Conclusion: The Cosmic Politics of Peace in South Sudan

The rivalries of the cosmic polity pre-date the coming of the hakuma, but the god-like nature has made the hakuma a dominant player in this arena. This book has highlighted how, since the coming of the hakuma in the mid-nineteenth century, the ability to rain arbitrary favour and destruction, including war and peace, with impunity, has been a key feature of what the hakuma is in South Sudan. Therefore, for those living around the Bilnyang and connected rivers, from the coming of the social and political sphere of the hakuma in the mid-nineteenth century, the hakuma has been god-like. The various forms of hakuma have not explicitly claimed to be divine, but their ability to rain favour or destruction, life or death, peace and war, with arbitrariness and impunity, place them in the cosmic polity. In the cosmologies of the Nuer and Dinka, this was enough to make the hakuma appear to be divine – or at least claiming to be divine. This tallies with Graeber and Sahlin’s descriptions of all global governments being god-like because of the contingent histories of our world. Therefore, by the late nineteenth century in Southern Sudan, in the political imaginary, the hakuma were established as part of the cosmic polity.

The hakuma’s ability to demand peace, as much as its ability to kill or demand war, can also be arbitrary, violent and an assertion of divine-like powers. Peace meetings and agreements often lead to upsurges in physical violence in the everyday lives of South Sudanese. Yet, in addition, since the colonial period, peace-making in South Sudan has often involved hakuma demands over the logics, terms and conditions of peace. Peace meetings and peace-making have often been a space to remake and reinterpret the cultural archive. The terms of hakuma-backed peace often demand the impunity of the hakuma and demand compliance with the peace through military threat. Peace then becomes violent not only because of any direct physical violence, but because it entrenches the power of the hakuma to demand its own impunity for killing, war and peace. The hakuma is not restricted, and its potential for violence remains.

The god-like nature of the hakuma is not indicative of its distance or absence. Nilotic cosmologies often place God at a distance,1 David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins, On Kings (HAU Books, 2017), page 89. but in prophets, for example, divinities can seize nearby people. Proximity does not negate divinity in Nuer and Dinka cosmologies. The hakuma, since the colonial era, has been entangled in the everyday and intimate, as well as the seismic negotiations of power, even in the most rural areas that appear at a distance from government centres. There is no absence of government. Instead, the hakuma-god dwells close to, and rains favour and destruction, in the most intimate parts of life. Over time, the presence of the hakuma has been part of the re-crafting of the cultural archive. This is both because the archive incorporates ideas of the hakuma and bends to creatively refuse it.

With the hakuma part of the gods, it is in the cosmic polity that war and peace are ultimately made. Peace involves demands to suspend and constrain violence – to limit the power of the warring parties to carry out arbitrary violence. Yet, power is constructed by sitting outside of this, being able to demand war and peace, and not being subject to the suspension of arbitrary violence. For over a century, the wars of Southern/South Sudan have also been the wars of the hakuma. Since the nineteenth century, these have been linked to the country’s deep connections to global networks of trade and exploitation. In contemporary South Sudan it is impossible to find a war that is not entangled with the broad hakuma sphere. In this context, stopping war and making peace is about limiting the divine-like nature of the hakuma and asserting that the hakuma is still subject to moral and spiritual restraints. Stopping war is about restraining the arbitrary power of the government both to declare war or peace. From the perspective of the cosmic polity, peace-making is about limiting the power of the hakuma to, with impunity, rain favour or destruction, to demand lethal killing or a refrain from lethal killing.

This book documents the long struggle by divine authorities from communities around the Bilnyang and connected rivers to limit the power of the hakuma and to make it morally and legally bounded. Throughout the history of the hakuma in South Sudan, and especially in recent decades, some of the main struggles for power have been about either limiting the god-like power of the hakuma, or challenging their god-like nature by ending their impunity. Officials in the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium government were killed by elephants, recent baany e biith who came too close to the hakuma died when they used money of the hakuma to kill with the curse, and Nuer prophets have barred entry to their luaks based on Nuer government officers being culpable for their actions as hakuma. Repeatedly, divine authorities have sought to limit the hakuma’s claims of impunity. Nuer prophets, even in the years of post-2013 wars, remade and re-insisted on the existence of spiritual pollution such as nueer, as well as their power to offer solutions. Divine authorities have remade rituals, moral understandings and practices as a form of protest, intentional rejection and creative refusal. Religious leaders have often taken a leading role in pushing back against the hakuma in attempts to keep them morally bounded. This has included seeing wars not only as wars of the hakuma but also as wars of revenge and subject to the moral norms that govern revenge and allow a lasting peace.

Therefore, political debates in South Sudan are happening, in part, through the remaking of rituals, the reshaping of ideas of purity and pollution and the retelling of histories. Much armed conflict in recent years, including national wars, has been understood as wars of revenge. Claims that wars are wars of revenge are not assertions of primordial understandings of war. Instead, they are attempts to culturally refuse wars of the hakuma as morally discrete and exceptional. They are attempts to assert logics of war and peace that are not based on money, markets, secular relations or individual deals. Revenge and associated notions of peace draw on rich archives of ideas and histories that limit the hakuma and that reimagine that the control of whether peace and war occur could be returned to the South Sudanese people.

