Peace often induces violent conflict in South Sudan. It is not just a state of ‘no war, no peace’ – people are not just resting in limbo between wars. Peace often, itself, generates violence and conflict. South Sudanese responses to peace do not make sense and cannot be understood unless we recognise this propensity for peace to be violent and produce conflict.
Most of this book was written after the signing of the 2018 R-ARCSS. On the 12 September 2018, peace apparently started again as the warring parties signed this long document. The Troika refrained from signing the agreement after the failures of ARCSS, but for international actors this comprehensive peace agreement quickly became the only framework for ‘long-term stability and durable peace’ to be achieved in South Sudan.
1 Nicholas Haysom, ‘Briefing to the UN Security Council by the Secretary-General’s Special Representative for South Sudan’, https://unmiss.unmissions.org/briefing-un-security-council-secretary-general’s-special-representative-south-sudan-nicholas-0, accessed 17 October 2021. Diplomats lauded the warring parties when they finally filled government positions in the transitional government as prescribed by the peace agreement, and the UN talked as if there would be a peaceful election in South Sudan in the coming years.
2 Discussion with UNMISS employee, 10 October 2021, online.This book has illustrated how the periods after such peace agreements have continued to be violent in the communities around the Bilnyang and connected rivers. The experiences of these communities are not discrete from broader experiences in South Sudan. Other parts of South Sudan have also seen episodic deadly upsurges in violence including after peace agreements. Even where parties to R-ARCSS declined in their explicit fighting with each other, there was an ‘increase in sub-national violence’.
3 Haysom, ‘Briefing to the UN Security Council by the Secretary-General’s Special Representative for South Sudan’.Yet, peace is not only violent when it produces an upsurge in armed conflict. Declarations of war and demands for mobilisation can amount to raining death both on those who fight and those caught in the conflicts. Peace can also be morally and spiritually abhorrent when peace leaves hearts hot, creating more demands for revenge and more moral confusion.
At the time of writing, Salva Kiir’s government has defeated armed opposition across South Sudan, including in the communities around the Bilnyang. Yet, this government victory against armed groups such as the SPLA-IO means that the national leadership is dominated by an autochthonous leadership from the west of the Bilnyang. If there are now powerful, rivalrous relationships that are shaping national politics, they are from within the
hakuma from these communities. In enacting these rivalries, figures in the
hakuma are mobilising based on identities that evoke shared family histories. Ancestors are a significant part of the cosmic polity, and such narratives bring them to life. At the same time, the instrumentalisation of ancestors by the living has limits; ancestors often end up as rivals to the living.
4 Graeber and Sahlins, On Kings, page 10. As the
hakuma is drawn into these cosmic games, there is potential to hedge them in by custom and seek limits to their power to kill with impunity. The ancestors and the divinities continue to limit the divine power of the
hakuma, and peace-making must not close the space for this.