Introduction
It was late morning in May 2014, and I was sitting on the sofa in the lobby of a Radisson Blu Hotel. The sliding doors of the hotel opened onto a typical, international hotel lobby with marbled floors, a series of lifts, a spiralling staircase and clusters of small, hard, colourful square-shaped sofas and armchairs. If you could only see the lobby, and not the street outside, you would not have known where we were in the world. The hotel on that June morning was in the centre of Addis Ababa (Ethiopia’s capital city). The hotel was hosting the negotiating teams of South Sudan’s main warring parties – the South Sudan government and the still nascent Sudan People’s Liberation Army – In Opposition (SPLA-IO). They had been invited by IGAD – an East African intergovernmental regional body – to Addis Ababa to continue peace negotiations. These negotiations would eventually result in the signing of the long 2015 Agreement on the Resolution of Conflict in South Sudan (ARCSS) and the 2018 Revitalised-ARCSS.
The peace negotiations had been initiated in January 2014 in response to escalating armed conflict in South Sudan. On the 15 December 2013 in Juba (South Sudan’s capital city), fighting erupted between soldiers in the barracks of the Presidential Guard. The next day, soldiers divided largely based on alliances and divisions formed during the Sudan Government – Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) conflicts of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s.
1 Douglas Johnson, ‘Briefing: The crisis in South Sudan’, African Affairs 113: 451 (2014): 300–309. In this 2013 moment of government anxiety, uniformed, president-aligned forces killed civilians based on crude conceptions of ethnicity.
2 Skye Wheeler, ‘South Sudan’s New War: Abuses by Government and Opposition Forces’ (2014). In almost instantaneous response to the violence in Juba, vast swathes of soldiers in the north-eastern third of South Sudan mutinied and took up arms against the government, with many combatants and supporting communities understanding the conflict as wars of revenge for the killings in Juba.
3 Naomi Pendle, ‘The “Nuer of Dinka Money” and the Demands of the Dead: Contesting the Moral Limits of Monetised Politics in South Sudan’, Conflict, Security & Development 20:5 (2021): 587–605. Over the following three years, armed conflict would also spread to the Equatorias – the southern third of the country. By 2018, excess mortality from the conflict was over 400,000.
4 Francesco Checchi, Adrienne Testa, Abdihamid Warsame, Le Quach and Rachel Burns, ‘Estimates of Crisis-attributable Mortality in South Sudan, December 2013–April 2018’ (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, 2018), www.lshtm.ac.uk/south-sudan-full-report, accessed 7 December 2020. Between 2013 and 2021, there were over thirty pockets of famine-level hunger impacting hundreds of thousands of people.
5 Chris Newton, Bol Mawien, Chirrilo Madut, Elizabeth Gray and Naomi Pendle, ‘Chiefs’ Courts, Hunger, and Improving Humanitarian Programming in South Sudan’ (London School of Economics and Political Science, 2021). By 2021, 3.7 million South Sudanese had fled their homes to seek safety.
6 This includes 2.3 million refugees and 1.4 million IDPs from ‘conflict and violence’ but ignores IDPs caused by ‘disasters’. UNHCR, ‘Refugees and Asylum-Seekers from South Sudan – Total’, 30 September 2021, https://data.unhcr.org/en/situations/southsudan#_ga=2.132774989.2119093081.1634396357-810602092.1634396357, accessed 16 October 2021; International Displacement Monitoring Centre, ‘County Information’, www.internal-displacement.org/countries/south-sudan, accessed 16 October 2021. Throughout these wars, the government and armed opposition carried out extreme and seemingly arbitrary acts of physical violence against civilians, breaking international and local norms.
