With its scrubland, unpaved roads and mud brick huts, the Jebel Amer area in Darfur, western Sudan, can look like a poor and desolate place. Under the ground, though, lies something sought by people everywhere: gold. In the past year or so the precious metal has begun to alter the nature of the decade-old conflict in Darfur, transforming it…

Fellows and associates of the Institute responded in online and broadcast media to the attack by al-Shabaab on Nairobi's Westgate shopping mall. RVI trustee Lindsey Hilsum reported from Westgate for Channel 4 News, where she is International Affairs Editor. In an article on the C4 site, she wrote 'I lived in Nairobi for seven years back in the…

Fellows and associates of the Institute responded in online and broadcast media to the attack by al-Shabaab on Nairobi's Westgate shopping mall. RVI trustee Lindsey Hilsum reported from Westgate for Channel 4 News, where she is International Affairs Editor. In an article on the C4 site, she wrote 'I lived in Nairobi for seven years back in the…

The South Sudan Law Society's publication, In Brief, covers critical issues in legal and constitutional development in South Sudan. An article in the inaugural issue by Victor Lowilla explains how criminal defendants are often treated as guilty until proven innocent, against basic legal principles. Victor Bol’s piece on civil society’s…

The South Sudan Law Society's publication, In Brief, covers critical issues in legal and constitutional development in South Sudan. An article in the inaugural issue by Victor Lowilla explains how criminal defendants are often treated as guilty until proven innocent, against basic legal principles. Victor Bol’s piece on civil society’s…

A man called Luka climbed a cassia tree in the parish grounds to cut branches to sell, having taken five of six sachets of the strong alcohol they sell here called ‘Empire’. Drunk, he fell to his death. The family claimed compensation, but three witnesses confirmed that between his accident and his death Luka had told them no one should be held…

I have lived through three eras in Ethiopian history: the final years of the feudal system, the revolutionary communist decades of the 1970s and 1980s, and finally the state-sponsored capitalist system of today. My childhood seems distant now, so much so that I sometimes wonder if it was real. But for my first decade the feudal system formed…

The people of Lakes State, in South Sudan–the majority Agar Dinka in particular–have the reputation among some other South Sudanese of being hot-blooded and short-tempered, a wild card in the wider Dinka confederation that constitutes South Sudan’s largest ethnolinguistic group. The Agar have been the subject of a number of anthropological and…

The RVI's 2014 annual field courses, now in their eleventh year, were held from May to July in Eastern and Central Africa. The Horn of Africa Course held in Kenya, from 31 May to 7 June 2014, and covered Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia, (including Somaliland and Puntland), and Northern Kenya. The RVI Sudan and South Sudan Course covered…

On 11 September the RVI Nairobi Forum hosted a discussion about UK and US banks' discontinuation of their services to Somali remittance companies. The occasion was the launch of a report by Oxfam and Adeso Keeping the Lifeline Open: Remittances and Markets in Somalia. The report highlights the positive impact of remittances on Somali…