The Borderlands of South Sudan

Authority and Identity in Contemporary and Historical Perspectives

C. Vaughan, M. Schomerus, L. de Vries, C. Vaughan, M. Schomerus, L. de Vries, Kenneth A. Loparo, Lotje de Vries, C. Vaughan, M. Schomerus, L. de Vries, Lotje de Vries

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137340887
• eBook ISBN: 9781137340894
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

Moving beyond the current fixation on "state construction, " the interdisciplinary work gathered here explores regulatory authority in South Sudan's borderlands from both contemporary and historical perspectives. Taken together, these studies show how emerging governance practices challenge the bounded categorizations of "state" and "non-state."

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Negotiating Borders, Defining South Sudan

Mareike Schomerus, Lotje de Vries, and Christopher Vaughan

In Maridi, a town near South Sudan’s border with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), in 2009 residents judged their situation harshly: “We see ourselves as unlucky because of the kind of border we have,” said a senior church leader.¹ He talked about how those living in other towns near the border were benefitting through cross-border trade, through access to services, and through exchange: “Because in Yei, they have an open border with DRC and Uganda; they can improve their trade and education. Same in Kajo Keji and so on. With us here, there is no cross-border trade, no road.” In Maridi, it was not even clear where the country’s border ended and the next began. Nobody from the government in the capital city of Juba seemed to particularly care. Other South Sudanese borders—with the Republic of Sudan, Uganda, or Ethiopia—were much more important.

The church leader’s house is situated in an area on the linguistic dividing line between anglophone and francophone Africa, where the new state of South Sudan is hardly noticeable as an enforcer of its boundaries. The area is not valuable or contested enough to require assertion of state authority. The absence of a meaningful boundary here is a consequence of the marginalization of this area from the political priorities of the South Sudanese state; the church leader’s complaint is perhaps not only about the absence of a clear boundary per se, but also about the absence of the state, its services, and infrastructure.

Along some of the other edges of South Sudan, the scenario is rather different: the state is much more visible. The borders with Uganda and Kenya, for instance, are vital for landlocked South Sudan’s provision of supplies of food, beverages, construction material, and other goods required for building the country; the state, both centrally and locally, profits from control of and involvement in these flows of goods across its southern borders. More notoriously, the state’s northern border with the Republic of Sudan remains the site of state competition and military confrontation, which impose a violent form of authority on everyday life in these areas and create significant insecurity for ordinary people.

These observations alert us to an obvious yet important point: that so-called borders, in South Sudan or anywhere else, do not have a singular meaning or significance. Within South Sudan, there are great variations in the extent of cross-border activities and movement, and equally great variations in the extent of border policing. This suggests that the state manifests itself in complex and varied ways at a local level at its borders. This book explores these complex, localized processes in the borderlands with the intention of shedding new light on state–society relations and state formation in South Sudan. State formation is not a simple top-down imposition of structures and institutions, but rather a process shaped by multiple interactions and negotiations between the agendas of state elites and officials, and the agendas of local populations, who may evade, resist, or co-opt some sort of stateness in lived local realities.² This is as true of South Sudan, both now and in the past, as of anywhere else, and border regions provide rich environments for understanding these processes, which might be summed up as embodying the local histories of what is at various times interpreted as the state in society.

Drawing the State: The Lines around a New Country

South Sudan became a sovereign state in 2011, after a long history of war between northern and southern Sudan, the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) in 2005, an Interim Period of implementing the CPA, and finally a referendum on whether or not South Sudan should secede from Sudan. After the successful vote for independence and the inauguration of what South Sudanese often affectionately refer to as “our baby nation” came a new and fully autonomous government and a new—and disputed—international border with the northern neighbor, the Republic of Sudan.³ Juridical statehood also brought the government the daunting task of having to function as a sovereign state in control of its boundaries.

While overall state control is seemingly exerted from the new capital Juba, it is worth remembering that South Sudan gradually emerged from its borderlands over decades of fighting. Richard Reid has argued that similar processes of state formation, founded on the “vitality of violence” associated with a politically “fertile frontier,” are indeed characteristic of north-east Africa more widely.⁴ The leader of the southern rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A), Dr. John Garang de Mabior, used borders—both the physical borders and the notion of being confined to the margins of the state—to bring his rebellion into being and to sustain it.⁵ The physical borders allowed Garang to cross into Ethiopia in the early 1980s; there he gained much needed military and ideological support for his rebellion from the then Ethiopian government, the Derg. Such support included the ability to use Ethiopian territory to train SPLM/A fighters. Military support for the rebellion also came across the southern border with Uganda, with the Uganda government becoming one of the SPLM/A’s crucial allies against Sudan’s government in Khartoum.⁶ Moreover, during the 1990s, the SPLM/A’s headquarters was located close to the border with Kenya, and the SPLM/A enjoyed good relations with the Kenyan state.⁷