7 Joshua Craze, ‘Displaced and Immiserated: The Shilluk of Upper Nile in South Sudan’s Civil War, 2014–19’ (Small Arms Survey, 2019), www.smallarmssurvey.org/sites/default/files/resources/HSBA-Report-South-Sudan-Shilluk.pdf, accessed 5 April 2020; Naomi Pendle, ‘Competing Authorities and Norms of Restraint: Governing Community-embedded Armed Groups in South Sudan’. International Interactions 47:5 (2021): 873–97; Skye Wheeler and Samer Muscati, ‘“They Burned It All”: Destruction of Villages, Killings, and Sexual Violence in Unity State, South Sudan’, Human Rights Watch, 2015.That late morning in May 2014, as I sat in the Radisson Blu Hotel in Addis, an eclectic combination of South Sudan’s political elite walked through the sliding doors and wandered past me to access the hotel’s lavish buffet lunch. It was hard not to be dazzled by this array of South Sudanese political celebrities. The day’s IGAD peace negotiations on South Sudan had not yet started and there was little prospect of any significant progress. In the meantime, the opposing elites of South Sudan’s warring parties could enjoy their internationally funded place of rest. The 2014 World Cup was only a couple of weeks away from starting and much time was spent watching football commentary and predicting the footballing outcomes.
If you turn to your right as you enter the Radisson Blu, the dining room is through a small opening. Tables are crowded together in a relatively small space, and hotel guests eat from a buffet of meats, salads, cheeses, fruits, cakes and freshly prepared choices made instantly by the waiting chef. That May morning, as other mornings, the representatives of the warring parties lined up, side-by-side, irrespective of the sides of the war that their soldiers were fighting on. Although on opposing sides of the war, these negotiating elites knew each other well. Many had fought together as comrades in the 1980s and 1990s and were even in-laws through networks of politically strategic marriages.
8 Clemence Pinaud, ‘South Sudan: Civil War, Predation and the Making of a Military Aristocracy’, African Affairs 113:451 (2014): 192–211. They had also served together in the Southern government and army formed by the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA). That May in Addis, they greeted each other and even sat with each other to eat.
Work on rituals and peace-making, such as Hennings’s work on Russia and Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, has highlighted the importance of subtle codes and ceremonial signals in making or breaking peace.
9 Jan Hennings, Russia and Courtly Europe: Ritual and the Culture of Diplomacy, 1648–1725 (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Eating together could be a sign of peaceful intentions, just as dancing together had been in eighteenth-century Europe.
10 Hennings, Russia and Courtly Europe. However, it was not. These South Sudanese dining companions were not ready for peace; fighting between them continued unabated for many more years. One general who had been commanding battles in Bentiu (Unity State, South Sudan) only weeks before joked to me that his time at the negotiations was a gift from the opposition leadership to fatten him up before returning to the battlefields.
11 For discussion of the use of gifts and the application of Mauss’s ideas to South Sudanese politics, see: Pinaud, ‘South Sudan’. This commander, in the coming months, would go on to command further significant battles. Eating together was not a sign of peace, and the peace meeting was entangled with ongoing violence.
By 2014, international policy shifts favoured peace agreements being ‘inclusive’, and ‘inclusive’ was interpreted as inviting more categories of people to the negotiations. In a cheaper hotel a few streets away from the Radisson Blu, as part of these attempts to be inclusive, IGAD was hosting a contingent of South Sudanese chiefs. In 2013, chiefs were playing a powerful role in mobilising armed combatants to join pro-government or pro-opposition forces. Sitting between armed groups and the communities,
12 Cherry Leonardi, Dealing with Government in South Sudan: History of Chiefship, Community and State (James Currey, 2013); Chirrilo Madut Anei and Naomi Pendle, Wartime Trade and the Reshaping of Power in South Sudan: Learning from the Market of Mayen-Rual (Rift Valley Institute, 2018). armed groups relied on the chiefs to mobilise popular support and recruit military labour.
13 Indicative of warring parties’ reliance on chiefs was Riek Machar’s interest in the chiefs who came to Addis in May 2014, and his request for a meeting about their invitation. Chiefs also often played a significant role in governing combatant behaviour during conflict.
14 Pendle, ‘Competing Authorities and Norms of Restraint’. In their constituencies, these chiefs were some of the most powerful figures of the emerging wars.
Chiefs were added to the list of invitees at the last minute and a handful of senior chiefs known to an IGAD advisor were gathered from across South Sudan. They were brought directly from their home villages, including some that were close to the frontlines. This included the senior chief from the president’s home region of Gogrial, a chief from the SPLA-IO headquarters in Pagak, and other chiefs from across South Sudan. Some of the chiefs who came to Addis were urban savvy and highly literate, but for others the large urban space was foreign to them. When fighting erupted in Juba in December 2013, my planned ethnographic research had been interrupted by these new uncertainties. A colleague in IGAD invited me to Addis Ababa to help support the less experienced chiefs navigate this urban setting.
