Almost two years after the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, the country faces multiple overlapping crises and growing humanitarian needs. The Taliban government has attempted to monitor and control small arms at the national level, however, much of the day-to-day running of affairs is left to the local officials both for political reasons and capacity issues.
A reshuffle of Jonglei’s state government is underway, precipitated by the out-going leadership’s inability to quell chronic armed violence and raiding in the state.. While the current rainy season will prevent large-scale raiding in the coming months, attacks on humanitarian convoys and low-level raiding continue, with women and children abducted.
Upper Nile is on the precipice of renewed armed conflict. After a lull in violence in the past two months, armed groups are mobilizing for possible confrontation as Johnson Olonyi’s Agwelek forces reposition themselves near key ports on the White Nile, and SPLA-IO and Nuer White Army forces mobilize youth in northern Jonglei and southern Upper Nile.
In Warrap state, home to South Sudanese President Salva Kiir and much of the country's political and military elite, many hoped that the signing of a peace agreement in 2018 would bring an end to the violence that had scarred their country for the previous five years. Instead, in Warrap, violence intensified, and pitted communities against each other in increasingly brutal tit-for-tat attacks that targeted women, children, homes, and the very capacities of communities to sustain life. At the war's end, everything became war.
'In January 2022, in a bid to stem a tide of violent attacks and kidnappings in north-western Nigeria, the government labelled the armed groups involved in the violence as "terrorists". The relationship between these groups and the internationally designated terrorist groups Boko Haram and Islamic State in West Africa Province in north-eastern Nigeria was unclear. But the decision illustrated growing concern that violent extremism might spread to the country's north-west. It also raised questions about the types of measures that were needed to prevent escalation of violence...'
Upper Nile is in chaos. A once durable alliance between the national government in Juba and the Padang Dinka in Malakal has given way to a much more uncertain situation, in which the regime of South Sudanese President Salva Kiir sets feuding elites against each other. Disorder has proved an effective tool of rule.
The Sahel is home to a number of marginalized borderlands—such as Libya’s southern border region—characterized by the movement and activities of various armed groups, the absence of strong state institutions, and the prevalence of disparaged communities. Potentially, the combination of these factors makes the subregion more exposed to risk and individuals raised in such borderlands can be especially vulnerable to recruitment by violent extremist groups.
The archive of the Human Security Baseline Assessment (HSBA) for Sudan and South Sudan project is a set of pages centralizing older updates and versions of HSBA documents and publications from the former HSBA website. All documents in the archive include a time stamp with the respective date of publication and are listed in chronological order. The archive is divided into the following categories:
Weapons and ammunition management is a key consideration for any security provider handling arms.
The increasingly sophisticated arsenals of guided light weapons held by non-state actors pose an international security threat. These include man-portable air defence systems (MANPADS) and anti-tank guided weapons (ATGWs)—systems operable by a single user or a small crew, where the weapons’ missiles are either manually targeted or self-guided after launch. Such systems have been used by armed groups to attack commercial airlines, military aircraft, and governmental targets, as well as to degrade military and peacekeeping operations.