is international direct aid (repair, renewal, rebuilding) being denied also to South Sudan?
I'm sure that I read that one reason the Syrian refugees are not going home is that there might (or might not be?) economic/trade/financial sanctions in place from some large (usually positive donor) countries who are not permitting the repair effort to get underway in the areas controlled by Assad's regime (as some see it, areas controlled by the legitimate Syrian national government as others see it) (I give both sides as I am unsure, due fog)
Modern Refugeeism is so highly complex, I used to live in Geneva and visit the office of the then director of the UNHCR, when they were based in the 'Palais Wilson' GATT building. In those far-off days of the 1980's it seemed simple to identify who was a refugee, the denigrating term "economic migrant" was not then bandied around. Simple rules seemed to work, and the UNHCR was the reference agency.
Nowadays, with some austerity struck or just angry 'first world nations' being highly sensitive about refugees or migrants in general, some using buffer islands, some planning to use Guatemala as a buffer - it is much more nuanced to decide what should be done, ethically.
As I've travelled widely in soviet lands, post soviet lands, Yemen, Kashmir other arabian countries and divided European nations, met many people of different economic achievement levels, different societies; I now think that the refugees themselves are typically much better informed than we (random other people, like me) are about their previous home situation. (many recent Syrian refugees to the European continent were fully mobile data online, continuously updating routes and understanding hazards, admittedly trying to evade/dealing with evil "snake-heads" & traffickers too)
I think full mobile internet data is rarer in Africa, but there are many developing uses of mobile text based internet and clever people with clever solutions. I would personally sponsor sensible accurate individuals in South Sudan, or Syria or Libya, to give accurate ground truth assessments that could help the ensure that news is spread when the conditions exist for displaced people to return in safety to their previous homes.
I tend not to believe much of what I read, I find many sources highly biased, one way or another, that fog again. I think citizen journalism from 'hot spots', without interference, might be an option. Sudan/South Sudan is one of those "oily" places, where things happen, possibly externally funded deliberate strife, can we stop that? Yes - perhaps eventual decarbonisation of our society and the pivot to ubiquitous renewable energy might help in calming some or all of the resource wars, resource winner situations, ruling billionaire in a poor country situation.
There might hopefully be many other better options, but whilst travelling through Kathmandu in the 1990's, I did meet a big colony of previous refugees from the late 1950's Chinese 'absorption' of "their" Tibeten province - they had been guests of the wonderful Nepalese for more than thirty years, and I guess they remain there and of course notably in Dharamshala in India. Some refugees will, as you mentioned Tania, just retain a memory of "home", forever.
We need people to study & think wider. I personally am working to educate and empower many mayors (local regional village/town chiefs, lowest level political levels) in Africa, and in fact wider - I'm just a low level engineer in this work, whilst I do other stuff, but my colleagues have found that working at this mayoral level gets a lot of things done, done quickly, efficiently - without some of the higher strata problems/questions that inevitably occur in the real world. The refugee/economic migrant crisis will sadly inevitably grow, until the world itself becomes more stable and balanced.
Thanks Tania for asking a question, sorry that as I'm not a social scientist, I might not have helped the argument - but I remain interested and await to see what other ideas & thoughts might arrive from the clever students who are online at TSR