This report examines the importance of social relationships for South Sudanese refugees both during their flight and after their arrival in refugee settlements in West Nile, Uganda. The objective of this report is to help humanitarian aid actors understand important and often overlooked sources of household resilience during displacement. This understanding may help humanitarian aid actors design more effective interventions that strengthen existing social connections on which displaced populations rely for support. Equally, this analysis may help humanitarian aid actors avoid inadvertently undermining these important sources of household resilience during crises. This report is based on interviews and focus group discussions conducted in Palorinya and Rhino Camp refugee settlements in West Nile, Uganda between March 2018 and February 2019.
This research aimed to examine several questions in both South Sudan and refugee settings in Uganda. First, we wanted to better understand the effect of violent conflict and associated displacement on the nature, characteristics, and evolution of people’s social connectedness. In addition, we sought to investigate whether, and if so, how humanitarian assistance interacts with social networks and connections. In order to answer these questions, this analysis examines critical sources of material and non-material support that people receive via their social connections, and the potential bases of exclusion that prevent some households from accessing important social networks and related support. We describe the development and importance of refugees’ new relationships in Uganda, changes to their pre-displacement relationships, and the consequences of these changes for refugees’ perceptions of their own wellbeing. Rather than only examining individual relationships or focusing on the household as the unit of analysis, this report tracks the formation and evolution of relationships at various levels, capturing the many types and layers of bonds that affect refugees’ experiences.
This report adds to a growing literature on the importance of social connectedness during conflict and displacement. First, in considering peoples’ own strategies for forming, preserving, and adapting social relationships during crisis and displacement, our analysis contributes to existing research on the ways in which communities rely on one another during conflict and in its aftermath. Our analysis offers a different lens on the localization of humanitarian response, the analysis of which to date has primarily focused on formal local institutional responses to humanitarian emergencies.1 Second, until recently, the literature on social connectedness tended to ignore new relationships formed while people navigated armed conflict and displacement.2 In this report, we discuss these relationships as important components of understanding selfprotection, and how people respond to and attempt to recover from crises. Third, while most social analyses in refugee contexts focus primarily on refugee-host dynamics, this report also considers internal refugee dynamics, as well as how refugees relate to people who remain in their communities of origin.
This report is part of an OFDA-funded partnership between Mercy Corps and the Feinstein International Center (FIC) at the Freidman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, Tufts University to examine changes to social connectedness for conflict-affected South Sudanese in South Sudan and Uganda, and how these connections are linked to coping and recovery. This report expands on key themes that emerged from research on social connectedness in Panyijar County, South Sudan discussed in a report released in January 2019, and from Bentiu, South Sudan described in a series of reports released in October 2019. These preceding reports highlight the significance of social support networks for survival and coping during conflict and in its aftermath.
