RVI’s ongoing South Sudan Customary Authorities Project is seeking to deepen understanding of the changing role of chiefs and traditional authorities in South Sudan. As part of this project, RVI has trained a team of researcher in oral history…
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In May and June, the Rift Valley Institute will hold the 2018 annual field courses in Sagana, Kenya. Now in their fifteenth year, each course examines a different sub-region within eastern and central Africa: Sudan and South Sudan, the Great…
Ce billet a été écrit par Yolande Bouka et Judith Verweijen, les Co-directrices d’études du Stage d’études sur la région des Grands Lacs 2018 qui aura lieu au Kenya du 3 au 8 juin. Yolande et Judith seront rejoints par une équipe d’experts…
This blog post was written by Yolande Bouka and Judith Verweijen, the Co-Directors of Studies for the Rift Valley Institute’s Great Lakes Field Course, which will be taking place in Sagana, Kenya from 3-8 June 2018. Yolande and Judith will be joined…
Recent Publications

Digital Governance and Security in the Horn of Africa
March 28, 2025
While digital finance—including mobile money—has developed unevenly across Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya, such technologies are nevertheless transforming everyday economic activities. In some cases, borderlands and cross-border financial flows are central to these digital developments and are driving further innovation. From

Legally Informal: Women, conflict and cross-border trade in the Mandera tri-border area
March 28, 2025
In the Mandera triangle—a pastoralist region encompassing the point at which the borders of Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia meet—the reality of local and cross-border trade often diverges widely from official state policies of control. This disjunction has created a grey

Making Sense of Borderlands
March 27, 2025
This think piece is an extract of a longer paper taking stock of the roughly 40 X-Border studies carried out between 2019 and 2025 under the auspices of the Rift Valley Institute’s XCEPT programme. If we are to fully grasp