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Zum fünften Jahrestag der Unabhängigkeit ist der Konflikt im Südsudan erneut aufgeflammt. Nach fast zwei Jahren Krieg zwischen den Truppen von Präsident Kiir und Vizepräsident Machar war dieser erst im April 2016 mit seinen Ministern und einem Teil seiner Truppen zurück in die Hauptstadt Juba gekommen, um gemeinsam mit dem Kabinett seines Gegners Kiir eine Übergangsregierung der Nationalen Einheit zu bilden. Beide Seiten blockierten jedoch die Umsetzung des Friedensabkommens vom August 2015, in anderen Landesteilen wurde der Waffenstillstand mehrfach gebrochen. Am 7. Juli begannen die Sicherheitskräfte der beiden Kontrahenten in Juba aufeinander zu schießen. In den folgenden Tagen starben mehr als 300 Menschen. Keiner der beiden Anführer besitzt die vollständige Kontrolle über die kämpfenden Einheiten. Inzwischen hat Machar mit seinen Truppen Juba verlassen. Nun stellt sich die Frage nach der weiteren Gültigkeit des Friedensabkommens und der Legitimität der beiden Führer. Die Vereinten Nationen (VN) sind mit über 13000 Soldaten vor Ort und die Afrikanische Union (AU) will eine Eingreiftruppe zur Friedenserzwingung entsenden. (Autorenreferat)

AbstractAid organizations profess universalist objectives, such as humanitarian principles and human rights, whilst operating in areas in which these objectives cannot be fulfilled. How do they deal with the disparity between the claims they make and what actually happens? How are parts of the story covered up, and what do the stated objectives achieve? This article argues that denial — at a personal, organizational and institutional level — is crucial for sustaining assistance, and is facilitated by the language of rights and principles. Drawing on research from southern Sudan, it explores how aid organizations construct an official version of events that fabricates clarity whilst maintaining a degree of tactical confusion. This establishes a political morality, a seemingly ethical position that has political and psychological returns.

Abstract. This study examined the conflict in South Sudan, which started in December 2013 due to political dissatisfaction between President Salva Kiir and his then Vice President Riek Machar. When South Sudan got independence in 2011 through a referendum where more-than 98 percent of the population supported secession from Sudan, the country became a case study for potential secessions in Africa. However, the euphoria of independence quickly evaporated, and immediately replaced by violent conflict. Thus, the study explored the major causes of the conflict and concluded that political discontent resulting from power struggle among the elites fuelled the conflict. Furthermore, the study argues that citing ethnicity as the fundamental cause of the conflict is misleading and ill-conceived. Rather than being the catalyst of the conflict, the present conflict in South Sudan has rekindled ethnic identities and ideologies to a record height. The new wave of ethnic sentiment in South Sudan is as a result of irrational quest for political power and control among the top echelons in the country. Although ethnicity is not considered as the main cause of the conflict, however, given that the present situation has invigorated ethnic identities and sentiments in the country, the study concludes that any viable solution to the conflict must give incentives to fair ethnic and inter-ethnic representation and coalitions. Keywords. South Sudan, Power struggle, Ethnicity, Violence conflict, Peace-building.JEL. A13, A14, A30.

The role of women in developing and improving the livelihoods of the various communities in the country is key to peace-building. They have great influence and responsibility as mothers who bring many people to a common understanding. Based on this responsibility, the government of South Sudan has recognized their contribution to the peace process and the development of South Sudan as a whole. Pre-peace-building is said to be a proactive process that requires identification of conflict incidences, analysis of conflict structure, actors with adaptation of necessary responses and management mechanism, which includes restoration of trust and confidence of the stakeholders involved in the conflict. It is the art of regaining relationships with the governmental institutions and social groups in the various communities, which helps to unite them to live peacefully in their country.Therefore, this paper examines the contribution of women to peace-building during the recent conflict in the country. The paper also investigates the approaches employed by women in peace-building, as well as the efforts and commitments to influence their participation. Previously, women were excluded from participating in leadership in the fields of educational opportunities. However, their contribution to peace-building or conflict resolution will empower them to play a part in leadership positions. The methods used in this paper are descriptive and analytical. However, the sources used to gather the data for this study are both primary and secondary.

The conflict in South Sudan flared up again on the fifth anniversary of independence. After almost two years of war between forces controlled by President Kiir and those of Vice-President Machar, the latter had only recently - in April 2016 - returned to the capital Juba with his ministers and some of his troops to form a Transitional Government of National Unity, together with Kiir's cabinet. But both sides obstructed implementation of the August 2015 peace agreement, and repeated breaches of the cease-fire were reported in other parts of the country. On 7 July shooting broke out between the opposing forces in Juba. More than three hundred people died in the following days. In the meantime, Machar and his forces have left Juba and his chief negotiator Taban Deng Gai was installed as his replacement by President Kiir, splitting the leadership of the SPLM in Opposition. The question now is the fate of the peace agreement and the legitimacy of the two leaders. The United Nations has more than 13,000 troops on the ground, and the African Union is preparing an intervention mission to enforce peace. (author's abstract)

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, a leading scholar Samuel Huntington's thesis in the field of social science has described ethnic conflicts as an inevitable post-secession resurgence of previously suppressed historical ethnic rivalries. An analogy of this approach view the postcommunist era as "the fault lines between civilization will be the battle line of future". This study uses an instrumentalist approach to examine the root causes of the civil war after secession and found politicization of ethnicity as an unrevealed cause of civil war after secession. Politicization of the ethnic conflict occurred through the three variables political elites as actors, using political rhetoric and Mass media as an instrument to politicize. Ethnicity is an instrument that can be used by political elites in order to achieve a collective or personal goal's. Therefore, ethnicity cannot cause civil war unless if politicized. Two years after secession, South Sudan is seized by a civil war that has massacred an estimated of thousands and displaced millions. Conflict along the ethnic line erupted in December 2013, international media and some observers view ethnicity as the main cause behind the conflict but this thesis found politicization of ethnicity by president Salva Kiir's and former vice president Riek Machar as an actor, they played a significant role in causing a civil war. The two political elites used political rhetoric and mass media as a tool to politicized Dinka and Nuer ethnic groups. Politicization of ethnicity was what triggered a civil war in South Sudan and not ethnicity as claimed by international media and observers.

This article investigates the deployment of dependency as a keyword in discussions of food security in South Sudan, on the basis of interviews and observations carried out in December 2012. Our initial intent was to estimate challenges to rural food security as the country emerged from decades of violent conflict. However, the notion of a "culture of dependency" arose persistently from our data, alongside more conventional information about food. We contextualize this discursive deployment of dependency within ongoing scholarly debates about the existence of "dependency syndromes" in humanitarian relief operations in central Africa and within academic discussions of the power of buzzwords and keywords in development discourse, with particular reference to Swidler and Watkins's 2009 article "'Teach a Man to Fish': The Doctrine of Sustainability and Its Effects on Three Strata of Malawian Society." We argue that dependency in the South Sudanese context incorporates four facets: the near-total economic dependency of South Sudan on oil revenues; the social-structural dependency of rural communities on international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) for basic foodstuffs; a so-called "culture of dependency" that our informants claimed had taken root in rural areas, so that local people had lost old habits of autonomy and self-reliance; and the reliance of INGOs on the populations they serve. We do not empirically validate these "dependencies" but treat them as discursive constructs with potentially major implications for rural development.