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…
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I was in Juba two weeks ago participating in the Rift Valley Institute’s annual series of lectures at Juba University, whose theme this year was historic peace negotiations. Three sets of negotiations were examined: the 1972 negotiations thatled to…
Liz Hodgkin, RVI Fellow and former Amnesty International Sudan researcher, is teaching at St Augustine’s School in Isoke village, Eastern Equatoria, South Sudan. This is her tenth letter from Isoke. Other letters: No 1 July 2012, No 2 October 2012, No 3…
Liz Hodgkin, RVI Fellow and former Amnesty International Sudan researcher, is teaching at St Augustine’s School in Isoke village, Eastern Equatoria, South Sudan. This is her eleventh letter from Isoke. Other letters: No 1 July 2012, No 2 October 2012, No 3…
Philip Winter is an RVI Fellow and Central and Eastern Africa specialist. His account of the Congolese peace process A Sacred Cause was published in English in 2012 and in French in 2015 (Une Cause Sacrée, available from L’Harmattan in…
… One new group of people has flocked to Darfur in recent years: gold miners. From all over Africa, they have left their families, homes and countries, heading to a largely forgotten war zone to dig for gold. Activists…
RVI Fellow Magdi el-Gizouli on the return of President Omer el-Bashir from South Africa President Bashir’s return to Khartoum after the drama of his ‘missed’ arrest in Johannesburg was to say the least anticlimactic. The microphone set up for…
Liz Hodgkin, RVI Fellow and former Amnesty International Sudan researcher, taught from 2012 to 2014 at St Augustine’s School in Isoke village, Eastern Equatoria, South Sudan. For her earlier letters from Isoke see the following: No 1 July 2012, No 2…
The Rift Valley Institute organised a forum bringing together leading chiefs from five states of South Sudan in Nairobi last Saturday. The forum brought together the chiefs to discuss the current crisis in the country and the role they…
RVI Fellow Magdi el-Gizouli on the ascendancy of the commander of Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces The media simply can’t get enough of him. The commander of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, famous as Himeidti, a motherly…
Recent Publications
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‘THE FUEL IS US’: WATER, OIL AND DEBT ON THE SUDAN-SOUTH SUDAN BORDERLANDS
February 18, 2025
South Sudan and Sudan’s borderlands are run by a patchwork of armed authorities. Since early 2019, when opposition forces were effectively wiped out, these zones of control have remained relatively fixed, even as the war in Sudan drew close to
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Conflict, displacement and children in paid work in the Sudan-South Sudan borderlands
February 17, 2025
In this blog, Manal examines the pressures forcing many displaced people, including children, to seek paid labour to supplement dwindling support mechanisms in camps in South Sudan. The author draws on her research in 2024 as part of the XCEPT
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DOMINANT PATTERNS AND DYNAMICS OF URBAN CONTESTATIONS IN HAWASSA
February 12, 2025
Studying urban contestations in Ethiopia’s secondary cities can help us understand how the urban centres outside of Addis Ababa are evolving during an ongoing period of significant socio-economic and political change. In this regard, Hawassa in Sidama region provides an