Overcoming ruptures: Zande identity, governance, and tradition during cycles of war and displacement in South Sudan and Uganda (2014-2019)

This book explores the effects of war and displacement on the South Sudanese Zande, a people frozen in time by the classical anthropology of Edgar Evans-Pritchard. The research started in Western Equatoria State, South Sudan, at a time of hopeful reconstruction (2014-2015). Yet after war resumed in 2015, nearly a million South Sudanese refugees fled to neighbouring Uganda – and so the study continues with South Sudanese Zande refugees there (2015-2019). Based on hundreds of inter views with refugees and stayees, chiefs and elder s, government officials and former combatants, and ordinary people, this book places conflict, confusion, and the search for continuity at the heart of the historical ethnography of the South Sudanese Zande. The book focuses on the ties between people, between people and land, and the competing efforts to control those ties. These three foci relate to proto-legal questions that underpin human society: Who are we? To whom and where do we belong? And whose authority do we accept? This study shows that these foundational questions gain new salience in times of crisis, as people turn to nostalgia and utopia to escape present despair.Parts of the research for this PhD thesis were funded by: 1) the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs through the Knowledge Platform Security & Rule of Law; 2) the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs through the Rift Valley Institute; and 3) the Rockefeller Foundation through the London School of Economics’ Firoz Lalji Centre for Africa.Effective Protection of Fundamental Rights in a pluralist worl