Marilyn Ossome 2008. Southern Sudanese children between socialization in Kenya and reintegration in Sudan.

AbuBaker, Hwiada

Marilyn Ossome 2008. Southern Sudanese children between socialization in Kenya and reintegration in Sudan. Supervised by Abdel Ghaffar Ahmed

This thesis addresses the ways in which the Sudan conflict has affected children, focusing on how social, political and economic institutions responded to the needs of children affected by the war. The first section of the thesis introduces the main themes under which children and conflict have been traditionally studied examining children's involvement in military activity and recent changes in warfare that have magnified the extent and intensity of children's participation and response to combat. It adopts a gender perspective in the analysis of these impacts, critically examining the form and content of differential impacts of armed conflict on children on the basis of gender. The thesis incorporates findings from filed researches done in Kakuma refugee camp in Juba and Malakal in Southern Sudan. The researcher gathered data from five main groups of respondents namely: National nongovernmental organizations, international nongovernmental organizations, government bodies, religious organizations and individuals (parents/ guardians, community leaders and aid agency workers). Arguing from a perspective of cultural relativism, the thesis provides a detailed account of child protection issues in kakuma refugee camp. The ongoing process of repatriation is also a key theme, with its imperatives gleaned from comparisons between the social and economic conditions of children in Southern Sudan and in Kakuma camp. It is also challenging the notions of 'child soldiers' and the 'lost boys', problematizing these labels as antithetic to child protection. The final section is a discussion of the findings, again providing a gender-disaggregated analysis of the ways in which Southern Sudanese children have been affected by refugee life due to conflict. It concludes that there is a need to develop 'pull' factors for return to southern Sudan concomitant with those available to children at Kakuma camp. The researcher discounts gender as being a major determinant of children's access to education, but concludes that armed conflict exacerbates already fragile gender relations in refugee camps. A lack of prioritization of the issues of children by the government is also found to be likely to impede the effective reintegration of children back into post-conflict Sudan, much more so than any discrimination based on gender or other social categories.