*Originally published in 2024 and preserved as part of our archive project.Get E-International Relations delivered to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support our work.

South Sudan is the world’s newest country. Yet nearly one-and-a-half decades after gaining sovereign statehood in July 2011 it appears to have a second-class form of independence. Not under direct colonial control and no longer part of the larger (currently war-torn) state of Sudan, South Sudan has a contemporary form of rule: resilience governance. Resilience often sounds like a nice idea but when international agencies and institutions think that resilience is poor, communities risk being constrained by a politics of subordination and international dependency. This is because lacking resilience means you require external tutelage.  This type of external “resilience support” should not be understood as a merely temporary set of measures. There is a resilience paradox: the consequence of resilience policymaking is that community coping capacities are undermined while the international agency presence continues to expand.

This new form of international institutional resilience governance is managed by resilience “experts” who work through a wide range of international NGOs, fed on the funds of donors and national governments. In post-independence South Sudan, international agencies rapidly shifted away from purely humanitarian aid to much more politically and economically long-term resilience programming. This resulted in the UK-funded Building Resilience through Asset Creation and Enhancement (2013–2015 and 2015–2023) and Humanitarian Assistance and Resilience in South Sudan (2015–2021). In addition to a host of multi-donor programmes, such as the Partnership........

© E-International