Juba Lecture Series
The Project Since 2010, the RVI has organized an annual series of public lectures at the University of Juba. These lectures are designed to promote public discussion of emerging political and cultural issues in South Sudan. The lectures are co-hosted with the Centre for Peace and Development Studies at the University of Juba. Past lecture topics […]
The role of transnational networks and mobile citizens in South Sudan’s global community
South Sudan’s political culture, including its current civil war, is international. This is due to the country’s history of mass migration and displacement, particularly during the last two civil wars from the early 1960s. By the end of the last century, approximately four million of its roughly ten million estimated residents had fled across South […]
South Sudan Diaspora Impacts
The Rift Valley Institute, with support from Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade through the Austrialian Embassy in Addis Ababa, is currently working with a group of researchers and scholars from the University of Juba, South Sudan, and Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, to explore the relationship between Australian South Sudanese communities and […]
South Sudan Customary Authorities Project
The peace negotiations which preceded the current political transition process in South Sudan brought together the warring factions, former detainees, leaders of political parties, members of the wider South Sudanese political class and representatives of the churches and civil society. However, largely absent from this process were customary authorities—variously referred to as chiefs, kings […]
Politics, Power and Chiefship in Famine and War
South Sudan’s civil war has spread across the country, fuelling economic collapse and food shortages, and sending millions of residents fleeing across its borders. Although the former Northern Bahr el-Ghazal State has escaped the worst excesses of the current conflict—in part because it is a supposed heartland of South Sudan’s ruling politicalmilitary elites—it is also […]
National Archive of South Sudan
Aims The South Sudan National Archive Project is a multiphase project for the conservation, reordering, cataloguing and digitization of the historical government records of South Sudan, implemented in collaboration with the Archive Department of the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport. The project is designed to safeguard the contents of the Archive and make […]
Binyavanga Wainaina remembers Chinua Achebe
The life of the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe (1930-2013) was celebrated on 6 May 2014 at Bard College, New York, where Achebe taught for many years. There were spoken tributes from Nigerian author and art historian Teju Cole, from historian Myra Armstead, and from anthropologists Yuka Suzuki and John Ryle. The Somali writer Nuruddin Farah […]