15 In the end I failed in my mandate; one chief did go missing. A few weeks later we found out that he had gone to visit relatives.As I spent time with the chiefs in Addis, I was struck by the different mealtime behaviour of the chiefs compared to the politicians at the Radisson. At each mealtime, the chiefs would carefully choreograph their arrival in the dining room to avoid chiefs from areas that were from the opposing side in the war. Not all the chiefs were part of this implicit manoeuvre, but some were especially careful not to eat in the same place at the same time with those on the other side of the war. They were polite to each other. They would participate in the same meetings. Yet they would not eat together.
The chiefs described their refusal to eat together as a recognition of the spiritual and moral consequences of war. Ways of eating and not eating together are part of the rituals of life,
16 Mary Douglas, Implicit Meanings: Selected Essays in Anthropology (Routledge, 1975). and are, as Hutchinson highlights, entrenched with moral, spiritual and political meanings.
17 Sharon Hutchinson, ‘“Dangerous to Eat”: Rethinking Pollution States among the Nuer of Sudan,’ Africa 62:4 (1992): 490–504. The chiefs understood that legitimate armed conflict was embedded in moral and spiritual logics. Specifically, the ongoing armed conflict was seen as morally legitimate through contemporary ideas of revenge.
18 Naomi Pendle, ‘The “Nuer of Dinka Money”’. War did not only cause physical death and economic losses or gains. War also brought spiritual and moral dangers and cosmological consequences. In many of the communities where the war was being fought and from which the soldiers of the armies had been mobilised, feuds brought dangers of deadly spiritual pollution and impurity that would be made manifest by sharing food between feuding families.
19 Sharon Hutchinson, Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War, and the State (University of California Press, 1996), pages 106–7; Sharon Hutchinson, ‘“Dangerous to eat”: Rethinking Pollution States among the Nuer of Sudan’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 62:4 (1992): 490–504. The dangers of pollution could be useful as they could encourage parties to seek reconciliation and bring opportunities for peace-making.
20 Discussions with kuar muon, Mayendit, August 2013. By not eating together the chiefs avoided these spiritual dangers and upheld this cosmological understanding.
21 For discussions of food, see: Hutchinson, ‘“Dangerous to Eat’: 493; Hutchinson, Nuer Dilemmas; Douglas, Implicit Meanings. As they made peace, they sought to act in a way that showed a consistent moral logic to the moral logics and everyday realities of war. Peace, as war, had moral boundaries and should morally constrain all actors, including the most militarily powerful.
This book is about such spiritual and moral contestations, and the remaking of norms within the ‘cultural archive’, that arise from and reshape the violence of peace, protection, conflict and connected political economies.
22 This intentionally evokes Allen’s work on the violence of healing. Tim Allen, ‘The Violence of Healing’, Sociologus 47:2 (1997): 101–28; also Adam Branch, ‘The Violence of Peace: Ethnojustice in Northern Uganda’, Development and Change 45:3 (2014): 608–30. The book is interested in the debates over the cosmological consequences and meanings of war and peace, and the assertions of power that are embedded in these cosmologies. After all, in the end, the warring parties in the Radisson, who ignored the spiritual consequences of eating together while at war with each other, could be understood as claiming to be immune from these moral and spiritual consequences and dangers. They could be understood as implicitly claiming to be able to step outside of cosmological restraint and moral consequence. The book explores the implications of such claims.
The arguments of this book are based on ethnographic and historic research among Nuer- and Dinka-speaking communities connected to the Bilnyang and connected river systems (contemporary Warrap and Unity States, South Sudan) from the late nineteenth century until the 2020s. The research was conducted between 2012 and 2022. The book looks at their experiences of making peace and staying safe, including everyday peace-making and peace meetings in these communities. Yet, to avoid binary distinctions between local and international peace-making, the book also explores the interactions between these communities and national and international peace-making.