By the 1920s and 1930s, the cosmic politics of peace was taking new, but not necessarily less violent, forms. As elsewhere in its empire, British colonial officials sought to use law as a tool of governance, and the law was imposed through violence or the threat of violence. Through the law, the hakuma claimed its authority to kill with impunity. Death sentences were introduced for those who reopened feuds or who engaged in conflict. The hakuma’s legal peace was a physically and lethally violent peace, but a violence that the hakuma tried to limit to only being implemented by itself. Baany e biith continued to contest government power to kill with impunity, even by killing trees where government hangings were going to take place. Yet, ultimately the government’s militarised might allowed it to insist on legal peace – a ‘peace’ that permitted its own lethal violence but not the lethal violence of others.
Importantly these decades also cemented the primacy of law and the inclusion of compensation in the making of peace. Peace was still made when purity was restored through the exchange of cattle. Yet, purity now involved a form of legal compliance. To not accept peace was now an illegal act; conflict became a technical case for the law, and not a political negotiation between parties.
The implications for cosmic politics in the Bilnyang’s communities was the hedging in of divine authorities by making them subordinate to the customary law and legal institutions. Divine authorities lost control over the boundaries and occurrence of war or peace, and instead became restricted by standardised law. The government demonstrated its control over the law both through the standardisation of the law, and also through its insistence on the accepting of compensation through legal institutions. The histories of Nyuaruac Kolang and Giiir Thiik both narrate a local understanding of the government weakening divine power not through direct violent opposition but through recognition and co-opting of this divine power. The hakuma, in Graeber’s words, was making the divine ‘sacred’ by making divine authorities subject to the law.