In both Tonj North and Mayen Jur, peace was violent. Divine authority figures with the power to threaten a lethal curse were crucial for making the possibility of peace imaginable. The hakuma demanded peace, but it repeatedly turned to other divine authorities in order to support their demand for peace. People feared the power of the curse in the moment and took seriously not only the ritual performances but the possibility of lethal punishment. In Tonj North, people fled the bany e bith’s spear. In Mayen Jur, a prophet and bany e bith managed to bring communities together. They also insisted on a reimagining of wartime relations as law- governed, forcing the war to not be a period devoid of moral norms.
Despite the power of the curse, the peace was not able to resist political interference and competing demands, driven by shifting political economies to reimagine wars as unending. Fears of being politically disempowered and others’ political interests intermingled to produce new armed conflict. The wars in both Tonj North and Mayen Jur had used patterns of violence that violated all norms and codes of war, and that, therefore, made peace less possible. The wars had been fought as if they were unending, and armed conflict was easily aggravated when people’s cosmological expectations were not met. In this context of the making of unending wars, peace was not only violent in that it was enforced through violence, but also because it often demonstrated the hakuma’s arbitrary inclinations to switch between demands for war and demands for peace.