There is a continued disagreement over how to understand the wars that erupted from 2013. Diplomats, aid workers and journalists have often narrated the conflict in ethnic terms, with the war being a war of the Nuer and Dinka, and more recently a war of the Equatorians versus the Dinka. Pinaud offers a more nuanced account of ethnicity’s role in the wars by linking ethnicity to class.
1 Clémence Pinaud, War and Genocide in South Sudan (Cornell University Press, 2021). She argues that ethnically exclusive and predatory wealth accumulation was key in fostering ethnic group entitlement and an ideology or ethnic supremacy. She claims that this led to genocidal violence in 2013 that triggered the following decade of war. However, others have contested whether ethnicity really is the dividing line between wartime alliances. Johnson and Craze’s detailed work on the histories of alliances highlighted how the divisions between warring factions were often divisions between former SPLA and former anti-SPLA forces. The wartime divisions of the post-2013 period mirrored those of the 1990s.
2 Johnson, ‘Briefing: The Crisis in South Sudan’; Joshua Craze, ‘“And Everything Became War”: Warrap State Since the Signing of the R-ARCSS’, HSBA Briefing Paper (Small Arms Survey, 2022).De Waal’s 2014 description of a South Sudanese kleptocratic elite quickly gained saliency among diplomats and humanitarian donors as the alternative narrative to understand the wars in South Sudan. According to de Waal, South Sudan is governed by a political marketplace in which power is demanded through armed rebellion and loyalties are bought with money. Armed rebellions are a way to seek a place at the peace-making table and rent in this market.
3 de Waal, ‘When Kleptocracy Becomes Insolvent’. Having been removed from government in mid-2013, Machar and others rebel to show that they need to be bought back, through money, into the government. The decade of wars after 2013 are wars in which rebellions repeatedly ignite and in which alliances of politico-military leaders frequently change, suggesting loyalties are as fluid as marketplace transactions. The years of war following December 2013 did cement the political and military power of Salva Kiir and his cadre. If there is a political marketplace among South Sudan’s leadership, it was not that Salva Kiir did not ‘have the required skills’,
4 Ibid., page 347. but rather that he was a master of the art.
Works by Craze, Kindersley and Majok, Thomas, Nyaba and Uchalla have instead highlighted the structures of the political economy over decades that have given rise to the forms of government that caused these wars.
5 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-opportunities-shocks-and-changing-tastes, accessed 6 December 2020; Peter Nyaba, The Politics of Liberation in South Sudan: An Insider’s View (Fountain Publishers, 1996); Edward Thomas, South Sudan: A Slow Liberation (Zed Books, 2015); Joshua Craze, ‘Displaced and Immiserated: The Shilluk of Upper Nile in South Sudan’s Civil War, 2014–2019’ (Small Arms Survey, 2019), www.smallarmssurveysudan.org/fileadmin/docs/reports/HSBA-Report-South-Sudan-Shilluk.pdf, accessed 5 April 2020; 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. The post-CPA period saw the marketisation and monetarisation of society, with increasing inequities in South Sudan. The war was ‘rooted in long-established patterns of authoritarian, violent, and extractive governance of the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial periods, which concentrated economic and political power at the centre’.
6 Øystein Rolandsen and Nicki Kindersley, South Sudan: A Political Economy Analysis (Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, 2017), page 4. Pinaud described the emergence of a ‘military aristocracy’
7 Clemence Pinaud, ‘South Sudan: Civil War, Predation and the Making of a Military Aristocracy’, African Affairs 113:451 (2014): 192–211. and D’Agoôt the ‘gun class’, partly as a result of the wealth and power given to elites by 2005 CPA.
8 Majak D’Agoôt, ‘Taming the Dominant Gun Class in South Sudan’ (2018), https://africacenter.org/spotlight/taming-the-dominant-gun-class-in-south-sudan, accessed 10 December 2017.A key result of the wars since 2013 has been Salva Kiir’s and his cadre’s remaking of the military arena of South Sudan to cement his control over government. The years from 2013 saw the demise of the SPLA and the rise of an armed forced with a more direct loyalty to Salva Kiir. As scholars have highlighted, globally it is no longer the case that state pursue a monopoly over the use of force, and private armed groups, often termed militias or vigilantes, are often key to regime security itself.
9 Rebecca Tapscott, ‘Vigilantes and the State: Understanding Violence through a Security Assemblages Approach’. Perspectives on Politics (2021): 1–16; Lynette Ong, ‘“Thugs-for-Hire”: Subcontracting of State Coercion and State Capacity in China’. Perspectives on Politics 16:3 (2018): 680–695; Sana Jaffrey, ‘In the State’s Stead? Vigilantism and Policing of Religious Offence in Indonesia’, in Thomas Power and Eve Warburton (eds), Democracy in Indonesia: From Stagnation to Regression? (ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute, 2020): 303–325. In the neo-liberal global shift towards privatisation, the security of the government itself is privatised. In the context of South Sudan, the potential fluidity of the security arena has allowed Salva Kiir to oversee the rise of military forces more directly loyal to him and to move away from an SPLA that had been shaped by Garang.
In the 1980s–2000s, Kiir, like others, had contested parts of Garang’s leadership. Part of Kiir’s ability to counter and sustain his position despite Garang’s power was the recruitment of the supportive
titweng and
gelweng (armed cattle guards) in different parts of Greater Bahr el Ghazal. These were proxy SPLA forces defending against Sudan Armed Forces attacks, but they also swelled the number of forces that Kiir could command, giving him a stronger bargaining tool within the SPLA itself. The benefit of directly loyal forces was also apparent after the 2006 Juba Declaration when Paulino Matip allowed Kiir to benefit from the loyalty of his forces and provide his regime with a military backstop. On Garang’s death in 2005, Kiir had inherited a patchwork of alliances shaped by Garang that dominated the SPLA, and Matip’s forces allowed Kiir to counter this. Then, from 2012, recruitment started in Bahr el Ghazal for a force from the region that would be more directly loyal to Salva Kiir. Since 2012, this has included Mathiang Anyoor, the Presidential Guard (Tiger Battalion) and forces of the National Security Service.
10 Alan Boswell, ‘Insecure Power and Violence: The Rise and Fall of Paul Malong and the Mathiang Anyoor’, Briefing Paper (Small Arms Survey, 2019).One way to understand the wars since 2013 is not as a battle between the armed opposition and government, but instead a violent remaking of the whole security arena. In 2012, the SPLA had refused to allow Salva Kiir to absorb the Mathiang Anyoor in to the national army. A decade later, the majority of the SPLA was weak, unpaid, fractured and frustrated. Instead, a small number of battalions that were like the Mathiang Anyoor, in that they had a more direct loyalty to Salva Kiir and his cadre, make up the real armed forces. Moments of war when seen as apparent chaos can mask the reality that it is a moment of re-ordering and establishing new clarity about hierarchies.
11 Stephen Lubkemann, Culture in Chaos: An Anthropology of the Social Condition in War (Chicago University Press, 2008). For South Sudanese, these forces still implicitly claim to be the same as the gods, as previous governments, in that they rain favour and destruction. At the same time, the way they are recruited often blurs the line between the home and the
hakuma.