At the same time, for many engaged in these wars, they were not simply about a battle for control of the security arena. A striking feature of December 2013 and early 2014, was the speed with which armed conflict spread across Juba and then South Sudan. Rapid communications, including through mobile phone networks, allowed eyewitnesses of the violence in Juba to report instantly their interpretations of what they had seen to their home communities hundreds of miles away. People in the capital city were entangled, through families, networks of belonging and government, with people in the most distant, rural areas of South Sudan.
South Sudanese interpreted the physical, lethal violence in Juba as intimately linked to historical conflicts as continuities of their ongoing experiences of lethal violence and government claims of impunity. They interpreted news of events in Juba in relation to histories of armed conflict, ongoing lethal violence and contested logics of peace, and within dynamic moral, spiritual and legal frameworks of legitimate response that had been re-crafted in recent processes of peace. This prompted an almost spontaneous mobilisation of warring forces.
A perpetual puzzle in explaining conflicts that have clear benefits to certain elites is understanding why soldiers or armed men are mobilised to fight when their political and economic interests seem to be so diverse from these politico-economic elites.
1 David Keen, Complex Emergencies (Polity Press, 2007). The elite class of the
hakuma in South Sudan in 2013 had a significant economic disparity with South Sudanese from their home areas, and yet elite rivalries still prompted the mobilisation of vast forces. The mobilisation of armed men is particularly hard to understand as the costs of fighting were so high, including high risks of a brutal, burial-less, battlefield death. For some soldiers who have fought in recent years, the realities of predatory forced recruitment make this an irrelevant question; they fought as they were violently recruited and had no option to do otherwise. Yet, many young men opted to fight in the South Sudan’s 2013–18 wars.
Political and economic inequalities and grievances do help us understand why people agree to fight.
2 Peter Adwok Nyaba, ‘The Fundamental Problems of South Sudan: How to Sustain Peace and Conditions of Socioeconomic Development’, The Zambakari Advisory: Special Issue (2019): 20–24. At the same time, those who have implemented violence in these ways have repeatedly explained their mobilisation as motivated by revenge. Analysis that focuses on the political economy usually sees religious and moral narratives as a by-product of these more fundamental, political economy dynamics. For those from the Bilynang River System (as well as elsewhere, whatever side they were fighting on), revenge and fighting to appease the demands of the dead have been a dominant part of the rallying cry to war for both those fighting for government and those fighting for the armed opposition. Conflict as revenge can conceal underlying dynamics, but to ignore the dominance of this discourse also ignores the importance of the normative and cosmological order in mobilising people to war.
Narratives of revenge can clearly be instrumentalised by political elites to mobilise South Sudanese to fight. However, at the same time, interviews with armed men about revenge repeatedly incited duties of revenge that are embedded in moral and cosmological systems. The years before had seen divine authorities actively draw on cultural archives to reassert the spiritual consequences of killing, and conflict was now seen in such terms. If we dismiss revenge as only an instrumental mobilisation, we miss the deep, invasive remaking of normative and cosmological systems by governments and divine authorities over time. We also miss how people can push back against the hakuma through enacting revenge against the government, challenging elite assumptions of their own impunity.
Revenge should be understood as part of a historically contingent moral norm embedded in other beliefs and cosmological assertions, and potentially part of the creative remaking of the cultural archive as an act of refusal. While such ‘norms’ are never ‘natural’ in that they do not occur irrespective of history, they have the greatest social power when they are ‘naturalised’ and operate at an unreflective level.
3 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Routledge, 1984). These norms are often naturalised through evoking the cultural archive. Normative orders are sometimes explicitly revised, and public authorities can attempt to intentionally manipulate them to their advantage. Yet, there is explicit resistance, as well as the conservative nature of social norms.
In his research on the Mai Mai rebel group in DRC, Hoffman has described how ‘the mythico-religious values and beliefs were reprocessed into political values’, having ‘powerful politico-epistemological effects on how rebels organized themselves and related to civilians through rebel governance’.
4 Kasper Hoffmann, ‘Myths Set in Motion: The Moral Economy of Mai Mai Governance’, in Ana Arjona, Nelson Kasfir and Zachariah Mampilly (eds), Rebel Governance in Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2015), page 160. For 2013, we can again see this reprocessing of ideas of compensation and revenge. Revenge is never an explanation of conflict in itself, nor is it indicative of a Hobbesian propensity to violence in the absence of the state.
5 Katy Migiro, ‘Aid Groups Raise Fears of Escalating Violence in South Sudan’ (Reuters, 21 May 2015); Mary Kaldor, ‘In Defence of New Wars’, Stability: International Journal of Security and Development 2:1 (2013): 1–16; Paul Richards, ‘To Fight or to Farm? Agrarian Dimensions of the Mano River Conflicts (Liberia and Sierra Leone)’, African Affairs 104:417 (2005), page 3. As previously discussed, Stewart and Strathern have demonstrated how concepts of feuding and revenge are transformed through dialectic interaction with political circumstances. ‘We are dealing with old ideas recycled through new political circumstances and themselves changing rapidly as a result, often becoming heightened rather than disappearing’.
