Commentary on Cyclical youth-led conflict as an early warning indicator

Abstract

South Sudan’s second civil war (1983-2005) was conventionally and consistently portrayed in the western media as pitting the African, mainly Christian and animist, South against the Arab, Muslim North. And yet on any given day, fighting within the territory of what is now South Sudan was in those years typically more about cattle, women, and/or the resolution of longstanding local feuds between villages, clans, and ethnicities.