At the same time, the peace of these other cosmic authorities and moral logics are not non-violent. These remade rituals have been used to mobilise support for war, as happened in December 2013. For many priests and prophets, confronted by such continuous violence, their logics of peace have increasingly entrenched exclusive ethnic communities that can ultimately be instrumentalised by elites. Increasingly pollution and ritual have been remade to only offer peace to mono-ethnic communities. This carries the danger of entrenching, cosmologically, these current political divides.

Plus, the overwhelming and ever-growing military might of the hakuma makes the hakuma incredibly bitter. When there are large offences by the government or armed opposition groups, few South Sudanese even expect the local divine authorities to be able to push back. However, for some, the hakuma’s power is not only overwhelming because of military might. The wars of the hakuma have brought spiritual pollution. Therefore, the lack of divine power in the land is as much a manifestation of divinities’ exclusion by this spiritual pollution, as it is by being overwhelmed by military power.

International peace-making efforts, such as the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) and the 2018 Revitalised Agreement on the Resolution of Conflict in South Sudan (R-ARCSS), have been implicitly built not only on commitments to economic and political liberalism, but also to the underlying secular assumptions of contemporary European and North American political orders. Whether Europe and North America are secular, and devoid of gods and god-like governments, is not clear and is an empirical question for another space. Yet, what is clear is that this image of liberalism being entangled with secularism means that international peace-meeting efforts have claimed to be devoid of divine power. They have not paid attention to the cosmic politics at play in wars and peace in South Sudan, including the power of divine authorities and the South Sudanese hakuma, but also the cosmic implications of their own actions. This blindness to the cosmic hierarchies allows international actors to ignore the real politics, anxieties and struggles at play. It also allows them to be blind to their own (probably unintentional) actions that are akin to being divine.

For international diplomats and humanitarians, the danger of blindness to the cosmic polity is that they engage in policies that undermine efforts to maintain a moral order and lack of impunity, even in the midst of war. The danger is that they undermine the only authorities who might have the power to make peace that is cosmologically consistent and less violent. Much focus of international attention in South Sudan, including UN Security Council mandates for the UN Mission in South Sudan, have highlighted the need to protect civilians. The UN, NGOs and donor governments have seen the South Sudan government compliance to international humanitarian law as a key way to do this. Pursuing a Protection of Civilians agenda ultimately aspires to restrain government and prevent them being god-like; if governments are hedged in by international humanitarian law, they can no long carry out destruction with impunity. Without knowing, these international actors are engaging with the cosmic politics of South Sudan. Without being more cognisant of this politics, their involvement is more likely to have unintended consequences. The UN, NGOs and donor governments share with many South Sudanese divine authorities the aspiration to restrain the hakuma. They both seek to provide frameworks – moral or legal – that provide a boundary around the legitimate actions of the hakuma. They also use the threat of lethal power to encourage compliance. Some divine authorities can threaten the deadly power of the curse, while the UN displays deadly powers through the gun.

The international community has welcomed the role of some divine authorities in their efforts to restrain the South Sudanese hakuma. Church leaders and organisations have been key actors in peace-making at the national level. Local peace meetings have also often included invited Nuer and Dinka priests. However, as discussed in this book, this has often resulted in the hedging in to custom of these other divine authorities, reducing their power, including their power to restrain the hakuma. Peace meetings have not only prevented accountability for their past violence, they have also asserted their authority to determine when arbitrary violence is morally acceptable and to recode their violence as legitimate.

When non-government divine authorities have used violence to create peace or limit the hakuma, the UN and donor governments have seen them as an obstacle to peace.2 See, for example, ‘Incidents of Intercommunal Violence in Jonglei State’ (UNMISS 2012), https://unmiss.unmissions.org/sites/default/files/june_2012_jonglei_report.pdf, accessed 18 October 2022. However, for many South Sudanese, limiting lethal power to the hakuma amounts to an increase, not decrease, in the potential for arbitrary violence and destruction as the hakuma is then unrestrained. Divine authorities appeal to the South Sudanese as they ensure that, even when communities are disarmed or outgunned by the hakuma, there is still the power to curse. There is a need for international actors to better appreciate the anxieties and aspirations they share with these divine authorities about the unrestrained power of the hakuma.

At the same time, divine authorities are far from inherently benign or necessarily supportive of inclusive, non-violent peace. International actors cannot just lean on some imagined, static notion of tradition, but must be politically savvy in their dealings with divine powers, as much as they are in their dealings with government and opposition officials. Many divine authorities have been involved in the slow remaking of norms of revenge and spiritual pollution, with many enforcing these remade cultural archives through the power to curse with impunity. These remade norms can create new divisions between social groups, ethnicising divisions and entrenching the cultural archive as politicised histories. There is a need for an appreciation not of the momentary instrumentalisation of history and ‘tradition’, but of an awareness of how this slowly changes over time and absorbs divisive narratives that potentially make peace impossible.