With the Africa Center at the LSE, I have a paper out on the Security Sector Reform process in South Sudan. If that sounds too dry, then let me say that the paper is really about the fictions of bureaucracy and the silence of power. It’s full of historical ironies and international perversions, ghost soldiers and briefcase rebels, technocratic fantasies and oil economies. It’s about the way the state becomes autonomous from society through petrol-dollars and the humanitarian industry, how the war economy has created new class dynamics of immiseration and displacement, and the way centralisation and fragmentation in South Sudan are not opposites, but processes locked into a deadly spiral.
You can read it here.