A new version of the Sudan Open Archive is now available on an external hard drive. SOA 3.0 offers free digital access to over three thousand books and documents and articles about all regions of Sudan. It includes two…
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A report from the Open Society Initiative for Eastern Africa (OSIEA), and the Africa Governance Monitoring and Advocacy Project (AfriMAP) investigates the vexed question of nationality in the two Sudans. Bronwen Manby’s The Right to a Nationality and the…
Week by week RVI Fellow Magdi el-Gizouli’s blog, Still Sudan, offers a trenchant analysis of political developments in the two Sudans. Recently, his self-described ‘notes on a fluid situation’ have argued against international intervention in the new civil war…
RVI Fellow Douglas Johnson discussed South Sudan’s history, historiography, and sense of identity in the context of the new nation's first anniversary. Speaking at the ninth International South Sudan and Sudan Studies Conference in Bonn, he describing South Sudan…
Sudan Looks East, co-edited by Dan Large and Luke A. Patey analyses the 'look east' policy adopted by Khartoum from the mid-1990s onwards. The book examines the rise of China, Malaysia and India and their significance in Sudan and…
South Sudan's second bookshop is now open at the Roots Project, Nimra Talata, in Juba town. Leaves bookshop is the brainchild of Awak Bior, an official at the Juba office of the European Union. The RVI, along with other…
In a blog for the London Review of Books, RVI Fellow Jérôme Tubiana describes a year of research in Sudan and South Sudan on arms flows in Sudan. ‘Tracing their origin,’ he writes, ‘might make it easier to put…
Sudan’s big grain producers are struggling to find sufficient labour to manage their fields, writes RVI Fellow Magdi El Gizouli. The problem is particularly bad in the central Gezira region, in the eastern Gedaref State, and in North Darfur….
On Friday March 9, RVI founding Fellows Jok Madut Jok and John Ryle gave a talk on the current situation in the Sudans at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), in Washington DC. The event marked the…
Compromising with Evil: An archival history of greater Sudan, 2007-2012 is the unequivocal title of Eric Reeves' account of the role of the Government of Sudan in Sudan's internal wars. The book comes with accolades from scholars such as…
Recent Publications

Thinking about Borderlands: Observations and implications from XCEPT programme research
March 31, 2025
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
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