Radio Miraya
2769: 2024 Peace Perception Survey
The survey came about in 2019 with funding back then from the United States Institute for Peace to find out what should sub suddenly citizens think about the peace process and also the transitional government. We run the surveys since then. We are now on the fifth wave and we're having interviewed about 18,000 respondents so far in face-to-face interviews. We went to 15 counties. We are surveying these counties regularly each year with a random sample protocol so in these 15 counties we are at the survey statistically representative. The main findings of the survey are that overall we see a slight but still a significant improvement of the security situation in the country. We see mixed results when it comes to the public trust in the transitional process. This mainly depends on if people feel safe in their everyday life or not. If people, to speak in short, if people feel safe in their everyday life, they trust the transition process, they think peace is possible and that the government can get the country back to normal politics. If people face difficulties and security challenges in their daily lives, they don't think so. For the last two years, we have focused also on the elections and public perceptions of the election process since the elections are forthcoming in one way or the other. Here we found out that the South Senator will well mingly want to vote. We have rates of about 90% of the people who want to vote sooner rather than later. And astonishingly, this also concerns people who face considerable amount of risk of election violence. So in short, even if people say they expect significant and severe election violence, they still want to vote and overwhelmingly they still want to vote on time. What has changed over the last year was however, the political discourse from the parties has found some resonance. So the I/O constituencies would favor as well as the party with the best political vision for South Sudan. They say now increasingly that elections should not be held before there is a constitution in place and the sense has been held. This is a shift from last year where there was almost no difference between the followers of both parties when it comes to this question. When we come to polling, we find still quite the worst result over the country. The political popularity of the main parties depends largely where you are. IG is at 50+ percent in most parts of the country. When we come down to IDP, the IDP population, however, there's a vast dominance of sympathizers of S-P-L-M-I-O. What is concerning is that we find mixed numbers when it comes to civic and political space and the perceived ability of people to speak their minds. Here again, it is particularly the IDP population that face particularly severe restrictions when it comes to the political and civic space they feel they have. Here there is a lot of trust building to be done when we come to campaigning at a political and an election process so that especially those people who don't trust the process who feel threatened to speak their political mind feel included and feel the opportunity to speak their mind and to vote also their mind. These are the main findings we have found so far. This year's survey has been held in April, May 2024, and more findings are due to come in the forthcoming months. Since it is a perception survey, we cannot really say from the data if people have indeed to fear violence. We know that they expect violence and they experience violence. This is what we get out of the questions. What we did was over all four iterations of the survey to work with what is called everyday peace indicators, so we qualitatively in focus groups and interviews developed with people, five indicators that across the country signal if people face a via security threats or not, which is for instance the ability to use the main roads, the ability to go out at night and attend a neighbor, the ability to hold and attend cultural activities. These indicators give us a good overview of how people experience violence and security issues in their everyday lives, or what we can say from the data is that the hotspots of experienced violence and experienced security issues are not too surprising. It's basically those areas where you would also politically expect that there is quite a significant issue with everyday peace. All I call for instance, yay, this is just a few of the hotspots, whereas other parts of the country are actually quite okay. It is also then pretty clear that these hotspots where people experience a quite significant amount of everyday violence are those areas where also the expectations of election related violence are quite high. What has to be said though, that people don't think necessarily that this election related violence means that there is a return to a full scale civil war in South Sudan. This is not the case, the relationship here is more complex and probably also requires more in that research to look for the reasons in the specific areas why the perceptions are like that. It will be very difficult to organize elections in the short time frame, even with sufficient amount of resources, it will take half a year to organize elections from the state where the preparations are at the moment. You have additional political challenges which is to many processes at the moment in Nairobi, which will have implications on the timetable as well. Even the practicalities are just very difficult, where to put polling stations, what about the electoral security, and our data can help this process, identifying particular hotspots of violence, but also seeing where the deficits are. The main advantage that our data shows, that at current at least, there is a significant amount of trust in the NSC, the National Election Commission, wherever it has to be said that this data has been taken before the current political contestation around some of their nominations in the states. Still people believe credible elections are possible and this is something which is encouraging. Also, no MPs in their areas, in broad terms, people also feel prepared to vote, and quite a lot of respondents have also voted in national elections before, beating in 2010, 2011, in the referendum and the last Sudanese elections that concerns Amsterdam, beating neighboring countries. So it's not that there is no election experience, these are factors that might support a credible election process, but the challenges are vast. The challenges are vast insofar as there is not enough money at the moment, and this goes along with all the data there is, considerable expectations of fraud and interference of security actors in the electoral process.