The book’s arguments

This book explores the violence of peace by focusing on the peace-making experiences of communities and people in a region of South Sudan. Since the mid-nineteenth century, South Sudan has experienced mercantile and colonial violence, as well as decades of war. Overlapping with these experiences have been repetitive experiences of peace-making. Between 1990 and 2020 alone there were at least seventy peace agreements in South(ern) Sudan, including peace agreements between national warring parties and between communities.4 There were definitely more. This number is the result of aggregating peace agreements or meetings that I have known about first hand or that are from online sources. These sources include: Alan Boswell, ‘Do Local Peace Deals Work? Evidence from South Sudan’s Civil War’ (Kampala: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 2019), https://library.fes.de/pdf-files/bueros/uganda/15872.pdf, accessed 16 October 2021; Paul Nantulya, ‘Sudanese Church Commits to Promoting Peace in Sudan’, CRS Voices 1 April 2010, http://crs-blog.org/sudanese-church-commits-to-promoting-peace-in-sudan; PA-X peace agreements databased, www.peaceagreements.org/lsearch?LocalSearchForm%5Bregion%5D=&LocalSearchForm%5Bcountry_entity%5D=127&LocalSearchForm%5Bname%5D=&LocalSearchForm%5Bactor_mode%5D=any&LocalSearchForm%5Blink_nat_process_status%5D=all&LocalSearchForm%5Bmediator_status%5D=all&LocalSearchForm%5Bmediator_type_mode%5D=any&LocalSearchForm%5Blocale_name%5D=&LocalSearchForm%5Bcategory_mode%5D=any&LocalSearchForm%5Bagreement_text%5D=&s=Search+Database, accessed 16 October 2021. This book explores both these explicit peace-making activities, as well as other activities by South Sudanese that attempt to make their lives more peaceful and safer. By focusing on Nuer- and Dinka-speaking communities around the Bilnyang and connected river systems, the book moves away from a focus on the peace agreements and meetings themselves, to discuss the implications of peace-making for people’s lived politics. Even though peace-making often does not result in either peace nor an end to violence, it does still have significant consequences.

The central argument of this book is that to understand the real politics and violence of peace-making, we must understand how peace-making interacts with and reshapes power not only in everyday politics,5 Roger Mac Ginty, ‘Hybrid Peace: The Interaction between Top-Down and Bottom-Up Peace’, Security Dialogue 41:4 (2010): 391–412; Roger Mac Ginty, ‘Indicators: A Proposal for Everyday Peace Indicators’, Evaluation and Program Planning 36:1 (2013): 56–63; Oliver P. Richmond and Audra Mitchell, Hybrid Forms of Peace from Everyday Agency to Post-liberalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). but also in cosmic polities. ‘Human societies are hierarchically encompassed – typically above, below, and on earth – in a cosmic polity populated by beings of human attributes and metahuman powers who govern the people’s fate’.6 David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins, On Kings (HAU Books, 2017), page 2. These cosmic polities are not solely comprised of characters that explicitly claim divinity or divine powers, such as priest, prophets and popes; governments can also be divine.

‘The government is close to the divine; the government is like the divine’, an elderly man described to me as we spoke in his home near Koch market (Unity State, South Sudan) in October 2022. He was living with four other elderly people in a small shelter, and children came and went, bringing them milk and food. For him, government was like the divine both because it could give and show favour, but also because it could take things away, including life itself. This book finds that South Sudanese reasoning often resonates with arguments of the famous anthropologists Graeber and Shalins in that even apparently secular governments can also be god-like, divine and part of the cosmic polity. Global histories mean that the sovereignty of governments is bound up with notions of divine kingship and claims to be able to rain destruction and favour with impunity.

The god-like nature of government entangles governments in the interpretative labour of the cosmic polity; their implicit divine claims are dependent not only on brute force but also on a broad acceptance of their impunity. Even governments who have relied on the fear of force have had to engage in some interpretative labour.7 Sharon Hutchinson and Naomi Pendle, ‘Violence, Legitimacy, and Prophecy: Nuer Struggles with Uncertainty in South Sudan’, American Ethnologist 42:3 (2015): 415–430. Peace meetings and making can be a way for governments to make claims of impunity. The frequency of peace meetings means that they become regimes of governance and spaces in which power is negotiated and performed.8 Cherry Leonardi, ‘Points of Order? Local Government Meetings as Negotiation Tables in South Sudanese History’, Journal of Eastern African Studies 9:4 (2015): 650–668. Peace is then not a rigid rupture between times of war and peace, or between old and new regimes. Instead, it is part of the continuous political negotiation of power and legitimacy.

