South Sudan's administrative boundaries stem from the colonial period. Since it gained independence in 2011, subsequent rounds of reshuffling of the political system, internal borders, and power relations have been a source of confusion, elite manipulation, and conflict throughout the country. This paper explores the impact of this confusion by focusing on multiple shifting linkages between administrative boundaries and identities and shows how the mobilization of ethnic identities has become central to territorial claims and creating territorial borders. We use three local conflicts in Central Equatoria State to illustrate how claims of belonging and entitlement are being used by elites for economic, political, and socio-cultural gains. The three cases also show how such manipulation increases the likelihood of ethnic division and conflict. Following the decision by the government in 2015 to increase the number of states from 10 to 28 in October 2015, further manipulation of borders and identities is likely to occur and could result in more violence, ethnic-based conflict, and human suffering.

Drawing on empirical evidence from Yei River County in South Sudan, this paper argues that, rather than a temporary phenomenon, displacement may lead to a drastic reorganisation of land occupation and governance. Such reorganisation may become strongly connected to broader political contention. In the case of Yei, existing legal frameworks and institutions are inadequate to deal with land conflicts resulting from massive displacement and return. Crucially, historical grievances result in the displaced no longer being perceived as powerless victims, but as agents of a Dinka agenda to (re)occupy territories in Equatoria, and as perpetrators in land conflict. Such politics of land-control and identity may turn land disputes between displaced people and returnees into a major source of instability. At the same time, those displaced people who are not well-connected politically may lose their land rights.

Following South Sudanese independence in 2011, land reform became a major aspect of state building, partly to address historical injustices and partly to avoid future conflicts around land. In the process, land became a trigger for conflicts, sometimes between communities with no histories of “ethnic conflict.” Drawing on cases in two rural areas in Yei River County in South Sudan, this paper shows that contradictions in the existing legal frameworks on land are mainly to blame for those conflicts. These contradictions are influenced, in turn, by the largely top-down approach to state building, which has tended to neglect changes in society and regarding land resulting from colonialism and civil wars.