Pointing to a scarred bald patch above his ear, Lise Dide shows where shrapnel grazed his head when his village in Sudan's Blue Nile state was hit in an air strike. 'The plane came when I was asleep. I was still in my bed, I did not hear the sound,' he said in South Sudan's Doro refugee camp, set up just three weeks ago some 40 km (25 miles) from the Sudanese border. Dide is one of more than 80,000 Sudanese that have sought refuge in South Sudan from clashes between government forces and insurgents on the northern side of the poorly-marked and tense border, according to the United Nations.

The Republic of South Sudan (RoSS) is going through a major displacement crisis. The country is playing host to tens of thousands of refugees who fled fighting in Sudan’s Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile States. In addition to this, hundreds of thousands of people are displaced due to violence within South Sudan itself. The country also has to contend with a large influx of southerners returning from northern cities. This crisis could soon become overwhelming for the world’s newest country – a country already struggling to deliver security and basic services to its citizens.

On the occasion of this years' elections in Nigeria, the issue opens with an interview delivered by the Nigerian political scientist Sadeeque Abubakar Abba. The second contribution by Ubong Essien Umoh and Idara Godwin Udoh employs linguistic theory to explain the use of the numerous adjectives used when we talk about 'peace'. Bryan Nykon takes a closer look at the influence of feature films on our beliefs in the legitimacy of violence. Transitional justice is the topic of Padraig McAuliffe's article. In critically assessing the use of transitional justice mechanisms, he stresses the value of paradigmatic transitions sensitive to local conditions. Paul van Tongeren presents a policy brief on infrastructures for peace.

In Africa, poor medical care for diseases like polio and diabetes, as well as the lingering effects of war in certain regions, have created a large population of disabled people who are often rejected by society, says Hughes Kule, a Congolese-American activist who helped found a shelter for disabled street youth in Bongolo, DRC. 'Most street people here [in the Congo] are disabled people, because they are rejected by family and society. The family considers a disability a curse rather than a malformation. They believe it is a curse, but we believe it is largely because of the war.'

In 2009, the Forced Migration Studies Programme at the University of the Witwatersrand (now the African Centre for Migration & Society) undertook an analysis of the costs of policing immigration on the SAPS in the Gauteng Province. Their finding was that it cost the Gauteng SAPS Province some R362.5 million annually to detect, detain and transfer migrants to Lindela Holding Facility. The Forced Migration Studies Programme research demonstrated that the consequence of policing immigration undermines the ability of the police to tackle serious violent and organised crime.

Egyptian Prime Minister Kamal al-Ganzuri has said that 20,103 political prisoners had been released since February when a popular uprising toppled Hosni Mubarak, state media reported. He said that 68 political prisoners remained in detention, including 48 who have been sentenced, the official MENA news agency reported.

'As members of Civil Society, Zimbabwe Exiles Forum (ZEF), Solidarity Peace Trust (SPT), PASSOP and Southern African Litigation Centre (SALC) note with alarm and great apprehension the decision of the cabinet to review the right of asylum seekers to work and study. The organisations believe that revoking the above-mentioned rights without offering an alternative will have the effect of practically making it impossible for genuine asylum seekers to get protection, thus ultimately violating South Africa’s obligations under domestic and international law.'

The ragtag though powerful Islamist terror group, Al Shabaab, is taking on the Kenyan army on the battlefields of...Twitter, writes Simon Allison in this Daily Maverick article. And they're winning.

A powerful bomb blast targeting soldiers followed by gunfire rocked the troubled Nigerian city of Maiduguri on Tuesday 13 December, with at least 10 people killed, an official and a hospital source said. Residents claimed soldiers reacted to the bombing by shooting indiscriminately and burning homes, with troops having been accused of such abuses following previous attacks after alleging residents were complicit.

An Italian man has killed two African street sellers and wounded three others in an apparent racist shooting rampage in the city of Florence before committing suicide, police said. Gianluca Casseri, 50, who Italian officials described as a right-wing extremist, parked his car in the crowded Dalmazia square at lunch time on Tuesday 13 December, got out and started shooting with a large pistol, witnesses said.

At any given time, an estimated 130,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa are engaged in forced labour as a result of trafficking. It is a fraction of the global figure, which the International Labour Organisation (ILO) puts at 2.5 million, but this highly lucrative and concealed crime is on the rise in Africa and traffickers usually operate with impunity. Southern Africa has many of the conditions traffickers capitalise on: endemic poverty and unemployment that create a demand for better opportunities, and high rates of regular and irregular migration that mask the movements of traffickers and their victims.

