This update summarizes the current political holding pattern around both COVID-19 and the political transitions in Khartoum and Juba, and how these interact with established long-distance trade and migrant work systems that drive the borderland economy.

Aweil is lush and green with rains at the moment. Fields that I had last seen hard and crisp with dried seedlings, back in June 2015, are now months away from yielding. Aweil town continues to bustle, with football tournaments every evening at Independence Square, and donkey carts careering past pedestrians hopping puddles. It is often said that the former state of Northern Bahr el-Ghazal—…

Politics, power and chiefship in famine and war investigates how customary authorities on South Sudan’s border with southern Darfur have managed repeated wars and famines since the 1960s, both for the communities that they claim to represent and for their own survival and benefit. It sets out chiefs’ and elders’ experience of negotiating successive states, rebel movements and local militias…