For people in Unity State, armed conflict continued after the CPA both within Unity State and against forces and communities in Warrap and Lakes State. The ambiguities of the CPA left contestation and confusion over who should have the power of the hakuma in Unity State. For people living there, it meant that this era was still intermittently a time of mobilisation, attacks and offensives. People watched closely the fluctuating alliances within the hakuma, navigating how to stay safe despite this violence. Again, the peace of the CPA was violent.
At the same time, what was clear was that the post-2005 armed conflict was not discrete from the divisions of the 1980s and 1990s, nor from the reconfiguring of these contestations through the CPA. There was continuity and not rupture. One way that this was expressed was to describe the continuity of cosmic norms and cosmic politics during this period. A noticeable feature in Koch County was the absence of a prophet of MAANI – the divinity who was dominant from the 1920s–1970s through the prophets Kolang Ket and Nyaruac Kolang. The absence of MAANI in a time of such need explained the lack of peace and possibilities of purity. ‘Nilotic societies normally treat God as a force profoundly distant and removed from the human world’.
1 David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins, On Kings (HAU Books, 2017), page 89. Yet, by seizing prophets, divinities could be present to support people. MAANI’s abandoning of his people during a time of such hardship required explanation. A dominant explanation was that the community was now too polluted, from the previous decades of war, to allow MAANI to come. MAANI demanded a higher level of moral and spiritual purity. Peace would not be found through remaking political alliances, but through the remaking of moral purity. In the cosmic contests, the fights of the gods of the
hakuma were beneath this cosmic demand for a space where the divinity could dwell. Peace was violent as the cosmic polities had not been remade as peaceful and pure.