuilding in the Kivu Provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo
This chapter explores how effective or not has civil society been in ending armed conflict and building sustaining peace in Kivu provinces via the use of seven civil society’s peacebuilding functions. The findings are drawn from desk research, mainly exploring…
Briefing
Women, Conflict and Public Authority in the Congo
Even though women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) are undoubtedly marginalized in formal political life, they are not completely absent from the political arena. Congolese women are involved in the exercise of local public authority in a…
Background report
Southern Sudan at Odds with Itself: Dynamics of Conflict and Predicaments of Peace
This report aims to clarify reasons for increased intra-south violence in South Sudan. By reflecting on how people living and working in Southern Sudan experienced events since the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), this report looks at ways in which intra-southern…
Working paper
Civil Wars and State Formation: Violence and the Politics of Legitimacy in Angola, Côte d’Ivoire and South Sudan
Civil wars destroy existing political orders, shape new ones, and play crucial roles in the dynamics of state formation. This working paper is based on a 2-year research project reflecting on the social construction of order and legitimacy during and…
Research paper
Maintenance Space: The Political Authority of Garbage in Kampala, Uganda
In the name of cleaning up Kampala’s political institutions and public space, the Kampala Cap ital City Authority (KCCA), was established in 2010. To legitimize its contested and explicitly antipolitical authority, it made garbage collection and beautification its top priority,…
Background report
Crisis Responses, Opportunity and Public Authority during Covid‐19’s First Wave in Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan
Discussions on African responses to Covid-19 have focused on the state and its international backers. Far less is known about a wider range of public authorities, including chiefs, humanitarians, criminal gangs, and armed groups. This paper investigates how the pandemic…
Background report
Competing Networks and Political Order in the Democratic Republic of Congo: A Literature Review on the Logics of Public Authority and International Intervention
This CRP synthesis paper presents an overview of shifting dominant narratives on the Congo wars and the major findings of a systematic qualitative literature search on conflict and violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in relation to the…
Research paper
Vigilantes, Witches and Vampires: How Moral Populism Shapes Social Accountability in Northern Uganda
Strange murders have occurred in northern Uganda. Blood is said to have been removed from the victims, and there are tales about child sacrifice and terrifying witchcraft. An ‘election’ was organised to select the culprit, known as ‘Mr Red’, and…
Research paper
Authority that is customary: Kitawala, customary chiefs, and the plurality of power in Congolese history
This paper uses the history of the religious/healing movement Kitawala in the Democratic Republic of Congo as a lens to explore the relationship between forms of state-sanctioned “customary” authority and alternative nodes of “authority that is customary.” Focusing on three…
Research paper
Courses au pouvoir: the struggle over customary capital in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo
This article analyses the production and reproduction of traditional chieftaincy in war-torn eastern DRC through the case of a succession dispute in Kalima (South Kivu). Kalima has seen two decades of political instability and violent conflict involving numerous local, national…
Background report
Indirect Rule in Armed Conflict: Theoretical Insights from Eastern DRC
Building on the analogy between armed factions in contemporary conflict settings and states in the making, this paper explores the conditions under which indirect rule emerges in contexts of armed conflict, and the consequences that this governance arrangement has on…
Research paper
Maternal Vaccination in Uganda: Exploring Pregnant Women, Community Leaders and Healthcare Workers’ Perceptions
This research used qualitative methods to explore pregnant women, community leaders, healthcare workers, and programme managers’ perceptions of maternal vaccination in Kampala, Uganda. The authors found that public health messaging should target all community members, including partners and parents of…
Blog
In Uganda memories of Ebola spur resistance to COVID-19 public health efforts
Responses to COVID-19 vary across Uganda, with northern regions seeing resistance to public health efforts to enforce quarantine. For some communities the location of isolation and treatment centres, in particular, has caused public outrage, reviving memories of the 2000 Ebola…
Blog
When ‘a People’s War’ Turns Against Them: Reflections on Uganda’s ‘War of the Wananchi’ against COVID-19
With the incumbent President facing a critical election in early 2021, the truths over COVID-19 in Uganda became highly contested, as measures announced in the name of the people against COVID-19 began to double as interventions against the spread of…
Research paper
COVID-19, Public Authority and Enforcement
The securitization of health is not a new phenomenon. However, global responses to the 2014–2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa reveal the extent to which epidemic preparedness and response is now shaped by geopolitical concerns. This commentary describes how enforcement…
Background report
Chiefs’ Courts, Hunger, and Improving Humanitarian Programming in South Sudan
South Sudan has seen the most frequent reporting of localised famine conditions globally between 2013-2020, on average at least one pocket of famine conditions every two months. Focusing on identified famines, however, masks a broader and even more frequent issue…
Research paper
Competing authorities and norms of restraint: governing community-embedded armed groups in South Sudan
How can international humanitarian actors help to restrain the conduct of armed groups when they violate moral, legal and humanitarian norms? Using qualitative and ethnographic research in South Sudan, this article explores patterns of restraint among the gojam and titweng…
Blog
Bottom-up humanitarian protection: the experience of a young South Sudanese car-cleaner in Khartoum
What kinds of humanitarian protection are available for displaced people living outside of refugee camps? This article explores the forms of safety and protection available to displaced south Sudanese people living in Sudan, including community-based mechanisms such as family and…
Blog
Land disputes in South Sudan continue to affect refugees and IDPs
Post-conflict land disputes can seriously disrupt efforts by displaced people to return home. This article examines the different public authorities at play in securing or challenging someone’s right to use or own land in South Sudan. Such cases are often…
Book chapter
Taxation, Stateness and Armed Groups: Public Authority and Resource Extraction in Eastern Congo
This contribution analyses the role of taxation in the constitution of authority in the conflict-ridden eastern DRC, where numerous authorities alternately compete and collude over the right to extract resources. Taxation ranges from simple plunder, to protection rackets, to material…
Background report
Contesting Authority: Armed rebellion and military fragmentation in Walikale and Kalehe, North and South Kivu
Eastern DRC continues to be plagued by violence and dozens of armed groups. Yet, these groups—and how they interact with their social and political environment—remain poorly understood. This report analyses their involvement in public life in the territories of Kalehe…
