John Prendergast at Duke University

John Prendergast returns to Duke for a discussion on “How the World’s Newest Country Went Awry: Oil, Corruption, and South Sudan’s Senseless War.”

War has been hell for South Sudan’s people, but it has been very lucrative for the country’s leaders and commercial collaborators, South Sudan’s war profiteers. Perhaps two and a half to three million people have perished as a result of three wars in the last 60 years. South Sudan’s history of conflict and mass atrocities driven by unchecked greed. Ethnicity has been used as the main mobilizer for organized violence. The ultimate prize is control of a kleptocratic, winner-take-all state whose institutions have been hijacked by officials and their commercial collaborators for the purposes of self-enrichment and brutal repression of dissent. Corruption isn’t an anomaly within the system; it becomes the system itself, the very purpose of the state.

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