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Purpose – This chapter examines Talisman Energy's operations in the Sudan, as part of the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company (GNPOC). It seeks to demonstrate that international corporate culture precludes ethical decision-making and practices by placing would-be ethical actors in untenable situations.

Methodology/approach – A case study approach is adopted. It analyses various lawsuits brought against Talisman by the Presbyterian Church of Sudan, who claim that Talisman aided and abetted the government of Sudan in genocide during the various protracted conflicts of a violent civil war.

Findings – By reviewing Talisman's corporate social responsibility reports, we find that locating corporate charters in the hands of nation-states entails an inherent tension that can only be resolved by either implementing an international corporate charter in the case of multinationals, or abandoning the corporate charter altogether

Practical implications – We argue for immediate application of the International Criminal Court in The Hague against corporate enablers of government violence against its peoples.

Originality/value – In the case of Talisman in the Sudan, international corporate culture and lack of support from its operating partners did more than discourage Talisman from implementing ethical practices; it prevented Talisman from acting ethically. In particular, it prevented Talisman from using the economic importance of GNPOC to the government of Sudan to disallow the government from using Talisman's infrastructure or oil revenues in military campaigns against the peoples of Sudan.

In 2019, a popular revolution toppled Sudan's long-term military president, Umar al-Bashir. The country then entered a three-year transition toward democratic rule during which power was shared between Sudan's military and civilian political organizations. In this period, international organizations and foreign governments were quick to proclaim their support for Sudan's democratic transition. However, policy reforms during Sudan's transition went beyond changes to formal political institutions, as the transitional government implemented major programs of economic restructuring. These restructurings were supported by Sudan's international partners, who normalized a discourse that Sudan was “overindebted,” and who held that political and economic reforms ought naturally to accompany each other. As a result, the transitional government implemented a shock program of liberalization and austerity that imposed material hardship on much of Sudanese society, including during a global recession resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. This contributed to endangering the transition itself and the progressive promises of Sudan's 2019 revolution.

This chapter traces the history of how Sudan was excluded from Western financial and commercial markets through the imposition of sanctions in the 1990s. This caused Sudan to explore non-Western sources of external financing in East Asia and the Arabian Gulf. This history then shapes the contested ways in which Sudan's debts are counted by international institutions to create the misleading impression that the country is overindebted. Finally, the chapter examines how different elites coalesced to impose a program of shock fiscal austerity and economic liberalization during a crucial political moment, which helped to imperil the country's fragile political transition.

This chapter explores how marginalized youth, specifically former child soldiers in South Sudan, struggle to access education that is crucial in their reintegration process. The chapter draws upon data from a study focusing on the reintegration process of school boys formerly associated with armed forces and groups in South Sudan, and is based on ethnographic fieldwork including interviews and observations of 20 former child soldiers in Malakal, Upper Nile State. The study identifies a number of external factors that inhibit educational opportunities for the boys in their reintegration process. These are their life experiences, the impacts of war, their socioeconomic background and the lack of educational structures due to ongoing conflict. This study describes how the living conditions that motivated the boys to join the armed group are still present after their demobilization. Thus, they not only still find themselves in poverty but the time spent in the armed group and the impacts of war have put them in an even more marginalized position today than prior to their recruitment. The study argues that access to education is crucial in order to prevent recruitment and also re-recruitment to armed groups.

We consider the challenges to education in South Sudan by utilizing a national random sample of South Sudanese (provided by the BBC Media Action) and then semi-structured interviews with eight education service providers (SPs). We find that the conflicts have large impacts on educational opportunities. States that experience greater conflict also experience greater poverty. Under such conditions, children are important for providing resources for the family and education can become secondary. In these conflict areas, respondents are more likely to agree that education is more important for boys than for girls. SPs detail the large number of obstacles to delivering education. Displacement and fleeing danger creates problems with hunger, illness, and safety. SPs discuss the variability of resources, the scarcity of schools and teachers, and the uncertainty of life in South Sudan. They also discuss triumphs they have experienced and suggest changes or interventions that could increase educational opportunities.

The initiative featured here constructs a partnership between a refugee community with roots in South Sudan and the United States largest university writing program in an international resettlement city. The initiative positions inquiry, as a premise for authentic learning, in public as a participatory practice; it approaches difference as a resource for joint problem solving. Here, inquiry is something both public-workers-in-training and adult refugee learners do together – with one another and a host of other stakeholders with vested interests in the capacity of public institutions in order to become more responsive to diverse constituents resettling in Phoenix, Arizona, under conditions of forced migration. The research is presented across four phases. In counterpoint to the prevailing narrative of South Sudanese as a people “in need,” the culmination of the chapter presents interviews with citizens across South Sudan. These interviews bear witness to communities’ self-determination that instead casts education not only as their responsibility, but also their desire—one to which they have historically committed significant resources. In this fourth phase, findings with community members in South Sudan are put in conversation with the previous three phases wherein South Sudanese refugees tell of their encounters with credentialing institutions in Phoenix.

