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AbstractMany contemporary humanitarian organisations derive their legitimacy from their claims to protect civilians. Yet, what these organisations do in its name includes a diverse and contested range of activities that are often far from what global publics and affected populations understand as constituting protection. As others have argued, this detracts from honest discussions about when and how humanitarians are well placed to keep civilians safe from violence and threats. To begin to address this gap, we review what three well‐known humanitarian organisations publicly say they have done to protect strangers across three violent protracted crises. We capture how they portray their activities, the logics they attribute to them and what is left unsaid. Our findings suggest that humanitarians must, once again, collaborate over a shared protection framework that better signals what others can expect from them. We also identify an emerging convergence around the notion that peer‐to‐peer denunciations, conflict resolution, supporting self‐protection and community protection strategies and improving state‐society relations can be important forms of protection activity. There is, therefore, a need for a public stocktake over what can, cannot, should and should not be done to protect civilians in such contexts.

Global refugee regimes mean that South Sudanese, living in refugee camps in Sudan, can be considered as living on the political margins of the world and effectively denied citizenship. However, South Sudanese in these camps contest this marginalization. They do this, not by simply claiming citizenship of a state, but by challenging the very meaning of citizenship and connecting citizenship to different ideas of political collectivity. This article specifically considers how chiefs' courts' reforms to marriage laws have reshaped ideas of citizenship among South Sudanese in a refugee camp in Sudan. Marriage is particularly potent in its influence on identities and citizenship through its shaping of the legality of reproduction and, therefore, its remaking of political communities at the time and in the future. This article argues that chiefs' courts mediated and contested humanitarian assumptions about citizenship by re-emphasizing kinship as a basis for political communities. This was despite the wars in South Sudan including intra-kin divisions. Such kinship-based political collectivity and citizenship remade the concept of citizenship as trans-territory and not bounded by the nation state. The article also illustrates the courts' role in reshaping social obligations towards, and therefore citizenship of, the dead. The article is based on qualitative interviews and observations of Nuer chiefs' courts in a refugee camp in 2017, 2018, and 2020.

AbstractScholarship prompted by 40 years of mass repatriations has highlighted that repatriations and returns are shaped by social navigation and renegotiation of 'home'. This article argues that the original experience of displacement itself, and the interconnected social rupture or continuity, moderates this negotiation and has consequences for social distinction, class reproduction, and political emplacement as refugees return. Specifically, the article considers the diverse social implications of both refugee camp education and wartime militarization, and the mediation of their social consequences by the specificities of histories of initial displacement. We do this by exploring the first 10 years of socio-political struggles of men born in Southern Sudan in the 1980s who lived in Kakuma Refugee Camp (Kenya) in the 1990s and who returned to Southern Sudan after the 2005 peace agreement. The article contrasts experiences of those who were born in Greater Gogrial and Greater Bor as a way to take account of different histories of displacement.

Scholarship prompted by 40 years of mass repatriations has highlighted that repatriations and returns are shaped by social navigation and renegotiation of 'home'. This article argues that the original experience of displacement itself, and the interconnected social rupture or continuity, moderates this negotiation and has consequences for social distinction, class reproduction, and political emplacement as refugees return. Specifically, the article considers the diverse social implications of both refugee camp education and wartime militarization, and the mediation of their social consequences by the specificities of histories of initial displacement. We do this by exploring the first 10 years of socio-political struggles of men born in Southern Sudan in the 1980s who lived in Kakuma Refugee Camp (Kenya) in the 1990s and who returned to Southern Sudan after the 2005 peace agreement. The article contrasts experiences of those who were born in Greater Gogrial and Greater Bor as a way to take account of different histories of displacement.

Contemporary South Sudanese Nuer prophets play powerful roles in interpreting the moral limits of lethal violence and weighing the legitimacy claims of rival government leaders. Their activities remain largely invisible to external observers investigating the making and unmaking of fragile states. Focusing on South Sudan's tumultuous 2005–14 period, we reveal these hidden dynamics through analysis of the two most-powerful living western Nuer prophets. Gatdeang Dit, a male prophet of the divinity Deng, rejects all forms of violent aggression and fosters relations of peace and intermarriage with Dinka neighbors. Nyachol, a female prophet of Maani, inspires thousands of armed Nuer youth to retaliate against Dinka cattle raiders and other external threats while insisting on purification for Nuer–Nuer homicides. Despite their differences, both prophets invoke God's superior powers to push back against the simplified, secularized, and objectified forms of violence glorified by rival government elites. [prophecy, government, violence, legitimacy, uncertainty, Nuer, South Sudan]

AbstractProtection is not simply something done or delivered to people by states, humanitarian organisations and armed peacekeepers. Instead, a growing literature has begun to examine the self‐protection strategies of people and communities in protracted violent crises. Its authors suggest that nuanced understandings of how people retain a measure of agency in the face of violence is an important first step for those seeking to reduce their levels of threat and vulnerability. We use interview data from communities in Bor and Ler, South Sudan, long affected by conflict, to show how attention to the relationship between public authority and the safety of strangers can reveal the skills, resources and conditions under which protection is successfully provided. This also helps to re‐root 'protection' in local vernaculars that more closely resemble its everyday use among South Sudanese and offers entry points for humanitarian interventions with more realistic prospects of positive outcomes for communities sceptical of humanitarians' broken promises to protect.