Professional Affiliation

Doctoral Candidate, University of Pretoria

Expert Bio

Ms. Emmaculate Asige Liaga is a Doctoral Candidate at the Department of Political Sciences, University of Pretoria, South Africa. Emmaculate is a holder of a master’s degree from the University of Manchester where she majored in International Conflict and Security Studies. She is also an awardee of the Chevening Scholarship, an honor awarded to outstanding emerging leaders to pursue a one-year master at any UK university. Prior to this, she worked at Centre for the Study of Governance Innovation as a junior researcher. She also worked as a Politics tutor at the department of political sciences and as an Intern at the United Nations Information Centre. Her research interests include: Peace and Security from below, Conflict resolution, Agency of communities in policy making, and International Relations theories (Critical theories and marginalized theories). She is currently a Southern Voices Network for Peacebuilding Scholar at the Wilson Center.

Wilson Center Project

The Local Turn: Analysis of liberal peacebuilding and local strategies in South Sudan, 2005 -2015

Project Summary

This research seeks to investigate the strategies of peacebuilding employed by both the local and the International Organizations of peace operations in post-conflict communities. The project will provide an analysis of the impact that the involvement or exclusion of local/grassroots peacebuilding organizations can have on achieving peace objectives in South Sudan, thus filling the identified gap between the top-down and bottom up approaches employed by both foreign intervention and the local level organizations. The research builds on studies conducted by various proponents of ‘the local turn’, which assert that the non-involvement of ‘the local’ isolates the very foundations that peace should be built upon. Thus, the aim of the project is to rationalize the importance of transference of the agency of peacebuilding to the local. The research objective will prescribe policy recommendations to facilitate joint strategies that are effective, plausible and sustainable to and in peace building.