Thinking in the Dark: Ethics and Politics on the Sudan-South Sudan Border

This dissertation takes up a heterogeneous assemblage of elements in the Sudan-South Sudan border-zone, and inquires into the quasi-causal dynamics that set this assemblage in motion, and how such an inquiry can be constructed in contemporary anthropology.There is a bewildering array of different forces in the border-zone, from military groups to aid organizations, and from transhumant pastoralists to anthropologists and historians. I did fieldwork in the border-zone for eighteen months, in 2010-12, during the period in which South Sudan seceded from Sudan, and became a state. This dissertation makes a series of second-order observations about the principal modes of understanding the conflict in Sudan and South Sudan. I judge that a number of attempts to understand this border-zone in history, anthropology, and journalism, are inadequate. One of the principal approaches taken is to narrativize the history of the border-zone in terms of three civil wars: the first (1955-1972) and second (1983-2005) Sudanese civil wars, and the current South Sudanese civil war. These narratives are either written as tragedies, or as progressive histories, and turn on a periodization in which declarations of peace correspond to qualitative shifts in life in the border-zone. Such narratives are neither able to account for the strong continuities that this dissertation will show existed in the border-zone throughout the second half of the 20th century and first decade of the 21st, nor are they able to articulate what is emergent in the current configuration of the border-zone assemblage. I argue that these impasses are exemplary of a more general blockage in attempts to understand the temporality and dynamics of contemporary conflict, particularly in Northeast and Central Africa. The judgment that this dissertation makes is based on a conceptual clarification of the terms used by observers of Sudan and South Sudan to understand the recent history of the border-zone. This dissertation undertakes an analysis of several key terms, such as 'civil war,' and 'state,' and tests them against the Sudanese border-zone. To do so, this dissertation analyzes its recent history. I find that none of the key terms, in the way they are deployed by the observers that I investigate, are adequate unless they are reconfigured. The border-zone poses great challenges to an anthropologist attempting to give an adequate account of its dynamics. It is composed of a number of elements, such as ongoing negotiations between Sudan and South Sudan over the final location of the border, and military movements by a series of groups whose relationship to the armies of the two states is ambiguous. Each of these elements retains properties and interior dynamics that are not causally related to the other elements within the assemblage. Thus, for instance, negotiations in Addis Ababa have a form, a venue, and a mode of practice that do not depend on military confrontations in the border-zone, and such confrontations, equally, are contoured by rhythms (such as those of the seasons), that are distinct from the dynamics of the negotiations. This dissertation finds that existing accounts of the border-zone both refuse to acknowledge the relative independence of the elements that constitute the Sudanese border-zone as an object of inquiry, and thus assume (normatively or actually) correspondence relations between political statements and military movements, and insist on the separation of other elements of the assemblage, such as between inter-state negotiations over the border, and transhumant grazing rights. Such accounts fail to respond to the challenge of analyzing the dynamic inter-relationship of elements that do not produce a homogenous apparatus in which parts are placed in causal relation.The labor of this dissertation, however, is not simply critical. It also gives an account of the dynamics of the border-zone, and of what is emergent in this assemblage. I argue that the principal change to the transhumant forms of life that exist in the border-zone occurred neither with the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2005 (and an end to the twenty-two year long second civil war), nor with South Sudanese secession, and the putative imposition of an absolute border of state sovereignty onto flexible lines of pastoralist grazing. Instead, I trace the transformations of the border-zone to the emergence, in the 1980s and 1990s, of a military mode of exchange and predation, which super-imposed itself on forms of military, political, and economic organization orientated around kinship structures. I argue that this emergent form of organization calls into question the adequacy of accounts that periodize Sudan's history, and instead argue for an account of the border-zone that insists on the importance of intensifications and dynamic affordances as conceptual operators, rather than civil wars and periods of peace.This dissertation thus attempts a two-fold labor. It analyzes the Sudanese border-zone, and elucidates a number of emergent dynamics that afford capacities to the elements that constitute the assemblage. This dissertation also inquiries into the adequacy of a series of conceptual and practical forms of inquiry currently employed by observers in the border-zone, and poses the question of what a contemporary anthropology of conflict would look like, in an assemblage in which anthropological second-order observation is only one species of observation amongst many others, and when such second-order observations also form part of the dynamics of the conflict