Globally, frustrations with elite peace processes had encouraged a local turn in peace-making.
1 Roger Mac Ginty and Oliver P. Richmond, ‘The Local Turn in Peace Building: A Critical Agenda for Peace’, Third World Quarterly 34:5 (2013): 763–783. The NSCC’s initiation of the Wunlit process in the homelands of key Southern elites and factions was seen as an opportunity to make peace from below. The reconciliation of Garang and Riek, just over a year after Wunlit, allowed this process to be hailed as a success for the ability of local peace to force elite reconciliation.
This Wunlit peace process was presented as a ‘grassroots’ movement, based on the instrumentalisation of ‘traditional peacebuilding techniques’,
2 New Sudan Council of Churches, The Story of People-to-People Peacemaking in Southern Sudan (NSCC, 2002), page 55. and as an effort at the ‘revitalization of the Nuer culture and systems of governance’.
3 William O. Lowrey, ‘Passing the Peace … People to People: The Role of Religion in an Indigenous Peace Process among the Nuer People of Sudan’ (PhD diss., Union Institute Graduate School, 1995). Church leaders encouraged chiefs to reflect on how their ancestors had historically dealt with conflicts and restored peace.
4 New Sudan Council of Churches, The Story of People-to-People Peacemaking, page 55. While Lowrey explicitly recognised the wartime changes to the culture, the assumption was that a pre-existing culture could be re-discovered and asserted to bring peace.
As scholars have long discussed, there is no such thing as ‘traditional society’.
5 Georg Elwert and Thomas Bierschenk, ‘Development Aid as Intervention in Dynamic Systems’, Sociologia Ruralis 28:2/3 (1988): 99–112, page 99. If ‘traditional’ or ‘customary’ were understood as an ‘ideal type’ that was contrasted with change, the ‘modern’ and ‘the state’, it did not exist.
6 Comaroff and Comaroff, ‘Chiefs, Capital, and the State’. After all, ‘custom’ and ‘tradition’ were often ‘invented’ or constructed, including to support colonial or authoritarian regimes.
7 Terence Ranger, ‘The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa’, in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds) The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 1983): 211–262. For recent discussions, see: Kasper Hoffmann, Koen Vlassenroot and Emery Mudinga, ‘Courses au pouvoir: The Struggle Over Customary Capital in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo’, Journal of Eastern African Studies 14:1 (2020): 125–144; Judith Verweijen and Vicky Van Bockhaven, ‘Revisiting Colonial Legacies in Knowledge Production on Customary Authority in Central and East Africa’, Journal of Eastern African Studies 14:1 (2020): 1–23. Yet, ‘invention’ was never simple and powerful authorities always had to enter into a process of messy contested co-production.
8 Comaroff and Comaroff, ‘Chiefs, Capital, and the State’; Cooper, ‘Conflict and Connection’; Feierman, Peasant Intellectuals; Spear; ‘Neo-traditionalism’; Stoler and Cooper, ‘Between Metropole and Colony’. So ‘custom’ and ‘tradition’ both inform and are shaped by everyday practice. Following the arguments of Graeber, evoking a ‘tradition’ can also be an act of cultural refusal that contests authoritarian rule.
In reality, while Wunlit was presented as ‘tradition’, it changed the logics of peace-making and re-crafted ‘customs’ in order to reshape political hierarchies, social identities and possibilities of peace. The language of the ‘customary’ helped naturalise these changes. This chapter will discuss how Wunlit; performed tradition, increasing the authority of the church and made other priests sacred; made identity more inclusive by ignoring the dead; and removed the judicial logic of peace.