Abyei has proved to be the hardest part of Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) to implement, harder, even, than the determination of the rest of the North-South boundary, or the division of oil revenues. In this personal commentary Douglas…
RVI publishes books, research reports, research papers, briefings and meeting reports in a range of formats. Publications cover policy, research, arts, culture and local knowledge in the countries of eastern and central Africa. Research publications—books, reports and papers—are peer-reviewed. Some RVI publications are also available in French and/or Arabic.
The RVI is a signatory of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (2001); all publications are free for download in PDF format under Creative Commons licences. The views expressed in books and reports published by the RVI are those of the authors, not the Institute.
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RVI Fellow Douglas Johnson discussed the implications of South Sudan’s independence for the new nation’s history, historiography, and sense of identity in his keynote lecture to the 9th International South Sudan and Sudan Studies Conference in Bonn in July…
ركز النقاش الدائر حول السودَانيْن، الشمالي والجنوبي، على مسالة أين يمر خط الحدود بينهما. ويفحص التقرير الاول في سلسلة الحدود المتنازع عليها، حينما تصير الحدود الاداريّة حدوداً دوليّة، موضوعاً آخر لكنه يتميّز بنفس القدر من الأهميّة هو: الأثر المحتمل…
Discussion of the border between Sudan and South Sudan has focused on the question of where the boundary line is to be drawn. When Boundaries Become Borders examines a different, but equally important issue: the potential impact of the…
‘In South Sudan there is no system of governance so popular—yet so little understood—as the federal system. Historically the demand for federation with North Sudan was seen as the way to keep Sudan united, and the absence of such…
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