The president of South Sudan said his guards fended off renegade soldiers who were attempting to overthrow the government, a clash that exposes the oil-rich nation's fragmented and fragile political situation. Dressed in military fatigues, President Salva Kiir told…
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KHARTOUM, Sudan — The United States has demanded negotiations. Uganda has threatened to intervene. China has called for an immediate cease-fire. The conflict in South Sudan has attracted attention from around the world, but nowhere are leaders watching the…
Countries in the East African region are sharply divided over military intervention in South Sudan, as the talks in Addis Ababa flounder over political detainees and the presence of Ugandan troops… Kenya and Ethiopia have resisted [President] Kiir’s appeal…
On Friday 10 January leading South Sudanese civil society institutions came together to discuss the current situation [in South Sudan]… According to David Deng, Director of Research at the South Sudan Law Society, human rights violations in the past and…
A Hungarian researcher in Juba explains how a sixty-year-old letter in the National Archive of South Sudan led him to a prescient piece of reportage by Wolfgang Langewiesche, an American journalist of the 1950s. …I reached the last pages of a…
Summary: There are a limited number of UK-based research institutes that include a focus on conflict and development in Sudan. Experts indicate that the Rift Valley Institute (RVI) is the main organisation involved in Sudanese research. Other research institutes…
A leading scholar of South Sudanese affairs said Saturday that federalism is not the same as Kokora. Giving a lecture on federalism during a debate at Juba University, Dr Douglas Johnson of the Rift Valley Institute said that Kokora should not…
South Sudanese Intellectuals have called on the government to involve chiefs in decision making process since they play a key role in enhancing policy formulation and implementation. This call came following a two days public lecture on culture and…
Tom Porteous of Human Rights Watch reviews the Sudan Handbook. In 2004 the Rift Valley Institute organised its first Sudan field course. The course was conceived in a spirit of cautious optimism and motivated by a simple idea. Already by that time it…
17 March, 2013 (LONDON) – A delegation of South Sudan’s Traditional Leaders (TLs) has completed a tour of African countries in which a successful synthesis of governance at the local and centralised levels has been achieved. … Between July…
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Thinking about Borderlands: Observations and implications from XCEPT programme research
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Do the ways in which policymakers and national governments view borderlands reflect how the communities living there experience them? Building on this, can a better understanding of the characteristics of borderlands help in promoting development, improving governance and making more

Digital Governance and Security in the Horn of Africa
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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
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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