Current Projects

Women, Water and Peace: The Politics of Survival along the River Nile

Project Concept Summary:

This multi-sited project investigates women’s roles in local peacebuilding processes and natural resource governance along the River Nile. It draws on a combination of ethnographic fieldwork and legal analysis conducted in Egypt, South Sudan, Ethiopia and Uganda (Sudan may be added at a later time).

Legal analysis is informed by the theory of legal pluralism and incorporates attention to international human rights, regional and domestic frameworks as well as local customary law and traditional conflict resolution mechanisms.

The Participatory Action Research component of the project seeks to build women’s capacity to participate more effectively in local planning and decision-making bodies that govern access to and use of water and other natural resources in ways that contribute to conflict management/prevention.

I Am Tired of War: Youth Peacebuilders, Environmental Activists & the Green Path to Reconciliation in South Sudan

Project Concept Summary:

This ongoing study investigates South Sudanese youth’s political engagement throughout their country’s tumultuous episodes of protracted civil war, massive forced displacement, brief interim peace and post-independence state/nation-building, and renewed violent conflict.

The current focus is on youth’s complex roles as “green peacebuilders” involved in the  management of natural resources and environmental protection as a path to “transformative reconciliation”;  inter- generational differences are examined alongside gender, ethnicity, religion, displacement status, and other intersections of power.  

Structured as a modular sequence of independent but related projects, with each subsequent stage building upon previous analyses, the overall study employs an ethnographic and mixed method exploratory sequential design (QUAL, QUAN, PAR), informed by multiple conceptual frameworks depending on the segment – e.g. environmental security; political ecology; grounded theory; human rights approaches; legal pluralism; transitional justice; feminist analysis, phenomenology. A large number of publications document the findings from completed components of the study (see Publications tab).