The peace meetings were repeatedly organised and sanctioned by senior government figures, and often had a significant presence of army personnel and their weaponry. While the chiefs numerically dominated and were repeatedly the signatories of the agreements, it was also clear that these meetings were initiated by commissioners, governors and government in Juba, and enforced with their militarised power. Peace meetings relied on the will of the hakuma, and the hakuma was free to demand peace. The visible displays of weapons and soldiers at meetings demonstrated the government’s brute strength. These displays could easily be equated with Condominium displays of power that were used to demand peace in Greater Gogrial nearly a century before. Peace meetings were repeatedly used as a forum by commissioners, governors and commanders to demand compliance to new orders. For example, at the 2018 Ajiep Peace Conference, the governor communicated the prohibition of meetings of more than five people in order to discourage opportunities to mobilise. His display of military firepower reminded people that he had lethal power to enforce this ruling.
Peace meetings were also a chance for the
hakuma to remind people of their potential for arbitrary violence. For example, by the time of the 2018 Ajiep Peace Conference, the UN was criticising the governor for summary executions. The governor made it clear that future executions were still possible. He justified the previous executions based on the young men refusing to give themselves up for arrest. The senior army figure present also described how, decades before in a neighbouring state, he had had two people beheaded, and their heads buried, to discourage others from fighting. He recognised that, if the world had seen the army behaving like this, they would have said they were animals.
1 General Dau, 20 April 2018. Yet, in many ways, they were not asserting their likeness to animals, but to gods, as they could carry out this violence with impunity.
The presence of the army was also used to test compliance. Chiefs were repeatedly ordered to feed the army from their communities.
2 Ibid. This brought further hunger to families already struggling to find enough food. In Ajiep in 2018, the governor and commander asserted that the army would remain present in Gogrial for a long period. The governor illustrated this by telling soldiers to start finding fields to cultivate for food, implying that they would be there for at least six months until the harvest.
3 Governor’s speech at Ajiep Peace Conference.Peace meetings were also a chance for the government to not only display militarised might, but to assert their epistemic powers both through their knowledge of their home area as well as their knowledge of writing and the ways of the hakuma. While discussions at the peace meetings were openly critical of government, government officials and NGO workers (broadly associated with the sphere of the hakuma) wrote the minutes and terms of the peace. Written documents were associated with hakuma and most of the chiefs and others attending could not write or read. This allowed the government to re-craft and perform their preferred consensus through these written documents. The hakuma claimed power by its rulings being incomprehensible and by them demonstrating that they were cleverer.
Through peace meetings, the government also asserted its authority by trying to regulate MABIORDIT, asserting the government’s impunity to commit violence, promoting a non-judicial peace and quietening the dead.