Around the world, armed conflict is increasingly occurring in capital cities and governments are relying on pro-government, rurally recruited, militia to suppress anti-government political violence. Pendle and Maror draw lessons from South Sudan where recruits from rural areas were brought to Juba to help defend the government. Drawing on ethnographic observations and qualitative interviews with combatants, this article uses “rural radicalism” to argue that patterns of violence by these rurally recruited forces were shaped by histories of rural violence over previous decades and can be read to include a political objective that challenges the inequities in safety and security between rural areas and the capital city.

Post-cessation nationhood in South Sudan presented a paradoxical situation: a country united during struggle is fragmented after independence. Among the triggers for this scenario was the death of Dr John Garang de Mabior—the country’s founding father. This article is a multidisciplinary semiotic critique of Akuol de Mabior’s film, No Simple Way Home (2023), against the history of South Sudanese nationhood. Without claiming a political scientific analysis, the author proposes that South Sudan’s crisis of nationhood is symptomatic of a quest for a unifying icon. He theorizes the protagonist’s quintessence of motherhood as a semiotic gesture of her de jure iconicity of unified nationhood.

This piece recounts the efforts by NGO Sign of Hope (SoH) to rectify human rights violations in South Sudan, which manifested themselves as drinking water pollution by the oil industry. Committed to exposing and remediating this water contamination, SoH was able to prompt the automobile company Daimler’s CSR to engage in extended dialogue with the oil industry stakeholders in Unity State. Despite a tactful use of various methods ranging from cooperation to confrontation, SoH’s campaign did not lead the oil producers to reverse the harm inflicted on the people of Unity State. When SoH tried to hold these companies accountable, SoH had the impression that it was hitting an elastic wall. This piece identifies lessons which may help to counter corporate human rights violations and compensate for the weakness of CSR in fragile states and in the face of corporate irresponsibility.

Many countries write their constitutions with some form of international involvement. Internationalized constitutional assistance has been made easier by technology as well as trade and political exigencies. The question, therefore, is: How does this inevitable foreign influence impact constitutional legitimacy? This article discusses this question and asserts that foreign influence interacts with three approaches of constitutional design to shape constitutional legitimacy: (a) popular participation, (b) elites’ contracts, and (c) transnational constitutional implants. Such a transactional relationship is referred to as the “three-stone legitimacy theory”, which implicates both the internal and the external legitimacy of a constitution. The former means citizens’ acceptance that a constitution meets their aspirations, while the latter refers to the international community's satisfaction with the resulting constitution as guaranteeing the universal democratic ethos. The article ends with a proposition conceptualized as a “blueprint” for a democratic constitutional legitimacy in South Sudan.

The article examines how to address the report of the African Union Commission of Inquiry on South Sudan, which accuses the Government of South Sudan and the rebels of committing “crimes against humanity” and violating “international humanitarian law” in the war of December 2013. The Commission recommends “an Africa-led, Africa-owned, Africa-resourced legal mechanism, under the aegis of the African Union and with support from the United Nations, to bring those with the greatest responsibility at the highest level to accountability” in a court. Second, the Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in the Republic of South Sudan asked for establishing a hybrid court in South Sudan to investigate and prosecute the perpetrators of “genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes”. The Cabinet of South Sudan approved, in its resolution on 29 January 2021, the establishment of the court. On the other hand, the Government of South Sudan rejected accountability for the perpetrators of international crimes in its resolution at the Transition Justice Conference and recommended “amnesty” for those admitting the commission of international crimes in Juba, Malakal, Bor and Bentiu. The research findings show that amnesty threatens peace and security because customary law rejects amnesty. Its implementation generates systematic vengeance from the clan of those killed. The research recommends the establishment of a hybrid court that adopts the complementarity principle in compatibility with the African customary law of blood compensation. The authoritative national criminal courts in South Sudan omit capital punishment on the grounds that (a) killer(s) pay(s) blood compensation, apok or cot, to the survivors of (a) killed person(s) with 51 cattle. The payment changes the penalties of life imprisonment, which international criminal law imposes on the perpetrators of international crimes and the death penalty, which African criminal law imposes on the confirmed killer(s). Finally, the tribunal imposes 10-year terms of imprisonment on the confirmed perpetrators of international crimes.

This article explores radio broadcasting and monitoring by and about Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) leader John Garang during Sudan's second civil war, focusing on the core period of Radio SPLA broadcasting (1984–91). Through oral history, memoirs, and international monitoring reports, the article analyzes radio conversations between Garang and his critics — northern Sudanese, southern Sudanese, and international — to argue that radio battles directly shaped the struggle for political authority between Garang and the Sudanese government, and within the SPLM/A elite. Radio allowed Garang to speak to a dispersed audience within and beyond Sudan, presenting an alternative history of Sudan, publicizing his vision of a New Sudan, and asserting his pseudo-sovereign control of SPLM/A-held territory. However, Radio SPLA did not exist in a vacuum; Garang's rivals responded on government and international radio to criticize his leadership in targeted, personal terms. Radio thus powerfully mediated between personal, national, and international politics during the SPLM/A's liberation struggle.

Disability inclusion has become a crucial issue for humanitarian action, at least at the international policy level. However, little is known about how humanitarian actors are “doing inclusion” in practice. With a case study on South Sudan, this article examines whether the increase in publications, policy tools and guidelines has made humanitarian action more inclusive for persons with disabilities, and how stakeholders can overcome persisting barriers for persons with disabilities. The article demonstrates noticeable progress in data collection, capacity-building, the removal of barriers and meaningful participation, but humanitarians still lack the skills, confidence and resources to address many persisting barriers. To advance inclusion, donors and humanitarian organizations must invest more time and resources in capacity-building and coordination.

This paper explores China's mode of medical intervention in South Sudan and compares it with the medical humanitarianism and global health imaginaries and modes of intervention that characterize the activities of the wider international community, especially NGOs and faith-based organizations. In their provision of medical aid to South Sudan, organizations of the international community largely draw on a discourse of suffering and a framework of emergency response to humanitarian crises in post-conflict settings, which often translates into vertical programmes which involve direct governance of the South Sudanese population. In contrast, China's contemporary medical interventions in South Sudan are a mixture of health diplomacy, health infrastructure and development aid, an assemblage which can be understood as a “non-suffering” model of care and a loosely defined apparatus of biopolitics. However, the obvious gap between national goals and the daily experiences of individual Chinese doctors suggests that this will be an uneven process of “becoming.”

The civilian-combatant frame persists as the main legal lens through which lawyers organize the relationships of conflict zone actors. As a result, little attention has been paid in international legal scholarship to different gradations of ‘civilianness’ and the ways in which some civilians might compete to distinguish themselves from each other. Drawing attention to international humanitarian actors – particularly those working for NGOs – this article explores the micro-strategies these actors engage in to negotiate their relative status in war. Original qualitative empirical findings from South Sudan illuminate the way in which humanitarians struggle over distinction with individuals working for the UN peacekeeping mission, UNMISS. As is shown, humanitarian actors are doing away with a static civilian-combatant binary in their daily practice. A more fluid logic informs both their self-conceptualization and their interactions with others who share the operational space. Humanitarian actors envision civilianness as a contingent concept, and they operate according to a continuum along which everything is a matter of degree and subtle gradation. As civilianness is detached from the civilian, any given actor might acquire or shed civilian-like, or combatant-like, characteristics at any moment. The distinction practices that humanitarian actors enact can be understood as a bid for legibility, so that they might be rendered intelligible in international law and in the eyes of other actors as a special kind of civilian – the ‘civilian plus’.