Social networks and the dead: learning from South Sudanese military widows in exile in Khartoum (Sudan)

Abstract Social networks play a key role in people’s coping strategies during humanitarian crisis and exile. However, so far, scholarship on these social networks has tended to ignore the continued role of the dead in social networks and the profound socio-economic obligations to the dead that can exist and impact the living, their ability to cope, their relationships and the moral economies that shape supportive exchange. Specifically, we focus on the powerful, ongoing obligations that military widows can have to their deceased husbands, and we critically consider how this impacts these widows’ abilities to cope and protect their children. We draw on interviews conducted between 2021 and 2023 with South Sudanese military widows who were living in Khartoum, some of whom had recently been widowed and others who had been widowed in the 1980s and 1990s. The article is based on long-term observations, as well as sixty life history interviews.