This paper examines digital mobilisation with respect to knowledge production, legitimacy and power in Sudan since new communication and surveillance technologies became widespread. Enthusiasm for digital opposition peaked with the Arab Spring and troughed through the repressive government apparatus. Social media (SMS, Facebook, Twitter) and crowdsourcing technologies can threaten the government's control over the public sphere as participatory practices. To arrive at this finding, we argue the significance of epistemological tools of those who control the representation of digital power, and approach state legitimacy as an ongoing and fragile process of constructing "reality" that requires continuous work to stabilise and uphold. At the same time, the paper describes an international counterpublic of security researchers and hackers who revealed that the Sudanese government invested greatly in controlling the digital landscape. We analyse Nafeer, a local grassroots initiative for flood-disasterrelief that made use of digital media despite the digital suppression. Nafeer's challenge to the state came from the way it threatened the state-monopoly over knowledge, revealing both the fragility and the power of state legitimacy.

By way of introduction to this special collection, this article addresses the question: Does the 'emerging' state South Sudan need a 'permanent' constitution, especially in light of the ongoing negotiations on the mode of statehood? We shed light on the resulting dilemma between the hasty production of a 'permanent' constitution and the idea of deriving its authority from the will of the people, implying the existence of a certain societal consensus. An analysis of a peace conference over land tenure clearly demonstrates that regional and national consensuses on issues to be inscribed in a 'permanent' constitution could not be reached. During this conference, a 'processual solution' permitted not only for the continuation of negotiations, but also for the integration of all involved actors. By contrast, the de jure makings of both the Transitional Constitution which currently serves as the preliminary normative frame of the new state, and the upcoming 'permanent' constitution show that many actors are ousted from the decision-making process. Furthermore, actors on, off, and beyond the constitution-making table negotiate within the normative frames of international actors, even if these frames and the mode of statehood are still under negotiation. The current political and military re-negotiations can be seen as an opportunity to fundamentally rethink the constitution-making endeavour. The paper argues that a slowing down of the constitution making and a 'processual solution' to the dilemmawithout an immediate claim to consent on substanceseems to be a more appropriate 'solution'.

No abstract

Hope, understood as a “temporal reorientation of knowledge” (Miyazaki 2004, 5), enacts and changes the future as a precipitate of interaction (Crapanzano 2003, 6). During South Sudan’s independence, an epochalist hope was directed towards an end of the miseries associated with Sudanese rule and government officials of the new state tried to inscribe this hope into symbols. Their idea was to create a strong relation between those symbols of hope and a new national identity, in order to bridge the epochalist anticlimax that necessarily followed the initial moment of independence. Via the examination of two examples of hope from South Sudan, and through scrutiny of the symbols of the flag and the anthem, I describe that hope in the future of South Sudan as it existed in 2011, the symbols and the nation building attempts. I conclude by returning to Frantz Fanon’s warnings against European models and an analysis of how those who follow them fall in the old trap of nationalism, an identity construction that necessarily includes and excludes. In the case of South Sudan this collapsed the country back into an old nightmare of ethnic factionalism, long-standing forms of exploitation with new beneficiaries, and new, violent, forms and acts of exclusion.