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How did South Sudan become one of the most striking examples of state-building failure and state collapse after years of international support? What went wrong in the state-building enterprise? How did external intervention overlap and intertwine with local processes of accumulation of power and of state formation? This book addresses these questions analysing the intersection between international and local actors and processes. Based on original ethnographic and archival data, it provides a unique account of how state-building resources were captured and manipulated by local actors at various levels, contributing to the deepening of ethnic fragmentation and the politicization of ethnicity.

South Sudan is a fragile country beset by conflicts. The oil shutdown accompanied by a border closure in 2012 was resolved, but ongoing military clashes between factions of the ruling party have affected livelihoods since December 2013. Before the onset of these conflicts, large parts of the population were food insecure (2 out of 3 people) and lived in poverty (1 out of 2 people). This note estimates and juxtaposes the impact of the oil shutdown and the ongoing military conflict on livelihoods based on food price changes, predicted harvest losses and displacement. The resulting poverty estimates help to understand the structural implications of these conflicts. But to validate these numbers, test the underlying modeling assumptions and inform a policy response, new data needs to be collected urgently.

This thesis focuses on returnees' potential to contribute to reconstruction and development in post-conflict societies. Do returnees bring with them resources of any kind? If yes, how can these resources be utilized in order to contribute to reconstruction and development in the return areas? Through analyzing the experiences of South Sudanese returnees in Juba, these are the main questions this study seeks to answer. By drawing on the theoretical concepts of returnee (re)integration and returnee capital, the study seeks to explore returnees' (potential) contributions to their return areas. The results suggest that returnees possess various forms of capital (material, human, social, cultural) acquired either pre-flight or during exile. The case study shows a particularly high level of education and work experience among the returnees, as well as social changes in lifestyles, attitudes and values. However, the utilization of the returnee capital depends on the prevailing conditions of the return areas. This study shows that there are several aspects of the South Sudanese context that hinder an efficient utilization of returnee capital, with lack of employment opportunities, limited access to land, poor service delivery, and social discrimination being the most prominent. As a result, this study concludes that return migration theoretically represents a transfer of resources to the returnees' countries and/or areas of origin, however, the returnees are often unable to translate their capital into either micro or macro contributions.

Purpose
The Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) has been mediating the South Sudan conflict since 2013. IGAD's intervention in South Sudan is anchored on its founding norm of peaceful settlement of regional conflicts and in reference to the principle of subsidiarity, under the Africa Peace and Security Architecture (APSA). However, it is puzzling how violence continued unabated even as conflict parties negotiated and signed numerous agreements under the auspices of IGAD. The parties to conflict seem unwilling to implement the 2018 peace agreement, which is arguably un-implementable. Yet, it appears that IGAD mediators were privy to this situation all along. The question that then arises is why IGAD would continue engaging in a mediation process that neither ends violence nor offers a promise of a resolution? Drawing out on empirical data, this paper argues that IGAD's organisational structures and functionality are key to understanding and explaining the South Sudan phenomenon within broader discourses on peace and security regionalism in Africa. This paper suggests the need to pay attention to the embeddedness of political power dynamics in the structures and functionality of Africa's Regional Economic Communities (RECs), such as IGAD, as one of the ways to (re)thinking and (re)orienting norms and practices of regional conflict management within the APSA and in pursuit of the "African solutions to African problems."


Design/methodology/approach
Data for this paper was obtained through document reviews and 39 elite interviews. The interviews were conducted with representatives of IGAD member states, bureaucrats of IGAD and its organs mediation support teams, conflict parties, diplomats and other relevant experts purposively selected based on their role in the mediation. The physical interviews were conducted in Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda, with others conducted virtually. Analysis and presentation of findings are largely perspectival, highlighting coexistence of contending peacemaking ideas and practices. The discussions centre around inter-linked themes of IGAD's conceptions of peace and approaches to peacemaking as informed by its structural and functional designs.


Findings
Findings illustrate the complexity of the peace process and the centrality of power politics in IGAD's peace and security arrangements. In view of the findings, this paper echoes the need for enhanced and predictable collaborative framework between IGAD and the African Union (AU) as central to the operationalisation of the APSA and pursuit of the African solutions to the African problems. Hence, this paper suggests transforming IGAD's political program into a robust political bureau with predictable interlinkages and structured engagements between IGAD's heads of state and government and the APSA's Panel of the Wise (PoW).


Originality/value
The study is based on empirical data obtained through the researcher's own framed questions, and its argument is based on the researcher's own interpretations innovatively framed within existing theoretical framework, particularly hybrid peace theory. Based on the findings, this paper makes bold and practical recommendations for possible workable collaborative framework between IGAD and the AU under the APSA framework