Extract from a long-form report on South Sudan's independence and the rebellion in the Nuba mountains

… Just as Bashir’s regime uses warfare as its main instrument of governance, fighting has become a way of life for the tribal people of the south. John Ryle, a London-based anthropologist who runs the Rift Valley Institute, which focuses on eastern Africa, told me, “There is a generation of southerners who have known nothing but war, and a cadre of southern youth whose means o survival is the gun. That may be the problem: they don’t know how to have peace. While soldiers and former soldiers rule in both countries, as they still do, it will be difficult for things to improve. It is all going to take a long time.”