This briefing was written by Micheal Woldemariam and Peter Chonka, the Co-Directors of Studies for the Rift Valley Institute’s Horn of Africa Field Course, which will be taking place in Kenya from 27 June to 01 July 2022. Michael…
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The South Sudan National Archive Project is a multiphase project for the conservation, reordering, cataloguing and digitization of the historical government records of South Sudan. The project has been designed to safeguard the contents of the archive and to make them…
Historically the production of knowledge reflects a history of unequal power relations and the economic domination of the Global South by the Global North. Africa sits at the centre of this inequality. Accordingly, the production of knowledge on African…
On 8 November RVI held a Forum ‘Understanding the Coup in Khartoum’ with speakers Kholood Khair, Eddie Thomas, Muez Ali, Sharath Srinivasan, Alden Young and Margie Buchanan-Smith. The following 5 points collates various comments made by the participants…
By Machot Amuom, RVI Researcher. I remember the joy and peace we had after Wunlit in 1999. When the 2013 violence happened, killing was done. When peace was signed in 2015 and again in 2018, nothing changed. When…
RVI’s partner in Somaliland, the Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies (IPCS) at Hargeysa University, has released two compelling new publications. These are: the latest volume of the Somaliland Peace and Development Journal; and a new report, ‘Partners or Competitors: The…
Yosa Wawa, Associate Professor, University of Juba The Rift Valley Institute works in partnership with the Ministry of Culture, Museums and National Heritage (MoCMNH) on the preservation and digitization of the South Sudan National Archives (SSNA). Under the current…
Jatin Dua – Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Michigan. After six days stationary in the Suez Canal, the Ever Given—a Panamanian-flagged container ship traveling from Malaysia to the Netherlands—was finally unstuck and able to continue its journey. While…
RVI’s Magnus Taylor speaks with RVI researchers, Joseph Diing Majok and Nicki Kindersley, about their latest report, Breaking Out of the Borderlands: Understanding migrant pathways from Northern Bahr el-Ghazal, South Sudan. The report takes the phenomena of the…
Displaced Tastes is a collaborative research project run by the Rift Valley Institute and the Catholic University of South Sudan as part of the X-Border LocalResearch Network. The project examines how experiences of conflict, regional displacement and mobility,…
Recent Publications

SHECONF 2026: International Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities
July 9, 2026
Event report On 26 March 2026, researchers, practitioners and academics gathered in Addis Ababa for SHECONF 2026, an International Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities in Ethiopia, the first of its kind convened by the Ethiopian Women Researchers Network (EWNET).

State Capture in Africa: How elite networks undermine democracy, development and security
June 24, 2026
Key points State capture has been increasingly recognized as a major governance challenge due to the way it helps to drive many of the most pressing problems facing contemporary states, including democratic erosion, corruption, economic exclusion, insecurity and declining trust

The New Geopolitics of Eastern Africa
June 17, 2026
On 20 May, the British Institute of Eastern Africa (BIEA), Chatham House, and the Rift Valley Institute (RVI) convened a group of experts to discuss the ‘The New Geopolitics of Eastern Africa’. The closed-door roundtable considered the ongoing transformation of