At the same time, the regimes of governance imposed by peace-making do not always make moral and spiritual sense. For those experiencing this peace-making, it can be as illegitimate, arbitrary, spiritually dangerous, violent and exclusive as times of war. Peace agreements have often involved governments recoding violence to try to make their violence legitimate and to allow them to carry out violence with impunity. Peace also relies on ‘“power over”, or the ability to coerce, sanction or discipline others into accepting an accord’.9 P. L. Chinn and A. Falk-Rafael, ‘Peace and Power: A Theory of Emancipatory Group Process’. Journal of Nursing Scholarship 47:1 (2015): 62–69. Importantly, demands for peace amount to claims to power and legitimacy.10 Roger Mac Ginty and Oliver Richmond, ‘The Local Turn in Peace Building: A Critical Agenda for Peace. Third World Quarterly 34:5 (2013): 763–783; Séverine Autesserre, Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention (Cambridge University Press, 2014); Mac Ginty, ‘Hybrid Peace; Gearoid Millar, ‘For Whom do Local Peace Processes Function? Maintaining Control through Conflict Management’, Cooperation and Conflict 52:3 (2017): 293–308. As divinity is associated with impunity, peace-making therefore often amounts to the making of divine governments and is a political act in the cosmic polity.

At the same time, if the polity is a cosmic polity, other divine authorities have unique opportunities to restrain the powers and impunity of governments. Other divine powers can contest and co-opt not only the physical power of the governments, but they can also ‘creatively remake’ moral and spiritual power idioms to ‘refuse’ governments’ interpretative labour that claims that they can step outside of moral and legal codes, and act with impunity.11 This invokes ideas about ‘culture as creative refusal’ by David Graeber: ‘Culture as Creative Refusal’, Cambridge Anthropology 31:2 (2013): 1–19. If the contestation is cosmic, other divine powers have a significant role to play in making war or peace.

Religious ideas infuse politics around the globe, and politics is rarely secular.12 Massoud describes Rule of Law in apparently secular liberal democracies as akin to a religious belief. See: Mark Fathi Massoud. ‘Theology of the Rule of Law’, Hague Journal on the Rule of Law, HJRL 11:2/3 (2019): 485–491. Colonial-era anthropological scholarship that has focused on religious belief in South Sudan could be accused of perpetuating racist, colonial distinctions and categories. However, discussion of the hakuma as divine in this book is about linking these South Sudanese ideas to common global patterns. The government of the UK also, implicitly, claims divine kingship, although this is not the focus of this book. In South Sudan, there has long been ‘religiously infused political thought’ and South Sudanese have long seen their difficult history as a ‘spiritual chronicle’.13 Christopher Tounsel, Chosen Peoples: Christianity and Political Imagination in South Sudan (Duke University Press, 2021), pages 3, 14. The spheres of politics and religion have not been discrete.14 Tounsel, Chosen Peoples. Additionally, still scattered through South Sudanese politics are acts that evoke divine authority in quests for political legitimacy. South Sudanese President Salva Kiir was compared to the biblical Joshua.15 Ibid. Vice President and sometimes armed opposition leader Riek Machar received the dang (ceremonial stick)16 Johnson has translated dang as ‘baton’, as well as ‘ceremonial stick’, and notes that scripturally minded Nuer translate it as ‘rod’. Douglas Johnson, ‘The Return of Ngundeng’s Dang’, Sudan Studies Journal (Sudan Studies Association, 2009). of the late and famous Nuer prophet, Ngundeng Bong. Both Kiir and Machar also have ancestors that wielded notable divine authority in their home areas.

However, the entanglement of the divine and politics is not simply because rulers identify themselves with supernatural beings. Graeber and Sahlins have argued that government claims of impunity to kill in themselves mean that all contemporary governments, anywhere in the world, invoke ideas of divine kingship. Governments ‘make themselves the equivalent of gods – arbitrary, all-powerful beings beyond human morality – through the use of arbitrary violence’.17 Graeber and Sahlins, On Kings, page 81. Globally, because of governments’ claims to sovereignty, which is essentially a claim to be able to carry out arbitrary violence with impunity, there is a historically contingent but globally common divine nature of sovereignty. World-over, including in Europe and the USA, the division between cosmology and politics is false, as claims of government sovereignty are claims of divinity. When governments and states execute favour, or destruction, or when they demand war or peace, with arbitrariness and impunity, they are setting themselves ‘outside the confines of the human’ and acting as if they were god.18 Graeber and Sahlins, On Kings.

Such implicit claims of divine power are not based on arbitrary violence alone but a broad acceptance of impunity for this violence. Brute force and violence can be so overwhelming that this in itself makes accountability hard to fathom. At the same time, the cosmic nature of politics entangles governments in the rituals, symbols, and spiritual and moral pollution of people’s cosmologies. Governments can claim impunity through engagement in the remaking of the cultural archives,19 Wendy James. The Listening Ebony: Moral Knowledge, Religion and Power among the Uduk of Sudan (Clarendon, 1988). and the moral and spiritual order. As human societies are part of ‘a cosmic polity populated by beings of human attributes and metahuman powers who govern the people’s fate’,20 Graeber and Sahlins, On Kings, page 2. governments become part of the contests of the gods. Peace-making can be part of these contested claims and cosmic contestations.