The notion of southern Sudan as the marginalized periphery of Sudan, akin to an underdeveloped and neglected borderland without access to power and centrally held resources, was the centerpiece of SPLM/A ideology in its fight against the Khartoum government; until today, resisting marginalization is something that many South Sudanese express as their main political goal.⁸ The SPLM/A’s principal ideological message was founded on ending enduring patterns of marginalization that affected western and eastern regions of Sudan as well as the south, and on creating a more equitable and united “New Sudan” for all Sudanese citizens. This notion of battling marginalization has shaped how South Sudan, at least on paper, sees itself: as a decentralized state that respects and includes its margins, not least because it has emerged from them.

The secession of the South, however, officially marked the end of the “New Sudan” philosophy of the SPLM/A. Instead, the former margin—the South—started to create and construct its own centers and peripheries. The rapid expansion of Juba and the autocratic tendency of the central government in the capital today suggest that a new and dominant center is being created—a process that belies the policies of decentralization to which the government of the Republic of South Sudan (RoSS) is theoretically committed. New marginalized peripheries are thus also coming into being. Yet the importance of apparently marginal borderland areas to defining the South Sudanese state and nation is striking. Areas on South Sudan’s borders that were formerly remote from state concerns have become central areas of contestation between South Sudan and its neighbors. Most obviously, the border with the Republic of Sudan remains at the heart of the country’s politics. Asserting the rights of South Sudan with regard to those borders is a central aspect of a growing South Sudanese nationalism, which both reinforces the authority of the SPLM/A and demands that the state meets imagined obligations of protection to borderland peoples. South Sudan’s borders thus continue to create opportunities and dilemmas for the SPLM/A.

This book attempts to provide insights into how both physical and ideological boundaries, past and present, influence what South Sudan is today. Capturing these processes is a challenging endeavor: the use of accurate terminology for a complex and rapidly changing political landscape presents the first difficult task. This book refers to South Sudan when discussing events that occurred after the declaration of independence on July 9, 2011. Before this date, we refer to the area as southern Sudan, both during the time of the interim autonomous Government of southern Sudan (GoSS, 2005–2011) and in earlier periods. In contrast, Sudan refers to the whole country from the period of Turco-Egyptian colonial rule in the nineteenth century until South Sudan’s secession, with a distinction made between northern and southern Sudan. The Government of Sudan (GoS), or the Khartoum government, denotes the administration from independence in 1956 to 2011; this includes during 2005–2011 the so-called Government of National Unity (GoNU), which was established by the CPA. Since the country’s split, we refer to the north as the Republic of Sudan.

We use SPLM/A in this book whenever we refer to the forces that fought the war, negotiated the CPA, and then effectively governed in southern Sudan and now in South Sudan. Since the signing of the CPA, the SPLM has been the dominant party in government and continues to function in close synergy with the army in independent South Sudan.⁹

The Northern Border and the Myth of “One-One-Five-Six”

South Sudan’s process of becoming an independent state was rather different to that experienced in most other sub-Saharan African countries. After decolonization across most of Africa in the late 1950s and 1960s, nationalist elites inherited the running of relatively well-established state bureaucracies headquartered in capital cities; states were administered within recognized colonial boundaries. Even where rebel movements fought and won liberation struggles to free Africans from colonial or white minority rule, they nonetheless went on to govern states defined by colonial boundaries.¹⁰ The only successful challenge to established borders before the creation of South Sudan was the Eritrean secession—and this was justified by the contested claim that it marked merely a long-delayed decolonization. South Sudan’s secession was therefore a watershed moment and has potentially far-reaching consequences: it challenged the assumption that colonial boundaries remain the only legitimate means of defining state sovereignty in the continent. Yet colonial boundaries have not altogether lost their significance even in South Sudan. Rather, the old Anglo-Egyptian Condominium (1899–1956) borderlines drawn between the provinces of northern and southern Sudan, and between southern Sudan and neighboring states, continue to be the main reference point in determining where the new international boundaries are situated. The creation of South Sudan’s international borders therefore simultaneously symbolizes a departure from and the maintenance of colonial definitions of political community.

