The (self) protection of civilians in South Sudan: Popular and community justice practices (with Rebecca Sutton)

About this event

Individuals and communities find innovative ways to protect themselves and survive war. A burgeoning research field on civilian self-protection (CSP) has developed to study this phenomenon. While this scholarship has produced significant new insights, we argue that CSP has been conceptualized in a narrow manner that fails to capture the range of harms that civilians experience as well as their responses to such harms. Using the case study of the Protection of Civilians (PoC) sites in South Sudan and adopting a subjective ontology, we identify one type of protective response neglected in the literature: community and popular justice. By conceiving of justice in this way, we aim to deepen understanding of civilian agency and start a conversation with scholars and practitioners about the boundaries of (self) protection.

Emily Paddon Rhoads is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Swarthmore College. Her research focuses on civilian agency and protection in armed conflict; humanitarianism and peacekeeping; and international organizations, in particular the United Nations, and norm dynamics. She has conducted grounded research in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan, Central African Republic, and Iraq. She is the author of Taking Sides in Peacekeeping: Impartiality and the Future of the United Nations (Oxford University Press 2016) and articles on civilian protection, humanitarianism and peacekeeping. She is an elected fellow of the Rift Valley Institute and a former Trudeau Scholar at the University of Oxford.

**Please note that the presentation is based on a co-authored recently published paper.

Citation: Rhoads, E. P., & Sutton, R. (2020). The (self) protection of civilians in South Sudan: Popular and community justice practices. African Affairs, 119(476), 370-394.