Throughout this book, I borrow from Leonardi and Hutchinson in describing ‘government’ in South Sudan as a broad socio-political sphere, not limited to the government of the day, but including ‘a bundle of influences and symbols’ that encompass ‘armies and the military cultures originally introduced by the Turco-Egyptian army in the 19th century’, and that include contemporary government and armed opposition institutions and actors.21 Cherry Leonardi, ‘“Liberation” or Capture: Youth in between “Hakuma”, and “Home” during Civil War and its Aftermath in Southern Sudan’, African Affairs 106:424 (2007), page 394. Throughout the book I use the common, Arabic-derived, South Sudanese term for government – ‘hakuma’ – to denote this broad government/socio-political sphere (which, for example, includes foreign traders and slavers), while ‘government’ is used to refer to the specific government of the time.

The hakuma came to be understood as divine in South Sudan as a result of colonial era rule, their arbitrary and unbounded violence and the global legacy of these conceptions of ‘government’. In Southern Sudan, for at least a century and a half, including through colonial rule and decades of war, hakuma have inflicted predatory, arbitrary and excessive violence. This arbitrary violence has also occurred as part of the political economies in times of apparent ‘peace’.22 Nicki Kindersley and Diing Majok, Breaking Out of the Borderlands: Understanding Migrant Pathways from Northern Bahr el-Ghazal, South Sudan (Rift Valley Institute, 2021), https://riftvalley.net/publication/breaking-out-borderlands-understanding-migrant-pathways-northern-bahr-el-ghazal-south, accessed 5 December 2020; Jovensia Uchalla, Trading Grains in South Sudan: Stories of Opportunities, Shocks and Changing Tastes (Rift Valley Institute, 2020), https://riftvalley.net/publication/trading-grains-south-sudan-stories-opp ortunities-shocks-and-changing-tastes, accessed 6 December 2020; Edward Thomas, South Sudan: A Slow Liberation (Zed Books, 2015); Craze, ‘Displaced and Immiserated’; Joshua Craze, The Politics of Numbers: On Security Sector Reform in South Sudan, 2005–2020 (LSE, 2021), www.lse.ac.uk/africa/assets/Documents/Politics-of-Numbers-Joshua-Craze.pdf, accessed 6 December 2020. Therefore, hakuma, and the global political economies in which they are entangled, have been a considerable obstacle to peace and protection. They display a violence that most South Sudanese have little power to limit or repeat. South Sudanese histories are a brutal example of the semi-divine claims of the hakuma, and South Sudanese have often equated governments to other divine authorities and institutions.

In South Sudan, the last century and a half of hakuma violence has not only caused excessive harm, but has also been accompanied by interpretative labour that claims these hakuma can kill and carry out arbitrary violence with impunity. Theorists such as Agamben and Schmitt have argued that prerogatives of statehood involve claims of ability to suspend the legal and moral order,23 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford University Press, 1998); Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, translated by George Schwab (University of Chicago Press, 2005 [1922]). and sovereignty is marked by the power to kill with impunity.24 Thomas B. Hansen and Finn Stepputat (eds), Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Postcolonial World (Princeton University Press, 2005). As Hutchinson has described, over the last century, governments in South Sudan have repeatedly claimed powers to kill with impunity, in times of war and in times of peace, and to declare their acts as ‘void of all social, moral and spiritual consequences for perpetrators’.25 Hutchinson, Nuer Dilemmas, page 58.

Many of the assertions of the hakuma to have the power to kill with impunity, without moral, spiritual or legal consequence, have taken place in legal or quasi-legal forums, such as local courts and peace meetings. Law can be a political weapon and form of social control.26 Mark Fathi Massoud, Law’s Fragile State: Colonial, Authoritarian, and Humanitarian Legacies in Sudan (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Jens Meierhenrich, The Remnants of the Rechtsstaat: An Ethnography of Nazi Law (Oxford University Press, 2018). From the early twentieth century, governments in South Sudan attempted to absorb into government-backed legal regimes existing religiously shaped ideas about how to make peace, such as through compensation and sacrifice. The law became an important tool of control for these colonial governments,27 Massoud, Law’s Fragile State. and courts and peace meetings were used to normalise governments’ exception from legal restraint, including in times of war. Governments have tried to set themselves outside of the law, and have made other divine authority figures subject to the law. As Massoud writes of British colonialism in Sudan, foreign officials were conscious ‘of the power of religion in people’s lives and in politics’ making it ‘vital’ in any legal reform project.28 Ibid. Based on North American and European ideas, exported through colonial rule and more contemporary international organisations, religion was something to be governed by law, and law itself was to be seen as a higher power.29 Ibid., page 489. Massoud goes as far as equating the authority of law and God as the power and legitimacy of both are based on people’s faith.30 Ibid., page 490.

Importantly, the hakuma being supranatural is not synonymous with the distance or absence of the hakuma. Literature on failed states and weak governments has understood conflict as caused by the absence of the hakuma. However, for many South Sudanese, the hakuma is entangled in their daily lives and life-changing decisions, even in the most remote areas. Through chiefs’ courts and taxes, the hakuma is part of the most intimate parts of life. Yet, this does not exclude its divinity. In the cosmic orders of many South Sudanese, the divine dwells above in the sky, but also speaks to and seizes people, and becomes entangled in everyday lives. To be divine is to be set apart and socially distinct, but this does not mean to be absent or physically distant.