{"id":20218,"date":"2017-10-25T18:04:47","date_gmt":"2017-10-25T18:04:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jww.org\/?p=20218"},"modified":"2017-10-25T18:04:47","modified_gmt":"2017-10-25T18:04:47","slug":"south-sudans-youth-perpetrators-peacebuilders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jww.org\/site\/south-sudans-youth-perpetrators-peacebuilders\/","title":{"rendered":"South Sudan\u2019s youth: perpetrators or peacebuilders?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Below is an excerpt from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.irinnews.org\/opinion\/2017\/10\/25\/south-sudan-s-youth-perpetrators-or-peacebuilders\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">an op-ed by Mike Brand just published by IRIN:<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<p>\u201cThere are no opportunities for youth here,\u201d said Yar, a 20-year-old South Sudanese refugee from Jonglei, stuck in the Nyumanzi refugee settlement in northern Uganda.<\/p>\n<p>Her words were echoed in conversations I had throughout my two-week visit to the settlements.<\/p>\n<p>Since war broke out in South Sudan in December 2013, approximately four million people, one third of the fledgling nation\u2019s population, have been forced to flee their homes.<\/p>\n<p>Today, half of those who\u2019ve fled are living as internally displaced persons in South Sudan, and the other half have become refugees in neighbouring countries, especially Uganda.<\/p>\n<p>Uganda now hosts more than one million South Sudanese refugees and more cross the border every day, fleeing violence, insecurity, and drastic food shortages in their native country.<\/p>\n<p>Yar arrived in Uganda in 2014. She lost most of her family in the war and is now living alone in the refugee settlement, without much hope for the future.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThere is no opportunity for youth to study in secondary school or to get jobs,\u201d she told me. \u201cYoung people are just sitting around doing nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The issue of youth idleness was a recurring theme in nearly all my conversations: with refugees, NGO representatives, the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, and the Office of the Prime Minister, or OPM, which coordinates the refugee response in Uganda.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Approximately 61 percent of the South Sudanese refugee population in Uganda is under the age of 18.&nbsp; With no signs of South Sudan\u2019s ethnically driven civil war ending anytime soon, some refugees could be displaced for 10 to 20 years, or more.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.irinnews.org\/opinion\/2017\/10\/25\/south-sudan-s-youth-perpetrators-or-peacebuilders\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Read the full article on IRIN &gt;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Below is an excerpt from an op-ed by Mike Brand just published by IRIN: \u201cThere are no opportunities for youth here,\u201d said Yar, a 20-year-old South Sudanese refugee from Jonglei, stuck in the Nyumanzi refugee settlement in northern Uganda. Her words were echoed in conversations I had throughout my two-week visit to the settlements. Since&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":20219,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[176,188,272],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-news-features","category-south-sudan","category-176","category-188","category-272","description-off"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jww.org\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jww.org\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jww.org\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jww.org\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jww.org\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20218"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jww.org\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20218\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jww.org\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jww.org\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jww.org\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jww.org\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}