South Sudan is the world’s youngest country. However, almost 15 years after gaining sovereignty in July 2011, it now appears to have achieved a form of second-degree independence. South Sudan, which was not directly colonized and is no longer part of the larger (now war-torn) Sudanese state, has a modern form of governance. Resilience Governance. Resilience often sounds like a good idea, but when international institutions and institutions think they are not resilient, communities risk being constrained by the politics of dependency and international dependence. Because if you lack resilience, you need external guidance. This type of external “resilience support” should not be understood as simply a temporary measure. There is a resilience paradox. The consequence of resilience policymaking is that communities’ ability to cope is weakened while the presence of international institutions continues to expand.
This new form of international institutional resilience governance is managed by resilience “experts” working through a wide range of international NGOs, leveraging funding from donors and national governments. In South Sudan since independence, international organizations have rapidly shifted from purely humanitarian assistance to much more politically and economically long-term resilience programs. This led to funding from the UK. Building resilience through asset creation and improvement (2013-2015 and 2015-2023) and Humanitarian aid and resilience in South Sudan (2015~2021). In addition to a variety of multiple donation programs, including: Partnership for Resilience and Recovery and Reconciliation, Stabilization and Resilience Trust FundEstablishment of NGO-led non-profit organizations, etc. Elastic Exchange Network.
While colonialism operates in a clear and direct way, denying civil and democratic rights, resilience acts (officially) as a strange halfway house where people, communities and governing institutions are treated as if they were equals to Western advisors and empowerers. . – but in practice it is clear that they are considered unable to participate on an equal basis.
Resilience discourses on economic sustainability, rights, civil society, and security all assume that the people of South Sudan are unprepared for access to liberal modes of development and democracy. For example, instead of doing development work, international organizations are more likely to argue that development will fail if communities are not yet “resilient,” or that resilience is a “conceptual bridge between coping and development.” Instead of providing humanitarian assistance or temporary support for security or welfare, aid agencies argue that these policies or resources will not help without the resilience of local communities. Talk to political NGOs that work with political parties. It’s the same too. Clearly people are not really ready to accept democracy. Because there is no “comprehensive contract” in society, civil society must be resilient and parties must focus on technical issues rather than issues that are divisive and risk returning to violence.
There is a clear difference between the resilience imagined by beneficiaries of resilience promotion in the Global South, whose states are subject to resilience policy decisions, and successful Western actors who cope, recover, and are always open to the possibility of adaptation. Resilience building in the Global South operates differently, seeking to deny a sense of self rather than celebrate the neoliberal entrepreneurial self.
Communities are thus seen as not independent, self-determining entities and therefore appear to lack a basis for self-assertion, legitimate voice, and consent in policy-making. This distinction evokes clear parallels with the era of colonialism and racial hierarchies of power and influence. As Denise Ferreira da Silva argues, the distinction between colonizers and colonizers was constructed along these very lines. In this context, the University of Westminster and the University of Coventry have a joint academic networking project (funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK) designed to explore what “decolonization resilience” means through building a network of scholars from the global South. there is. . The project initially involved the exchange of scholars from the University of Ghana, the University of Kigali and the University of Juba. We met for our second workshop in Juba, South Sudan at the end of November this year.
One of the first things that emerges from our work is that resilience seems to be a confusing category. From the perspective of traditional international policy discourse, resilience is difficult to determine. While humanitarian and development discussions assume the independence of beneficiaries, resilience operates under or outside of liberal understandings of equality and universalist understandings of capabilities.
Resilience is difficult to clearly define even in the more specialized policy and academic literature. Some writings use resilience in a more traditional sense to refer to coping and “rebound” modes to maintain coherence and structure. But modern resilience seems to be about “moving forward,” using crises to explore transformative, forward-looking opportunities. However, these debates about resilience, or debates about resilience, risk masking another, far more problematic form of resilience in the Global South. Here, resilience governance is instead giving rise to a problematic stasis known as the resilience paradox. Resilience governance initiatives in the Global South provide little support for “rebound”, arguing that local forms of governance are problematic in terms of gender and age inclusion, while communities appear to lack the self-reliant capacity to “move forward”. . In these cases, focusing on resilience over traditional humanitarian and development assistance approaches is counterproductive and instead keeps communities in a state of stasis.
A USAID project addressing the limits of post-independence governance in South Sudan recognizes that resilience building is self-defeating, but at the same time recognizes that the solution is always more attempts to improve resilience-building interventions. One USAID project claims: “But after decades of dependence on donors, it is difficult to put communities in the driver’s seat. Communities are not used to solving their own problems, and implementing partners are often more comfortable using a top-down approach.” The paradox of resilience work is that external agencies see resilience support as working on preconditions for autonomy rather than acknowledging autonomy. The reason their projects fail may be because resilience “experts” inevitably start by raising problems rather than building local capacity.
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