Building Resilient Peace in South Sudan

The international understanding of peacebuilding is in a flux. As the liberal vision of building a democratic peace has shown to be overly ambitious, intrusive and top-down, practitioners are now developing more pragmatic and context-bound ways of transforming violent conflict and promoting self-sustainable peace. In this debate, resilience has emerged as a novel and promising approach that works through, mobilizes and energizes existing local resources in the search for peace. Surprisingly, however, the concept of resilience has not yet received much scholarly attention within the field of peace and conflict studies. This project seeks to fill this gap by analyzing the turn to resilience in peacebuilding in conflict-ridden South Sudan. It asks: how are resilience-based approaches transforming peacebuilding practice in South Sudan and what implications does this have for creating a sustainable peace?