Narrowing Horizons: Contingencies, coping practices and conflict handling among South Sudanese refugees after aid cuts

Executive summary

Aspiring for Peace and Inclusion Research (ASPIRE) is a long-term research project implemented by Danish Refugee Council (DRC) in partnership with UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, and the University of Copenhagen (UCPH). It aims to understand refugees’ efforts to achieve peaceful coexistence through their engagement with their peers, their communities, and interventions by political authorities and humanitarian, development, and peace actors. When the research project was initiated in 2023, it followed refugees from South Sudan in Rhino Camp Refugee Settlement, northern Uganda. In 2024, the project expanded to include Kalobeyei Settlement and Kakuma Refugee Camp in western Kenya. Leveraging other projects in South Sudan, the research team conducted two field research trips to South Sudan in 2025; data from these trips are also reflected in this report.

ASPIRE works with peer researchers, refugees trained in ethnographic methods who follow conflicts and conflict-mitigation in their own neighbourhoods. The main theme of the 2023 report was refugee initiatives aimed at managing incipient conflicts and preventing escalation. In 2024, we examined the possibilities for dealing with conflicts by focusing on the authorities - statutory and customary - among whom refugees navigate. In 2025, we examine the effects of substantial reductions in humanitarian assistance and compare Uganda and Kenya with respect to emerging conflict patterns and the ways in which locally led initiatives and community structures that support the peaceful handling of conflicts are affected.

The overall argument of the report is that the recent cuts in humanitarian support lead to narrowing horizons for camp-based South Sudanese refugees in Kenya and Uganda. While they once hoped to build better, sustainable lives for themselves and their children in asylum over the long term, reductions in aid have forced them to focus on immediate survival needs and to make more short-sighted decisions, which may trigger conflict. The stark decline in the number of households receiving food assistance and the reductions in the amounts of food for those still eligible impose severe constraints on refugees’ ability to access basic means of survival. While refugees based in Rhino Camp have better access to farmland and livestock compared to refugees in Kakuma and Kalobeyei, increased pressure on these resources can be a conflict trigger.

Under these conditions, people are pushed to orient their actions toward immediate survival rather than long-term goals and planning. Refugees actively seek to adopt and adapt coping practices as best they can with a view to past experiences, current concerns, family relations, and moral and social obligations. However, negative coping practices are increasingly adopted, putting pressure on intimate relations and triggering conflict. The severe constraints also spark coping practices such as theft, debt, or forced marriage that involve increased safety risks and risks of conflict at both the community and household levels. There are concrete differences across the camp settings: theft of livestock or crops is more common in Rhino, while we see more conflicts over stolen phones and food items in Kakuma and Kalobeyei. But many coping practices and resulting conflicts are similar.

In their efforts to address conflicts arising from current coping practices, people reach out to and engage with formal, semi-formal, or informal actors. However, many protection services and formal security providers, such as the Community Peace and Protection Teams (CPPTs) in Kenya, have been affected by cutbacks and are now under-resourced, as are protection activities, protection staff, and help desks provided by humanitarian actors. Semi-formal actors, such as the Refugee Welfare Committees in Uganda, have been less directly affected as they rely on volunteers. Such actors may be called upon more frequently as the statutory organizations retract. Indeed, this may look like increased “localisation” as dependence on more remote agencies declines. Yet the semi- and informal actors are less able to take on the additional burden, as they must devote more time and resources to their own survival. This also has a gendered aspect, as we see a decline in female community leaders, who are often single parents (as opposed to their male colleagues) and need to reprioritise their attention to the family in times of extreme precarity.