Governing People's Safety in Areas of Extremely Limited Statehood: South Sudan and the Central African Republic

The project investigates the effectiveness (differentiated in output, outcome and impact) of security provision in areas of limited statehood. It asks the following questions: • What are the success factors of effective security provision on the local level (in situations of extreme state weakness)? • What is the role of specific context conditions like ethnic homogeneity (resulting in social capital), spatial distance to the country’s capital and presence/absence of external actors (particularly peacekeepers)? • What kind of policy implications can be drawn from strong local variance in countries invariably characterised as extremely weak? This project combines a case study approach with subnational comparative analysis. Research is based on qualitative methods of empirical enquiry, including techniques used by political anthropologists and political scientists. Six local arenas of (effective and ineffective)production in two countries (CAR, South Sudan) were selected in order to test our hypotheses pertaining to institutionalised actor constellations, absence/presence of international actors, social capital/ethnic homogeneity, socio-spatial distance to capital and national policies. After desk studies (focusing on the last item) intense fieldwork has started in all six arenas, where focus group discussions and non-participatory observation will be conducted by the research team; potentially a reduction to four sites will be administered. Research assistants maintain ‘event logs’ on security relevant events and developments over the entire project duration, expert interviews will be conducted in the two capitals.