Subject(s) to control: post-war return migration and state-building in 1970s South Sudan

Abstract

This article looks at the history of postwar state-building in South Sudan through a study of one of the region's many return migration projects. South Sudan was arguably the subject of the first state-led mass repatriation campaign of twentieth century Africa, after the first civil war that escalated in 1963 and ended in 1972 with the Addis Ababa Agreement. Using archival material from the newly-reformulated South Sudan National Archives in Juba, this paper examines this comparatively forgotten postwar return and reconstruction project in South Sudan from 1969 to 1974. In this period, civil war ideas, staff and techniques were recycled into an apparently benevolent and "peace-building" project of Relief, Repatriation and Rehabilitation (RRR). The returns management project set out where the returning citizens of Sudan should go, how they should settle, live, and relate to the state. This study argues that this project developed and entrenched particular wartime state ideas of its imagined South Sudanese population, and the nature of its compact with its society. It argues for a longer view of the continuities of war-and peace-time population control, as a way to explore postcolonial ideas of "good government". The return and resettlement period also demonstrates the South Sudanese populations' expanding repertoire of engagement as postwar citizens: return migration and resettlement projects are good opportunities for people to reformulate their skills and tactics of negotiating, approaching, cheating and avoiding a "new" state.

Who are the civilians in the wars of South Sudan?

“…There is also a growing body of literature that examines theories of conflict from the community-level and moral perspective (including Biong Deng, 2010; Hutchinson and Pendle, 2015; Jok, 2005; Justin and De Vries, 2017; Kindersley, 2019; Leonardi, 2007a, 2007b; Pendle, 2015; Stringham and Forney, 2017). Both these strands of research provide useful insights into violence against civilians, especially research on the evolution of wartime practices of population control (Kindersley, 2017; Rolandsen and Kindersley, 2019; Thomas, 2015). This article sets out to explicitly connect these areas of research by investigating the question of civilian protection using these stands of research into South Sudanese conflicts as points of departure.…”

“…In garrison towns in the south, the Sudan government controlled its dependent populations through travel passes and military perimeters; in the Nuba Mountains (and later in Darfur), people were resettled into the military encampments of ‘Dar es Salaam’ peace villages; and in Khartoum, brutal slum clearances, checkpoints and forced encampment minimized the disruptive power of hundreds of thousands of displaced people, limited them to dependent and underpaid labour, and provided opportunities for coercive recruitment into the armed forces. Local militias controlled population movement and settlement, for instance on the Darfur–Northern Bahr el Ghazal frontier in the late 1990s, capturing fleeing people as labourers and conscripts, and acting as intermediaries negotiating (and taxing) humanitarian access to displaced camps in southern Darfur (Jok, 2001: 49–50; Kindersley, 2017). And within rebel-controlled territories, mass relocations sustained the SPLM/A, for example in the large-scale resettlement of Dinka-ethnicity military families and displaced people in Yei town in 1997.…”

Political Ecology of Health of South Sudanese Immigrants and Refugees in Ottawa

“…Since the CPA agreement in 2005, a significant number, primarily men, have returned. Besides this chapter by Fanjoy (2015), there are very few studies that explore the issue of return migration to South Sudan (Arowolo, 2000;Kindersley, 2017: Newhouse, 2012, however, as mentioned, this issue has been widely written about in other contexts (Dustmann, 2003;Fussell & Sastry, 2011;Thomas, 2008). These studies tell a heroic/patriotic story of immigrants returning home to help rebuild their own countries or reconnect with loved ones and rediscover their identities (Fanjoy, 2015;Koinova, 2011).…”