More Than a Drink: How Does Alcohol Shape Violence in South Sudan?
As part of the XCEPT programme research in South Sudan, we conducted surveys and interviews with community members in Kapoeta and Akobo counties to explore drivers of violence in their communities. Between February 2024 and January 2025, over 400 participants shared their views with our team.
Lokai Julius Lokwaleng, who conducted interviews in Kapoeta, shares his insights on alcohol’s role in violence. XCEPT Researcher Fiona McEwen, who analysed the interviews, joins him to contribute her insights on the theme in both Kapoeta and Akobo.
Kapoeta: alcohol and the county today – Lokai Julius Lokwaleng
I have worked in research for ten years, mostly on opinion polls and community surveys in South Sudan. I recently gathered data on the connection between trauma, mental health, and violence for XCEPT’s Impact of Trauma Survey. When I was interviewing people in Kapoeta, where I am from, I noticed how much alcohol ties into violence and impacts people’s everyday lives. Alcohol in rural Kapoeta is tangled up in how we live: from our domestic lives, to our work, to the violence of cattle raids and revenge killings with neighbouring communities.
In my language, Toposa, alcohol is called ngagie. People brew different kinds of ngagie in Kapoeta, ranging from weak – home-brewed ngagie nakwaa – to middle-strength takaya – to high-proof siko. Before, alcoholic drinks were for special events like weddings, initiations, harvests or peace talks. Alcohol was regulated by the elders; it was not part of everyday life. This has changed in the past few decades. It is more widely available now – from homemade, to locally brewed, to cheap foreign spirits or beers.
Why are people turning to alcohol? Years of stress from wars and displacement, job scarcity, lack of education provision and poverty have taken their toll on people. Alcohol has become cheaply available and is no longer only for special occasions; it has become a lifestyle for many.
In addition, a lack of opportunity has caused some young people to turn to alcohol out of boredom. And when they are spending time in drinking dens, they are not herding or planting. Without the main breadwinners carrying out this work, communities face heightened chances of already likely food insecurity. And some people using alcohol sometimes resort to negative and often violent financial coping mechanisms, such as theft, highway robberies and cattle raiding. Alcohol can give an individual the courage and perceived confidence to bypass their moral conscience, leading them to perform activities which are difficult, risky, and unacceptable. This has led to normalisation of unacceptable behaviours as a way of life.
In informal work, alcohol is sometimes provided by employers to motivate people to carry out difficult or dangerous work, such as labouring or gold mining. This makes it hard for people to avoid trying alcohol and likely increases the amount of people who develop problem drinking. Even in NGOs, government and private sector, alcohol addiction has eroded the work ethic. Individuals struggling with alcohol dependency often find it difficult to comply with workplace rules, regulations, professional work standards and as such, employers face significant challenges in retaining staff, maintaining productivity, and ensuring effective service delivery.
In the past, authorities at all levels – county, payam and boma – have tried to regulate alcohol but they were not successful. The local communities have acted: youths, who saw that alcohol was contributing to bad practices in the community, went door to door pouring away illicit alcohol, but they also beat alcohol business owners. Potential solutions could include increasing the price of the sugar used in alcohol manufacturing, limiting the hours when businesses selling alcohol can operate, licencing, taxing drinks, educating communities on the negative effects of alcohol, and creating and enforcing community by-laws to regulate alcohol consumption and promote responsible behaviour.
Alcohol as a driver of violence: what the interviews said – Fiona McEwen
In the interviews in Kapoeta and Akobo counties, we heard people’s accounts of how alcohol can lead people to violence, and how violence can lead people to drink. Here is what some interviewees said.
Many people talked about the negative impact of alcohol, with one local chief suggesting that “Most of the conflict in the area has some connection with alcohol”. A common view is that alcohol increases thoughts of stealing and violence, with some even describing alcohol as a warrior or fighter:
“Alcohol is [a] warrior. It can kill a person without a reason.”
Sometimes this was described as being similar to the effects of supernatural spirits on people’s behaviour:
“Spirit affects people’s mind and behaviours. But with alcohol, it is very difficult to differentiate between spiritual effect on mind or alcohol… Alcohol is causative.”
Cattle raiding is a common theme that came up repeatedly in the interviews. Cattle are a highly valuable source of wealth and prestige in South Sudan, and so this contested resource can cause violent conflict. In one interview, cattle raiding was explained as a way to pay debt accrued by alcohol addiction:
“When someone drinks alcohol and did not pay, he lacked money to pay, he can just think of going to raid so as to get cows [to] sell and pay the debt. When this person goes to the bush and finds the owner of the cows, he must kill that person and drive the cows.”
We found evidence that alcohol is used for courage before a raid: this includes both people using alcohol themselves, and giving alcohol to other people to persuade them to join:
“When I get that you are a fearful person, I come to you and say, ‘let us go and raid’. I will first give you alcohol to activate the mind. It will be telling you to fight and kill the enemies.”
And one interviewee told us how people take bigger risks than they would otherwise after they have been drinking alcohol:
“When men go to raid, they carry alcohol in a bottle. When they see an enemy, they drink. And this makes their minds tell them to just go and attack. They just run toward them to shoot – and later they get killed.”
We also heard from interviewees that alcohol impairs judgement and causes risky behaviour: when under the influence, people can overreact to perceived threats:
“That is the biggest thing, when a person became drunk his mind directs him to violence and raiding, once he is in the cattle camp and sees the cows moving, he jumps with his gun and starts shooting without even seeing where the enemies are. This is because he is driven by an alcoholic mind.”
Not only does alcohol offer courage to commit violent acts, one interviewee shared that it is also used as a reward for violence:
“Alcohol, these days, is all about killing. When young people are drinking in a group, the one who has killed many people is given the larger share, and that motivates others to kill.”
In addition to conflict with other communities, we found that people considered alcohol the root cause for conflict inside communities, such as spontaneous fights. One person we interviewed said:
“Violence and alcohol are like two brothers. People want to fight after taking alcohol and that is habit.”
Another person we spoke to highlighted alcohol’s role in domestic violence:
“There is someone I know; I do not mention his name. He became a drunkard. After getting drunk, he would come back and quarrel with his wife, beating her.”
Often acts of violence like this are met with revenge, which forces the cycle of violence to continue.
Alcohol’s role in violence in South Sudan’s context cannot be underestimated. Violence between and within communities is driven by a multitude of factors; however, the growing role of alcohol in exacerbating violence is clearly a key concern in many communities.
Despite attempts to create change, the cycle of alcohol and violence continues. Participants explained that alcohol misuse is often driven by hunger, poverty, trauma-related mental health problems, job loss, divorce, and social exclusion. Meanwhile, alcohol production and sales serve as vital income sources for some families, particularly women who brew and sell local alcohols as a livelihood. This means alcohol becomes increasingly available and commercially important, which makes change difficult.
While authorities have tried to crack down on alcohol use, ultimately the social issues that incentivise people to produce and consume alcohol need to be addressed in order to really have an impact.
This article is issued by the Cross-Border Conflict Evidence, Policy and Trends (XCEPT) research programme, funded by UK International Development. XCEPT brings together world-leading experts and local researchers to examine conflict-affected borderlands, how conflicts connect across borders, the intersection of climate stresses and conflict, and the drivers of violent and peaceful behaviour, to inform policies and programmes that support peace.
The views and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the UK government.
