Providing strangers with safety from conflict’s brutal violence is morally and logistically complicated, especially when that violence is inflicted by people’s own governments. The United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross and other global authorities have long debated these conundrums and given new meaning to ‘humanitarian protection’, but in reality people claiming to provide such protection do radically diverse activities and have different ideas about who and how people should be kept safe during conflict.

Despite the expansion of humanitarian protection, the consequence is that people are often not kept safe but are instead left bewildered. People can have very different moral ideas and different fears, not only of physical harm, but also of spiritual, social and cultural harm. Even humanitarian protection itself is partly about protecting humanitarians. As moral schemes are constantly renegotiated, power dynamics can embed hierarchies, including between men and women, as well as patterns of social exclusion.

For over forty years, South Sudan has been a seminal site for testing humanitarian protection ideas, and continues to experience a protracted conflict, including extreme kinds of humanitarian violations. Despite large-scale interventions, South Sudanese have not been safe and millions of people have fled into neighbouring countries, and attempts by South Sudanese public authority figures to keep people safe, such as by chiefs, ‘witchdoctors’, vigilantes, bishops, Pentecostals, Nuer prophets and women leaders, have failed.

Research: The project will explore how people deal with complex moral, logistical, spiritual and intellectual problems in their daily experiences of protection during conflict, and practices of keeping strangers safe. This includes understanding the hidden moral anxieties of national and international humanitarian protection actors as they work in local contexts, and how other actors contest or co-opt these humanitarian ideas and provide different forms of safety.

In particular the research will investigate the following questions:

• How should we understand the complex struggles of South Sudanese to protect and stay safe both in South Sudan and neighbouring countries of displacement?
• What are the hidden moral anxieties of national and international humanitarian protection actors working in local contexts?
• How are different actors able to contest or co-opt humanitarian ideas to provide different forms of safety?
• Humanitarian protection concepts, laws and practice are bewilderingly complicated, morally ambiguous and often contradictory. How do people cope with this bewilderment in their everyday lives?

Building local capacity: The project will bring new ideas to these debates by prioritising research and publication by African early career scholars. The research team will work to increase the capacity of the University of Juba to offer teaching on research in humanitarian protection.

Supporting policymakers and practitioners: The project will ensure the research has a positive impact on humanitarian policy and practice. This will be achieved by working closely with three humanitarian organisations, namely an international organisation (Norwegian Refugee Council) and two South Sudanese organisations (Nile Hope and CARD). The project also includes an advisory board of high-profile international practitioners, and findings will be shared through meetings, policy briefs and events with key decision-makers.

The research will draw on a variety of disciplines including history, anthropology, socio-legal studies, political science, ethnomusicology and heritage studies, tracing the everyday experiences and understandings of protection across different regions. Ethnographic observations will be conducted with practitioner partners, namely the Norwegian Refugee Council and the organisations Nile Hope and CARD, to interrogate how these humanitarians respond to different ideas of protection and negotiate authority in their daily practice, including authority over gender hierarchies.

Researchers will also carry out ethnographic work among other actors who seek to provide safety and dignity, paying attention to their material realities. For example, have shelters been built to preserve people’s dignity? Part of this ethnographic work will include legal ethnographies and observations of chiefs’ courts in providing protection.

Early career South Sudanese researchers will participate in the project’s capacity building. Their experience is pivotal to the methodological approach by drawing on lived experiences of protection, their nuanced cultural and linguistic knowledge, and their potential for new epistemic and empirical insights.

The project will also employ the use of visual and musical anthropological methods to work beyond the narrative approaches of interviews, investigating the aesthetic and symbolic ways in which people understand protection. By building a database of oral and object-based interpretations the research will form the basis for an exhibition on how people seek protection. To compliment this approach, an ethnomusicologist will assist researchers to understand ideas about protection expressed through music and song.

Oral history and archival methods will also be used to explore the evolution of protection since the 1990s and the anxieties in humanitarian protection practice during this period. As well as collecting oral histories from protection actors in South Sudan, researchers will humanitarian archives, including the Norwegian Refugee Council archive, Save The Children archive in Birmingham, and the Sudan Open archive developed by the Rift Valley Institute.

The project will create a wide range of outputs to engage scholars, policymakers, humanitarian practitioners and affected communities in South Sudan and its borderlands. Researchers will publish academic journal articles and blog posts, including from early career scholars in South Sudan, as well as produce aural and visual outputs, such as exhibition, musical pieces and graphic animations.

Articles

Janguan, T., Kirk, T. (2023) Hiding in plain sight: IDP's protection strategies after closing Juba's protection of civilian sites. Global Policy. 

Pendle, N. & Craze, J., (2020). A Fantasy of Finality: The UN Impasse at the Protection of Civilian Sites in South Sudan. African Arguments.