Impact case study database

a) EU-funded Access to Justice in South Sudan project implemented by the British Council, supporting capacity-building work with chiefs’ courts, which are the primary local judicial institutions in South Sudan. Leonardi has acted as expert advisor to the project since 2013, playing a key role in shaping its focus, approach and research methods. Her research findings on chiefs’ courts are cited in project presentations to donors and were summarised in planning documents which ‘ **[REDACTED]**’ (E1) By mid-2020, the project had engaged with 45 customary courts, involving approximately 700 chiefs, 100 court clerks, and 1,600 community representatives. Approximately 2,800 customary court cases had been observed in the courts (E1). Leonardi was approached again in 2020 to advise on ‘legacy’ strategies for archiving, analysing and publishing the wealth of court data gathered, and she will review written outputs in 2021.

b) Swiss-funded South Sudan Customary Authorities project (2015-present) implemented by the Rift Valley Institute (RVI). The project cited Leonardi’s research in a Phase III project proposal in 2016 and employed her as a consultant between 2018 and 2019. She gave a public lecture at the Catholic University in Juba during a forum bringing together chiefs and youth in June 2018, and provided input to a project review in early 2019. She produced an overview report, Making Order out of Disorder: Customary Authority in South Sudan, which drew on her own research and synthesised a series of research outputs from the project, most of which also cited her work on the nature of chiefly authority. [REDACTED] (E2).

Leonardi’s research on the violent and extractive nature of early commercial and imperial encounters, combined with Zoe Cormack’s research on South Sudanese material culture and museum collections, generated the AHRC-funded South Sudan Museum Network to explore the history and value of objects taken from the region to Europe in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. This network brought together museum curators from across Europe for the first time to consider the connections and significance of their holdings from South Sudan, resulting in a new inventory of these collections and a forthcoming open-access, illustrated publication highlighting key objects. The network workshops enabled South Sudanese participants to explain and debate the contentious histories of museum objects and displays.

According to the network partner, the Pitt Rivers Museum (PRM), the meetings enabled its curatorial staff ‘to engage closely with colleagues from all over Europe on collections and their stake holder communities, and facilitated many follow up communications and research directions. The network was vital in establishing a further network of South Sudanese Diaspora members living in the UK, who were invited to come to the PRM in November 2018 to view collections and take part in a film training course. As part of this course, the community group made a film which summarized their feelings about museum collections for the diaspora community, ‘Exploring our South Sudanese Identity at the Pitt Rivers Museum’. Dr Zoe Cormack, the network’s Co-I, took a lead role in this work as a current Research Affiliate of the Museum. The diaspora group’s visit was timed to coincide with another initiative that arose directly from the AHRC network’s activity, being a Mellon Foundation funded Global South Visiting Professorship at the University of Oxford in 2018 for Jok Madut Jok, one of the network’s participants. This successful set of initiatives led to a further Diaspora group visit to the PRM in Feb 2020, with an expanded number of community participants from different parts of the UK. The network and its ongoing impact have therefore been instrumental in fostering and developing a range of museum-community relations both in South Sudan and in the UK (E3).

Another network member also initiated the relabeling of objects in the British Museum catalogue from ‘Sudanese’ to ‘South Sudanese’. The final workshop held in collaboration with UNESCO in Juba, South Sudan, raised awareness of the European collections among South Sudanese government, heritage and arts and culture personnel, as well as providing a forum to debate the future of museums in the new country. It led to further work by Cormack and a key network participant advising UNESCO over a potential World Heritage Site in South Sudan. The network website disseminates information and resources, with a total of 7,156 views between 2017 and 2020, and 1,412 Twitter followers.

Leonardi’s research and expertise has been cited and consulted by UK and other international agencies, policy-makers and practitioners, through a range of dissemination and advisory channels. While it is difficult to demonstrate specific policy change as a result, there is considerable evidence of key contributions to the information base used by policy-makers. Leonardi’s publications are cited in many policy reports and briefs. For example, a special feature on South Sudan in the ODI publication Humanitarian Exchange included a call for international actors to ‘fundamentally rethink our timeframes’ and spend more time understanding South Sudanese institutions: ‘on the subject of chieftainship and customary authority, Cherry Leonardi’s book… is particularly helpful.’ In 2019 Leonardi was invited to discuss her research findings on local governance and conflict with the UN South Sudan Joint Mission Analysis Centre (E4).

The Conflict Sensitivity Resource Facility for South Sudan, funded jointly by the UK, Switzerland, Canada and the Netherlands and implemented by Saferworld and swisspeace, also includes Leonardi’s publications in its repository and monthly briefings, and cites them in several of its own policy briefs on governance, housing, land and property and conflict sensitivity guidance. The swisspeace focal point working on the CSRF regularly refers to Leonardi’s work in briefings and presentations to donors and policy-makers (E5).

Leonardi’s research is cited in a draft report on South Sudan’s contested internal state boundaries for the United States Institute of Peace and Rift Valley Institute. [REDACTED] (E6).

Leonardi’s work was also used in an internal FCO brief on South Sudan’s internal boundaries, and she contributed to a workshop and the writing of a publication on decentralisation and internal boundaries by the Overseas Development Institute (2016), which has been heavily used by the FCO and DfID. [REDACTED] (E7).

Work on security in the South Sudan-Uganda borderlands with J. Fisher resulted in a workshop in Uganda, organised jointly with the International Refugee Rights Initiative in 2018, to discuss the South Sudanese refugee influx into Uganda. This informed a joint submission to the UK parliamentary inquiry into forced displacement in Africa: the final report cited the submission in relation to gender issues in refugee settlements and the need to engage local community organisations and traditional leaders in refugee response (E8).

Work on borderlands also led to contributions to a report by the Governance and Social Development Research Centre, University of Birmingham, to help DfID prepare for an Ebola outbreak in South Sudan and an advisory group and workshop at the Wellcome Trust in 2019 for the Social Science in Humanitarian Action Platform (SSHAP) work on the Ebola outbreak in DRC. She subsequently provided feedback on an SSHAP brief on cross-border dynamics between South Sudan and DRC, in which her work on borders was also cited (E9).

Leonardi and Browne’s ‘Introduction: Valuing Land in Eastern Africa’ ( Critical African Studies), drawing on Leonardi & Santschi’s research (R5, R6), was used by the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors Land and Resources Global Group, whose director attests it was ‘a good counterbalance to the more overt market orientated worldview of the valuation and surveying profession and has helped raise important issues of communal value and social cohesion’. It will inform the preparation of a Manual for the “Valuation of Unregistered Lands and Informal Property” by the UN-Habitat Global Land Tool Network, for which Leonardi was invited to join the expert review group, and which ‘could have enormous repercussions in the acquiring of communal land and property for public and investment use’ (E10).