Please join the conversation with Prof. Jana Krause
In many contemporary conflict zones, UN agencies and donors coordinate multi-sectoral resilience-building interventions — South Sudan being a prominent case. Under this umbrella, NGOs implement social cohesion programs aimed at strengthening inter-group relations and preventing local violence. This article analyzes the impact and unintended consequences of one such program in Jonglei State, among the areas most severely affected by South Sudan's civil war (2013–2018) and by large-scale communal violence. Drawing on repeated fieldwork conducted between 2017 and 2023, I show how the program fostered social cohesion between two ethnic groups that had fought on opposite sides of the war — while ultimately enabling their joint violence against a third group. I argue that social cohesion building is not a neutral technical exercise but a politically charged intervention, one as capable of facilitating violence as of preventing it. The presentation further opens discussion on the value, challenges, dilemmas and limitations of conducting fieldwork in active conflict zones amidst severe humanitarian crises.
About the spaker:
Jana Krause is Professor of Political Science at the University of Oslo. Her research spans communal violence and civil war, peacebuilding and social resilience; gender, peace, and security; and the politics of peace processes. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in Indonesia and Nigeria, and more recently in Myanmar, Kenya, and South Sudan. She is PI of the ERC-funded project ResilienceBuilding: Social Resilience, Gendered Dynamics, and Local Peace in Protracted Conflicts. Krause is the author of Resilient Communities (CUP, 2018) and co-editor of Civilian Protective Agency in Violent Settings (OUP, 2023). She holds a PhD from the Graduate Institute Geneva and was previously Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam. She held visiting positions at Yale University, King's College London, and the Hertie School Berlin.
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