Governance vacuums and local responses in Pajok, South Sudan: the Pajok Community People’s Committee

Although the personal and political conflicts currently eviscerating the SPLA continue to play out largely in terms of increasingly extreme ethno-communal violence in the northeast part of the world’s newest nation, the most obvious and violent effects of this dispute are yet to reach many of the communities living in the country’s south and west. Pajok Payam is one such place, where the fires that have burnt continuously here throughout the late November to early March dry period were not started by warfare but rather as part of the annual cultivation cycle, the dominant focus of life in this remote area of Eastern Equatoria State.