In recent years, a variety of efforts have been made in political science to enable, encourage, or require scholars to be more open and explicit about the bases of their empirical claims and, in turn, make those claims more readily evaluable by others. While qualitative scholars have long taken an interest in making their research open, reflexive, and systematic, the recent push for overarching transparency norms and requirements has provoked serious concern within qualitative research communities and raised fundamental questions about the meaning, value, costs, and intellectual relevance of transparency for qualitative inquiry. In this Perspectives Reflection, we crystallize the central findings of a three-year deliberative process—the Qualitative Transparency Deliberations (QTD)—involving hundreds of political scientists in a broad discussion of these issues. Following an overview of the process and the key insights that emerged, we present summaries of the QTD Working Groups’ final reports. Drawing on a series of public, online conversations that unfolded at www.qualtd.net, the reports unpack transparency’s promise, practicalities, risks, and limitations in relation to different qualitative methodologies, forms of evidence, and research contexts. Taken as a whole, these reports—the full versions of which can be found in the Supplementary Materials—offer practical guidance to scholars designing and implementing qualitative research, and to editors, reviewers, and funders seeking to develop criteria of evaluation that are appropriate—as understood by relevant research communities—to the forms of inquiry being assessed. We dedicate this Reflection to the memory of our coauthor and QTD working group leader Kendra Koivu.1

The debate over peace in Sudan has centred on the ongoing talks in Naivasha, Kenya. This paper argues, however, that sustainable peace is not simply a function of the implementation of an agreement between the SPLA and Khartoum, but that other fracture lines will run through post-conflict Sudan. Here we draw attention to the rupture between the Dinka, dominant within the SPLA, and the Equatorian peoples of the far south, hundreds of thousands of whom were driven from their homes or faced with economic and political oppression under SPLA occupation. As these refugees return, it will be through local government structures that Equatorians will or will not be integrated into the SPLA political project for Southern Sudan. Thus, local government figures prominently in the possibility for sustainable peace. We describe the origins and structure of local government in Southern Sudan, situating it in the history of political tension between Dinka and Equatorians. We then describe the challenge of equitably distributing land and foreign aid to returnees in the context of ethnic politics and a massive NGO presence.