Civil War on a Shoestring: Rebellion in South Sudan’s Equatoria Region

Abstract

This article is a case study of armed opposition factions in the Central Equatoria region within South Sudan’s current civil war. Based on research in South Sudan and northern Uganda during the spring of 2017, the study focuses on the internal organisation, recruitment and funding processes, and political ideas of these organisations, engaging with recent theories concerning governance and civilians in rebel-controlled territories. It argues that rebels and civilians are not separate analytical categories, and that the region’s new wartime orders are embedded in common local knowledge drawn from historical practice.

Notes on Contributors

Nicki Kindersley is the Harry F. Guggenheim research fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge University, specialising in political and intellectual histories of civil war and displacement in the South Sudan region. She is an honorary research fellow and member of the Centre for Law and Global Justice, School of Politics and Law, Cardiff University.

Øystein H. Rolandsen is a senior researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, specialising in the history and politics of civil wars, borderlands, counter-insurgency and peace interventions

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This work was supported by the Carnegie Foundation and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs [grant number QZA-16/0273] ‘Enhancing South-South Cooperation’; and by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs [grant number 0078A/2395], ‘Politisk-økonomiske analyser av fokusland for norsk bistand – og utviklingspolitikk: Sør-Sudan’.

Notes

1. For convenience, we refer here to the former Central Equatoria state area, rather than the multiple new states created in the region in December 2015.