Suchergebnisse

Southern Sudanese civilian populations have been trapped in a rising tide of ethnicised, South-on-South, military violence ever since leadership struggles within the main southern opposition movement – the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) – split into two warring factions in August 1991. This paper traces the devastating impact of this violence on a particularly volatile and fractured region of contemporary South Sudan: the oil rich heartlands of the Western Upper Nile Province. Foregrounding the historical experiences and grassroots perspectives of Nuer civilian populations in this region, the paper shows how elite competition within the southern military has combined with the political machinations of the national Islamic government in Khartoum to create a wave of inter- and intra-ethnic factional fighting so intense and intractable that many Nuer civilians have come to define it as 'a curse from God'. Dividing Sudan's seventeen-year-long civil war (1983–present) into four distinct phases, the paper shows how successive forms and patterns of political violence in this region have provoked radical reassessments of the precipitating agents and ultimate meaning of this war on the part of an increasingly demoralised and impoverished Nuer civilian population.

Contemporary South Sudanese Nuer prophets play powerful roles in interpreting the moral limits of lethal violence and weighing the legitimacy claims of rival government leaders. Their activities remain largely invisible to external observers investigating the making and unmaking of fragile states. Focusing on South Sudan's tumultuous 2005–14 period, we reveal these hidden dynamics through analysis of the two most-powerful living western Nuer prophets. Gatdeang Dit, a male prophet of the divinity Deng, rejects all forms of violent aggression and fosters relations of peace and intermarriage with Dinka neighbors. Nyachol, a female prophet of Maani, inspires thousands of armed Nuer youth to retaliate against Dinka cattle raiders and other external threats while insisting on purification for Nuer–Nuer homicides. Despite their differences, both prophets invoke God's superior powers to push back against the simplified, secularized, and objectified forms of violence glorified by rival government elites. [prophecy, government, violence, legitimacy, uncertainty, Nuer, South Sudan]

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Genocide, Truth, Memory, and Representation: An Introduction -- Part 1. TRUTH/MEMORY/REPRESENTATION -- 1. What Is an Anthropology of Genocide? Reflections on Field Research with Maya Survivors in Guatemala -- 2. Perilous Outcomes: International Monitoring and the Perpetuation of Violence in Sudan -- 3. Whose Genocide? Whose Truth? Representations of Victim and Perpetrator in Rwanda -- Part 2. TRUTH/MEMORY/REPRESENTATION -- 4. A Politics of Silences: Violence, Memory, and Treacherous Speech in Post-1965 Bali -- 5. The Limits of Empathy: Emotional Anesthesia and the Museum of Corpses in Post-Holocaust Germany -- 6. Forgotten Guatemala: Genocide, Truth, and Denial in Guatemala's Oriente -- Part 3. TRUTH/MEMORY/REPRESENTATION -- 7. Addressing the Legacies of Mass Violence and Genocide in Indonesia and East Timor -- 8. Mediated Hostility: Media, Affective Citizenship, and Genocide in Northern Nigeria -- 9. Cleansed of Experience? Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing, and the Challenges of Anthropological Representation -- Epilogue: The Imagination of Genocide -- Contributors -- Index