Sudan Course 2008
The fifth Sudan Course took place at Rumbek Senior Secondary School in June 2008 under the direction of Justin Willis and John Ryle. The course is taught by a team of noted Sudanese academics and activists and international specialists. This year the teaching staff included Roland Marchal, Douglas Johnson, Magdi al Na’im, Joanna Oyediran, Jok […]
A Dinka moral world: reading an ethnographic account of an agro-pastoralist community in South Sudan
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 group. The Agar have been the subject of a number of anthropological and archaeological studies, but, […]
Sudan Course 2007
The fourth Sudan Field Course took place in May 2007 in Rumbek, South Sudan. The teaching staff included Douglas Johnson, author of The Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil Wars, Suliman Baldo of the International Center for Transitional Justice, Jok Madut Jok, author of Race, Religion and Violence in Sudan, Hala Elkarib of the Khartoum-based SIHA (Strategic Initiative for Women in […]
Sudan Course 2006
The third annual RVI Sudan course took place in Rumbek, South Sudan from 7th to 12th May 2006. As in previous years, the course provided an intensive introduction to north and south Sudan, covering modern history, politics and administration, civil war, ethnography, economics, human rights, and natural resources. The course was organized in collaboration with Rumbek […]
Sudan Course 2005
The second Rift Valley Institute Sudan Course was held in July 2005 in Rumbek (then the administrative centre of the new government of South Sudan). The course took place at Rumbek Senior Secondary School, the first international event to be held there since before the civil war. The teaching staff on the 2005 course consisted […]
South Sudan’s Experience at Peace Making
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 the Addis Ababa Agreement, the 1999 Wunlit people-to-people peaceconference, and the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement. The […]
Sudan Course 2004
The first RVI Sudan Course was held in April 2004 in Kenya at a game ranch on the Athi Plains, outside Nairobi. Participants were housed in a field centre on the ranch and a tented safari camp nearby. Twenty-five students from sixteen organizations and a dozen nationalities attended. There were ten academic staff and half-a-dozen […]
Letter from Isoke No 10: Pregnant students and guava thieves
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 November 2012, No 4 December 2012, No 5 March 2013, No 6 April 2013, No 7 May 2013, No 8 June […]
Sudan and South Sudan Course 2012
The ninth course covering Sudan—and the first to cover the new nation of South Sudan—was held in Athi River, Kenya from 26 May to 1 June. The course was under the direction of two of the co-editors of recently-published The Sudan Handbook (2012): Justin Willis, of the University of Durham, and Jok Madut Jok, of Loyola Marymount College, […]
Letter from Isoke No 11: Ghost teachers, scorpions, broken chairs
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 November 2012, No 4 December 2012, No 5 March 2013, No 6 April 2013, No 7 May 2013, No 8 June […]