6 Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew. J. Strathern, Violence: Theory and Ethnography (Continuum, 2002), page 12. For Stewart and Strathern, ‘[i]t is, in effect, the result of the existence of state structures and the mutual impingement of local and national processes that feuding systems cannot realise their own larger cyclicities of violence and peace-making’.
7 Ibid., page 13. In December 2013, South Sudanese recourse to revenge was a product of people’s understanding of death, life, war, peace and revenge itself, which was embedded in cosmologies and struggles for authority, and which had been contested and worked out (and was still being worked out) over the previous century and through the post-CPA years. As explained in previous chapters, the post-CPA era and peace agreements during this time had cemented the repeated lack of compensation for deaths in violent conflict. The hakuma had stopped, or not reinstated, judicial peace, effectively creating a legally entrenched ethnic division. Prophets and priests had contested these shifts. There was an eagerness to reinstate the moral and cosmological community that did not allow anyone to kill with impunity (with the exception of the divine) and that did not ignore the demand of the dead for justice. However, the hakuma had impacted the logics of peace and many now see a ‘hot’ peace of violence as the only option.
In terms of the armed opposition, the rallying call to mobilisation was explicitly a call to revenge. Those who took up arms against the government in December 2013 rallied around the quickly spread claim that 20,000 Nuer had been killed by government forces in Juba.
8 Pendle, ‘The “Nuer of Dinka Money”’. The actual number is still unclear.
The demand for revenge for Nuer dead also re-created a moral community of the Nuer.
9 Ibid. Ethnicities are always historically contingent and change over time.
10 John Lonsdale, ‘Moral & Political Argument in Kenya’, in Bruce Berman, Will Kymlicka and Dickson Eyoh (eds), Ethnicity & Democracy in Africa (James Currey, 2004): 73–95. In attempts to remake their constituencies, political leaders often seek to shape identities.
11 Alex de Waal, Somalia’s Disassembled State: Clan Formation and the Political Marketplace (World Peace Foundation, 2019), abstract. At the same time, leaders cannot fully control the way that identities are shaped.
12 Koen Vlassenroot, ‘Citizenship, Identity Formation & Conflict in South Kivu: The Case of the Banyamulenge’, Review of African Political Economy 29:93–94 (2007): 499–516. Not only may others in society and with power try to shape identities, but identities are also restrained by pervading social habits that are only slowly reshaped over time.
13 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups’, Theory and Society 14:6 (1985): 723–744. Identities can sit beneath ‘consciousness and choice’.
14 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field’, Sociological Theory 12:1 (1994), page 15. As highlighted in Toby Dodge, ‘“Bourdieu goes to Baghdad”: Explaining Hybrid Political Identities in Iraq’, Journal of Historical Sociology 31:1 (2018): 25–38. They can also be subject to sudden rupture in times of war.
15 Adam Baczko, Giles Dorronsoro and Arthur Quesnay, Civil War in Syria: Mobilization and Competing Social Orders (Cambridge University Press, 2017). The formation of identities and polities, including ethnicities, can be driven by the way violence is organised.
16 de Waal, Somalia’s Disassembled State.The framing of the post-December 2013 conflict as a ‘war of revenge’ against the killing of Nuer remade the Nuer into a kinship-like community in which Nuer had kinship-like obligations to each other.
17 Pendle, ‘The “Nuer of Dinka Money”’. This moral logic of treating fellow Nuer as kinsmen was not a new concept and it had been naturalised during Wunlit and the post-CPA period (as discussed in Chapter 8). The implication of this new vision of the Nuer community was that military labour was not commodified but instead subject to the moral expectations of kinship.
It was not simply that politico-military leaders used cultural archives to incite violence in the moment, but that cultural archives had been politically reshaped over decades. In many ways, the mobilisation of the armed opposition in late 2013 and early 2014 was a bottom-up process driven by popular demand for an anti-government response, and not controlled by the leadership in that moment. At the same time, the popular demand for an anti-government war was shaped by pre-existing norms, moral expectations and the cultural archive that had been politically influenced over the previous decades. The popular call to arms against the government was not just to defend the Nuer from government force, but also to revenge for the acts carried out in Juba in December 2013.
18 John Young, Isolation and Endurance: Riek Machar and the SPLM-IO in 2016–17 (Small Arms Survey, 2017). The nascent opposition leadership did not construct notions of revenge in that moment, but people’s demand for revenge was the product of the slow evolution of norms of revenge during the 1980s, 1990s and into the post-2005 peace. The previous decades had remade norms of revenge and made it possible to imagine the post-December 2013 conflict as a ‘war of revenge’.
19 Naomi Pendle, ‘“The Dead are Just to Drink From”’: Recycling Ideas of Revenge among the Western Dinka, South Sudan’, Africa 88:1 (2018): 99–121.For the armed opposition, the rapid mobilisation of anti-government forces in the army and communities created the movement and mobilised armed labour. Yet, it had disadvantages for Machar’s vision of opposition. He had been eager to mobilise an opposition that was broader than the Nuer and the building of a pan-Nuer identity around revenge was undermining his attempt to build a cross-ethnic constituency of support.