SOUTH SUDAN –Peace begins when and where people can connect with each other, not only emotionally and intellectually, but also physically.
In 2025, peacekeepers serving with the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) did everything they could to improve such connectivity.
By repairing and maintaining roads – hundreds of kilometers of vital supply routes - military engineers have enabled the delivery of humanitarian aid to those most in need. Easier and faster mobility has also boosted trade, and has in this way, together with creative agricultural projects, improved both food security and livelihoods, scarcity of which is a frequent cause of conflicts.
Some of the country’s most important (and mostly gravel) roads, like the one connecting Malakal with the northern parts of Upper Nile, or equally well-travelled ones in and around Aweil, Leer and Gumuruk, are virtual, not to say real, lifelines for communities directly depending on them.
Rapidly deteriorating roads is just one of the effects of changing weather patterns. Unusually high water levels are also causing severe floods in places like Pibor and Bentiu, where some residents have had to move to higher ground and others have had their dwellings swept away or destroyed.
By undertaking the arduous task of constructing, reinforcing or maintaining existing dykes, our Blue Helmets have, to the best of their ability, minimized the areas of land becoming flooded, preventing the displacement of an estimated 300,000 people.
During the rainy season, roads, no matter what efforts are made to keep them open, in some parts of South Sudan are virtually impassable. In such locations, UNMISS has instead worked on improving airstrips to make passenger, cargo and medevac flights possible. One example of this can be found in Kuajok.
Other climate-related challenges require more creative approaches. When the quantity and quality of available water pose risks of residents catching cholera and other waterborne diseases, building solar planted water towers does not just serve a mitigating purpose but also offers long-term solutions for affected communities.
Clean-up campaigns are another type of efforts that can prevent outbreaks of diseases – and make neighborhoods, schools, hospitals or other facilities neat and tidy. When such operations are carried out together with residents, they also tend to bring peacekeepers and host communities closer together as they can celebrate the results of their combined work.
Sometimes these bonds become as lasting as the pieces of land that, following close cooperation with the United Nations Mine Action Service (UNMAS) and other UN agencies, allow thousands of households to trade temporary shelters for proper housing where land can be farmed.
While the future impacts of climate change are anyone’s guess, we dare predict that UNMISS peacekeepers will continue to rise, as best they can, to the ever-changing challenges they are presented with.
By Jaella Brockmann
