Like most post conflict societies, South Sudan faces a set of challenges including having to deal with high levels of insecurity. After more than 20 years of war, the new country is still fighting battles with renegade soldiers who broke ranks with the ruling SPLM and disarming
different elements that are a by-product of the protracted conflict. But there is another cause of insecurity that has roots in the social-economic constructs of a deeply cultural society. Many young men have access to guns and are using them in cattle raids across the country. The young cattle raiders seek for cows in order to pay for their dowry. Marc Sommers who spent time researching this phenomenon says that there is an increasing inability by South Sudanese youth to meet rising dowry (bride price). This has led to many of them enlisting in militias to carry out cattle raids. Here is our chat below.
Marc Sommers is a 2011−12 fellow with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a visiting researcher with Boston University's African Studies Center. He is the author of Islands of Education: Schooling, Civil War and the Southern Sudanese (1983−2004), as well as Stuck: Rwandan Youth and the Struggle for Adulthood. Sommers is a former Jennings-Randolph Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace.