Gambian lawyer Fatou Bensouda has been officially elected as the next chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and will become the first African to hold the top post at a time when the ICC is almost exclusively focused on the continent. Bensouda, who has served as deputy to Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the outgoing ICC chief prosecutor, was the only candidate and unanimously chosen by the ICC's assembly of state parties at their annual meeting in New York. She had previously worked as a legal adviser at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Tanzania.

The 30,000 people living in a town in northern Libya have been driven out of their homes, in what appears to have been an act of revenge for their role in the three-month siege of the city of Misrata. So what really happened in the town of Tawergha, are the accusations of brutality against the town's residents fair and what does it say about hopes for national unity? In the middle of August, between the end of the siege and the killing of Gaddafi, Misratan forces drove out everyone living in Tawergha, a town of 30,000 people. Human rights groups have described this as an act of revenge and collective punishment possibly amounting to a crime against humanity.

This Washington Post article notes that there will soon be more US troops based in Djibouti than in Iraq. Since 2002, Djibouti – a former French colony – has played host to the only permanent US military base on the African continent. Camp Lemonnier has grown steadily from a small outpost to an operation with more than 3,500 military personnel.

Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR) and the Refugee Rights Centre at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, on behalf of the Somali Association of South Africa (SASA) and the Project for Conflict Resolution and Development (PCRD) was granted an order 13 December 2011 in the Eastern Cape High Court in Port Elizabeth regarding the closure of the Port Elizabeth Refugee Reception Office. In terms of the order, an interim office at the regional immigration office must continue to provide asylum services to all holders of asylum seeker and refugee permits issued under the Refugees Act. The order also stipulates that no one whose permit expired between the period of 30 November 2011 and 14 December 2011 when the refugee office was non-functional will be subjected to a fine or any criminal sanction for the expiry of that permit.

A Zimbabwean activist, Gladys Mabvira, is set to spend her first Christmas in Harare in nine years as she is set to be kicked out of the UK next week. She has been an active member of opposition group ZAPU UK. Her open and public participation with this group, particularly her online blogging, would put her at risk if she was returned to Zimbabwe, says this article from

Billionaire businessman Natie Kirsh has endorsed the rule of King Mswati III of Swaziland and criticised efforts to democratise sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarchy. In reports published in the Times of Swaziland and the Swazi Observer, Kirsh denied that King Mswati 'is an absolute monarch', and ignored the unrest in the country that gave him his start in business in the 1960s. 'I even lacked enough tissue to wipe my wife’s tears as she saw how the country has developed,' he said. Even as Kirsh spoke, Swaziland’s Minister of Finance, Majozi Sithole, reported that the cash-strapped government might not have enough money to pay civil servants this month. Swaziland Solidarity Network member Mumsi Thwala said Kirsh’s remarks at the royal village left her 'stunned, speechless and depressed. Kirsh owes his fortune to a cozy relationship with a dictatorial regime'.

The world court has said it was referring Malawi to the UN Security Council over its refusal to arrest Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir who is wanted by the court for genocide. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued an arrest warrant for al-Bashir and as a signatory to the Rome statute that created The Hague-based world court, Malawi was obligated to detain the Sudanese leader on its soil. But on 15 October al-Bashir was among six heads of state attending a meeting of the 19-member Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (Comesa) in the tiny landlocked nation and returned home later in the weekend unhindered.

Two weeks of discussions at the 17th annual Conference of the Parties (COP17), which ran through Friday and Saturday nights, resulted in sleep-deprived negotiators attending numerous closed meetings and missing flights. These groups have been disappointed by the outcomes, and the consequences that will be shouldered by developing nations, especially those in Africa.
'Delaying real action until 2020 is a crime of global pro-portions,' said Nnimmo Bassey, chairman of Friends of the Earth International. 'An increase in global temperatures of 4ºC, permitted under this plan, is a death sentence for Africa, small island states, and the poor and vulnerable worldwide. This summit has amplified climate apart-heid, whereby the richest 1 percent of the world have decided that it is acceptable to sacrifice the 99 percent.'

Gun battles broke out near the international airport in the Libyan capital, Tripoli, army officials said. An army spokesman told Libyan TV two gunmen opened fire on Saturday on a convoy accompanying army chief Maj-Gen Khalifa Haftar but called it an 'isolated incident'. It was reportedly followed by hours of clashes along the coastal road. The violence adds to concerns over stability in Libya after the toppling of Muammar Gaddafi earlier this year.