The proliferation of disputes over the boundary line between South Sudan and the Republic of Sudan necessitates a brief overview of this border’s shifting history during the twentieth century. When Sudan became independent on January 1, 1956, the north–south internal border remained an imprecise line on the map. South Sudanese often casually refer to the border that internally separated northern and southern Sudan as “one-one-five six”; in popular debates, this imprecise line became a somewhat mystical element in defining South Sudan’s border with northern Sudan. Yet the mismatch between the importance attached to the border defined in 1956 by South Sudan and the very limited degree to which the British defined this border is striking. The British never demarcated the border and detailed maps of delineation do not exist, despite the repeated claims by politicians in both Sudans that such maps should be handed over by the UK Government.

Nonetheless, the administrative boundary between northern and southern Sudan was important in the colonial imagination as separating what was referred to as Arab northern Sudan and African southern Sudan. This division became especially prominent between 1930 and 1946, when the colonial “Southern Policy” decreed that the southern part of the country should be isolated from northern Arab influence.¹¹ Yet the strict division the Southern Policy claimed to impose often had a limited impact on the ground.¹² In practice, for local residents who lived along the often largely imaginary line, the border remained a zone of negotiation and contact, rather than division. Indeed, local cross-border governance mechanisms to manage contacts and rivalries between borderland peoples—often pastoralists who move across borders according to seasonal grazing needs—were to some extent supported through the colonial administration’s emphasis on tribal governance.¹³

Following an uneasy period characterized by Øystein Rolandsen as being “between war and peace” after independence in 1956, Sudan slid into civil war from 1963.¹⁴ Following the Addis Ababa Peace Agreement of 1972, a separate semi-autonomous southern administration was created. However, over the next decade there were repeated disputes over where the boundary between northern and southern Sudan should lie: an attempt to redraw the boundaries of the south in order to ensure oil deposits lay in the territory controlled by Khartoum was one of the precursors of the eventual collapse of the agreement.¹⁵ That the division between north and south was not as strict as the separate administrations might suggest is also symbolized by the fact that the SPLM/A rebellion, which emerged in 1983, was led by a Southerner who had been absorbed into the Sudanese military and was stationed in the north: Dr. John Garang de Mabior.

Sudan’s second civil war was fought from 1983 until 2005, the year in which Garang signed the CPA for the SPLM/A. The CPA stipulated both parties’ commitment to making the unity of Sudan attractive, while allowing for a southern referendum on self-determination. The border with northern Sudan unsurprisingly remained a prominent issue. The agreed text of the CPA states that both Sudans would honor the border as it was defined on January 1, 1956, as the basis from which to finally demarcate.¹⁶ However, during the Interim Period, the two parties did not settle on what “one-one-five-six” actually was. This point became particularly prominent again when in March 2012 the official map of South Sudan was published, which uses a 1953 ethnic and linguistic map to claim a boundary with Sudan, rather than “one-one-five-six.” This shift away from the border as it was at Sudan’s independence thus explicitly challenged the 1964 resolution on colonial boundaries of the Organization of African Unity, which outlined respect for inherited colonial boundaries under the principle of uti possidetis (which outlines that after decolonialization, frontiers remain as they were during colonial times). A South Sudanese delegation to an African Union conference on borders explicitly stated that uti possidetis did not apply to South Sudan. It is thus not surprising that currently five areas of the border remain under dispute (represented on Map 1.1), with a further four areas claimed by South Sudan. The forthcoming compilation of archival materials, including negotiation documents on the contested border areas, gathered by the African Union High-Level Implementation Panel (AUHIP), will provide important scholarly material to analyze the arguments put forth by either side.

The borderland between Sudan and South Sudan contains valuable resources, most notably oil, prominent in two of the major flashpoints, Abyei and Heglig. The formal economies of both countries greatly depend on th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Maps
• List of Acronyms
• Foreword
• Editors’ Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: Negotiating Borders, Defining South Sudan
• 2. Too Much Water under the Bridge: Internationalization of the Sudan–South Sudan Border and Local Demands for Its Regulation
• 3. Unclear Lines: State and Non-State Actors in Abyei
• 4. Pastoralists, Conflicts, and Politics: Aspects of South Sudan’s Kenyan Frontier
• 5. The Nuba Political Predicament in Sudan(s): Seeking Resources beyond Borders
• 6. Alternative Citizenship: The Nuer between Ethiopia and the Sudan
• 7. The Rizeigat–Malual Borderland during the Condominium: The Limits of Legibility
• 8. Pulling the Ropes: Convenient Indeterminacies and the Negotiation of Power at Kaya’s Border Checkpoint
• 9. State-Making and Emerging Complexes of Power and Accumulation in the Southern Sudan–Kenyan Border Area: The Rise of a Thriving Cross-Border Business Network
• 10. Labor and the Making of Central African Borders
• 11. Whatever Happened to the “Safe Havens”? Imposing State Boundaries between the Sudanese Plains and the Ethiopian Highlands
• Notes on the Contributors
• Index