I became involved in the Cross-border Conflict Evidence, Policy, and Trends (XCEPT) programme’s Local Research Network (LRN) at its inception in 2018. During the following years, the network introduced me to a wider community of researchers who share a similar interest in cross-border issues. This has led to extensive knowledge sharing and fruitful collaborations, particularly in terms of my personal focus on how agricultural transitions impact the experiences of women.

As well as helping me cultivate my networks within South Sudan, being part of the LRN has given me the opportunity to expand my horizons internationally. For example, I attended workshops in Bangkok, Addis Ababa and Nairobi, which opened my eyes to different research methodologies and provided me with guidance on writing policy papers. These skills have been further reinforced by online peer exchange events with the XCEPT programme’s international partners. I have also been able to establish lasting connections with employees of various UN agencies, NGOs, embassies and research institutions within and beyond South Sudan.

More generally, by fostering collaborative research projects with researchers from neighbouring countries, XCEPT enables comparative analysis and a more holistic understanding of cross-border dynamics. Just as importantly, the LRN facilitates direct access to local communities and their perspectives on cross-border issues, something I have found invaluable when it comes to unpacking the functioning of conflict and cooperation in borderlands. This approach has informed the various papers, blog posts and articles I have written or contributed to over recent years.

From a personal perspective, I can testify that my involvement in the project has vastly improved my data analysis and writing skills, bolstering my capacity to conduct impactful cross-borders research. In addition, I have put to practical use XCEPT capacity-building sessions on—among other subjects—conducting sensitive research in conflict zones.

Conducting fieldwork under XCEPT

I have had many extraordinary experiences during the fieldwork I conducted for XCEPT in South Sudan. In particular, I cherish my memories of women from different communities sharing their stories and experiences with me. As a South Sudanese woman who grew up in a cattle camp, I felt able to engage with my interviewees on an equal footing, providing me with insights an outsider may have struggled to glean.

Overall, my fieldwork has yielded a treasure trove of fascinating life stories. The passion for writing I have developed is in part driven by a desire to share these unique experiences with audiences around the world—something I consider to be a meaningful act of advocacy. In this respect, I am particularly proud of a briefing paper I wrote for XCEPT as part of the ‘Displaced Tastes’ research project, entitled ‘Migrating with Seeds: Women, agricultural knowledge and displacement in South Sudan’. Given the personal importance of this work, I go into further detail below, pulling out some key quotes.

Migrating with seeds

XCEPT’s focus on policy solutions means that the programme’s publications—from blog pieces to briefings to full-length reports—are tailored towards offering practical solutions to everyday challenges in conflict-affected border regions. The utility of this is demonstrated by the fact that South Sudan’s Ministry of Agriculture has acknowledged a number of important policy recommendations highlighted by the Displaced Tastes project. Moreover, ‘Migrating with Seeds’ was read by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and its partners, playing a role in the Rift Valley Institute (the managing organization for XCEPT) being given responsibility for the Participatory Impact Assessment of its seed provision interventions in South Sudan.

The basis for ‘Migrating with Seeds’ was the life story of my aunt, Mary Ajok Wetkwuot, born in 1961 in Rumbek East County, Lakes State. As I describe in my briefing, ‘I came to know her as a loving and kind-hearted person born into a family dominated by women’. Her story is a fascinating one:

Mary left Rumbek in the early 1980s because of aerial bombardments during the Second Sudanese Civil War and, after settling in Wau for two years, she crossed into northern Sudan. … When she first was displaced from Rumbek, she travelled with a small black bag containing her favourite sorghum and millet seeds, which she planted in every location she was displaced to. 

Over time, my aunt experienced a shift from ‘a communal to a commercial system of agriculture’. Responding to this, she ‘tried hard to preserve the tastes and networks of the old system in the new one’, and ‘By travelling with seeds, often across borders, Mary allowed people living in displacement in Kassala to keep their grain traditions alive’. In doing so, she made a name for herself as a farmer of kech (a type of sorghum): 

Over the past decades, Mary has continued to transmit this farming and cooking knowledge to her daughters, cousins and grandchildren, and with the harvest of the kech seeds with which she first departed from Rumbek in the 1980s, she has built a reputation that spans the Sudans.

When I came to interview her for the briefing:

She had claimed a small corner of the barracks where she was growing indigenous varieties of sorghum and millet. Although she had carved out a space for her agricultural activities, she expressed a longing to return to her vast ancestral land in Rumbek, to farm in the soil that she grew up in. 

Not only is my aunt’s story deeply meaningful to me, I felt it could cast light on ‘the changing tastes for food in South Sudan in the context of the country’s economic transition and place in the regional, cross-border economy of grain’, as well as how local women deployed the ‘social and material capital of seeds … to manage the wider transitions experienced during South Sudan’s decades of war’. The positive reception the briefing received hopefully proves I succeeded in putting across these wider concerns, and is testament to XCEPT’s willingness to give priority to the knowledge produced by locally-based researchers.

The Author

Elizabeth Nyibol Malou is a researcher with the Rift Valley Institute in South Sudan, and is the author most recently of The Triple Burden: Women selling their labour in South Sudan. She was previously a lecturer at the Catholic University of South Sudan, in Juba.

Acknowledgements

This blog is a product of RVI’s Cross-Border Conflict Evidence, Policy and Trends (XCEPT) research programme. XCEPT brings together leading local and international experts to examine conflict-affected borderlands, how conflicts connect across borders, and the factors that shape violent and peaceful behaviour. The programme carries out research to better understand the causes and impacts of conflict in border areas and their international dimensions. Funded by UK International Development, XCEPT offers actionable research to inform policies and programmes that support peace, and builds the skills of local partners. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the UK government’s official policies.

This blog was edited by Ken Barlow.