The conflict in Darfur reached crisis proportions in 2003 when rebel groups began to attack Government of Sudan forces. These attacks were motivated by years of neglect by the government and by political polarization of the area. Despite ceasefires and peace talks, the violence continues in 2018. This essay examined the crisis in Darfur from the perspective of social structure. Three social structures were identified: global climate change, race, and gender. Although there are significant complexities associated with these three social structures, possible paths to agency for the people of Darfur are discussed.

A personal narrative of my escape with my mother and siblings from South Sudan as refugees is presented. The narrative then chronicles the time in Egypt applying for refugee status and eventual resettlement in the United States. In the United States, resettlement began in Newark, New Jersey. I then document my move from Newark to San Diego, California to, eventually, New York City. In New York my life as a model, DJ, actress, and founder of Stand for Education is narrated.

Purpose – This chapter shows how professional women from diverse geographic locations claim belonging in the public sphere by using motherhood as an important strategy for negotiating gendered and classed spaces of belonging while constructing moral agency and proper citizenship as women.

Methodology/Approach – During anthropological research in Sudan and Mexico, the biographic narratives of two women, both key informants in larger, long-term ethnographic projects, were obtained by each researcher by engaging in a process of intersubjective knowledge production. These were analysed using the method of context analysis for dialogically constructed ‘narrations of the nation’.

Findings – The trope of moral motherhood works in widely differing national contexts as a means for women to claim a position in a public space and at the same time to negotiate the boundaries between private and public domains. Invoking this trope enables professional women to forge public belonging and to participate in politics, while still safeguarding their femininity and their decency.

Originality – This chapter demonstrates that national discourses about motherhood can be instrumental in creating a sense of civic belonging for professional women in two nation-states with widely diverse (post)colonial histories. Comparing narratives of belonging from such different national contexts can provide insight into belonging as an intrinsic part of identity constructions in paternalistic states. Both narratives show similarities in the way that motherhood constitutes a trope for active female citizenship whereby women actively claim public spaces and contest dominant discourses, which in the process de-essentializes motherhood.

This chapter explores how the dynamics of cross-border conflicts relate to the characteristics of the states involved. The underlying idea is that cross-border conflicts will develop in different ways and involve different sets of actors depending on the relative strengths and other characteristics of the states separated by the border. This proposition is investigated through a comparison of the conflict dynamics across three of Ethiopia's borders. These borders differ in terms of the relative strength of the two states they separate in each case, as well as on the kind of state presence found in the borderlands. Thus, the border between Eritrea and Ethiopia can be said to have a strong state presence on both sides; between Somalia and Ethiopia the state is considerably stronger on the Ethiopian side; while the border between Ethiopia and Sudan has a weak state presence on both sides. The conflict dynamics across the border with Eritrea have tended to be of a ‘classic’ bipolar and interstate kind, while the border with Sudan has seen a much more complex and ‘anarchic’ conflict pattern, involving a complex array of both non-state and state actors. The Somalia border falls somewhere in between, with a complex set of actors and conflicts, yet subject to an overall structuring along one dimension. These differences are argued to be congruent with the relative strength of state presence in these borderlands. The main value of the chapter may lie in its approach to the theme of African borders, and in the relativistic way in which it conceptualizes state strength.

Refugee can refer to movements of large groups of displaced people, who could be either internally displaced persons or other migrants. According to UN High Commissioner Report for refugees (2017), 65.6 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide because of persecution, conflict, violence or human rights violation alone. Now we are witnessing a massive shift of humanity unlike any seen before. A huge population around the world, which is equivalent to the entire population of the UK, is displaced from their homes. More than 23 million of them are from five places: Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, the Lake Chad Basin and Somalia. And the astonishing figures are 11.5 million people in five years between 2011 and 2016 in Syria, 4 million displaced from 2013 in South Sudan, 3.8 million in Afghanistan, 2.3 million in Africa's Lake Chad basin and 1.6 million in Somalia. All of the above have the reasons either being unemployment, insecurity and political instability or civil war or droughtlike phenomena, all of which can be summarized as economic crisis. Most of the time, we do our research on the subject about the wake of the crisis, but nobody do the prefacing matter analysis. This chapter is mainly based on the secondary data of the World Bank and the UNHCR and various governments' official data. In this chapter, we are trying to identify the major parameters responsible for refugee generation and also we are analyzing the cause of these phenomena, whereas no research has been done yet about the era prefacing that crisis.