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AbstractActivists and scholars are seeking to end famine by promoting international legal accountability for starvation. This article deepens our understanding of the relationship between the politics of famine and law by observing the ongoing prevalence and power of legal norms and institutions during times of famine. It reveals the widespread use of hunger courts in famine‐prone South Sudan and their role in legally enforcing social networks that provide for the most vulnerable. Based on analysis of country‐wide survey data from 2018 and 2019, qualitative interviews from 2019‒22 and in‐depth ethnographic observations of hunger courts in one chiefdom in South Sudan during a period of famine‐level hunger in 2018 and 2019, the article argues that hunger courts have played a key role in enforcing social networks. These courts have also supported continuity of chiefs' authority despite crisis. The article concludes by addressing two issues: whether law is necessarily emancipatory in times of famine, and whether legal norms have shifted responsibility for hunger away from the political economies and conflicts that cause famine, instead placing blame and shame on the families of the most vulnerable.

International humanitarian actors and academics continue to struggle to understand armed group conduct and how to restrain this conduct when it violates moral, legal and humanitarian norms. Armed groups that lack a visible, explicit formal hierarchical command structure, equivalent to those found in state militaries, have proved a particular puzzle. A growing body of scholarship on the strategic functions of patterns of violence and restraint has usefully moved beyond assumptions that extreme violence is indicative of an absence of authority over armed actors. However, literature has tended to ignore the potential plurality and complexity of authority figures that shape violence and the constraining, conservative nature of certain moral orders. This article makes use of qualitative and ethnographic research in South Sudan to understand patterns of restraint among the gojam and titweng cattle-guarding defense forces from 2014 to 2017. The analysis documents how public authorities gained legitimacy within these groups by renegotiating a group's social order, moral boundaries, and restraint through their own reinterpretations of meta-ethical ideals and histories. Cultural norms of restraint were manipulated by elites but were also remade into acts of creative refusal against these same elites. The article specifically focuses on how the life-giving work of children, women and old friends was used to protect life as well as incite violence. The article has implications for how international humanitarians can engage with the remaking of custom to enhance armed group restraint and better protect civilians.

Spiritual and divine authorities play a prominent role in mobilizing armed violence. This article provides a micro-history of a contemporary Nuer prophetess (guan kuoth) in South Sudan who mobilized hundreds of armed men including in support of current anti-government rebellions. The article grapples with apparent paradoxes in her approach to kume (a broadly defined notion of government) and customary law. This prophetess rejects logics of authority associated with the kume. At the same time, she champions the continuity of the language and imaginaries of customary authority that are deeply associated with government registers of authority in this context. The article argues that at the heart of the prophetess's approach is her attempt to overturn historic government initiatives that separated the political and religious nature of institutions, and to assert that governance without government is possible. Previous attempts to govern without the divine have interrupted the customary law's ability to offer healing including from the spiritual and physical dangers of killing. Her ability to mobilize people to arms is partly based on political claims to reconstitute the divine authority behind the customary law.

This article critiques explanations of South Sudan's armed conflicts since 2013 that have relied on over-simplified theories of identity or monetised politics. Instead, this article explores the renegotiation of the meanings of monetary exchanges in politics and the inter-linked remaking of political identities. Warring coalitions in South Sudan have mobilised support using different notions of political communities and divergent ideas about the role of money in defining relationships. Some political communities have faced moral condemnation for their apparent willingness to form alliances in exchange for money. The article specifically discusses the emergence of the derogatory term 'Nuer weu' ('Nuer of Dinka money') among the South Sudan armed opposition. Alternatively, other political visions have presented gifts of money as a way to reinvent naturalised, kinship-based political communities, as well as social obligations of revenge and hierarchical norms of giving. The remaking of identity and the moral limits of monetary gifts in politics cannot only mobilise forces to war but also have implications for the moral limits of peace. The article ends by discussing one commander's alternative visions of how elite money in politics could be made consistent with wartime moral norms by providing salaries for the dead.

Armed, cattle-herding men in Africa are often assumed to be at a relational and spatial distance from the 'legitimate' armed forces of the government. The vision constructed of the South Sudanese government in 2005 by the Comprehensive Peace Agreement removed legitimacy from non-government armed groups including localised, armed, defence forces that protected communities and cattle. Yet, militarised cattle-herding men of South Sudan have had various relationships with the governing Sudan Peoples'Liberation Movement/Army over the last thirty years, blurring the government – non government boundary. With tens of thousands killed since December 2013 in South Sudan, questions are being asked about options for justice especially for governing elites. A contextual understanding of the armed forces and their relationship to government over time is needed to understand the genesis and apparent legitimacy of this violence.

A fresh perspective on conflict and peace-making that highlights the cosmologies and invisible entities that state, society and religious authorities draw on to claim or reclaim legitimacy and control. Peace-making can be a violent, arbitrary assertion of power. At the same time, the spheres of power, politics and religion are rarely discrete: when governments behave like gods through demonstrations of arbitrary violence, the remaking of moral and spiritual worlds can provide radical ways to contest the brutality of both conflict and peace. This book is an exploration of the way that Nuer- and Dinka-speaking communities living around the Bilnyang and connected river systems in Warrap and Unity States in South Sudan have experienced peace-making and conflict in an increasingly militarized South Sudan. The book traces patterns of violence in peace-making back to colonial and mercantile activities in the late 19th century, but focuses on the period since the 1980s. Challenging dominant understandings of conflict and peace centred on neo-liberal brokerage and settlements or a politics entirely driven by instrumentalist, neo-patrimonial, marketized logics, this book shows how South Sudanese authorities, particularly religious authorities, have contested the legitimacy of violence and peace by drawing on divinely inspired notions of authority and norms of conduct. Drawing on archive, ethnographic and oral history research, as well as participant observations of the elite peace negotiations since 2013, Pendle describes the peace-making efforts of a range of actors from international diplomats to chiefs, Nuer prophets and local priests, to show how peace-making in South Sudan became an instrument used by actors to build authority by reshaping rituals, remaking hierarchies and re-encoding moral protest against oppressive regimes. By recasting anthropological and historical scholarship on divine authorities and moral communities in South Sudan, this book brings a new perspective to conflict, peace and governance that will be invaluable not only to scholars but to policymakers, practitioners and NGOs. This book is available as an Open Access ebook under the Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC.

This article examines the public authority of chiefs' courts within the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) Protection of Civilians Sites (PoCs). After December 2013, UNMISS peacekeepers opened the gates of their bases to around 200,000 civilians fleeing war. This unintentionally created a legal and political anomaly. Over time, conflicts and crimes rose within the sites, and UNMISS improvised a form of administration. But while the internationals sought technical solutions, people displaced within the sites turned to familiar 'customary' methods to manage problems of insecurity, establishing chiefs' courts. The PoC sites became an arena of plural authorities, with chiefs working alongside camp administrators, peacekeepers and humanitarian actors. We explore how and why the chiefs responded to insecurity within the sites and whether they engaged with, or diverged from United Nations actors and international norms. We demonstrate that justice remains central to the provision of security in contexts of war and displacement. International peace interventions are rightly wary of 'customary' justice processes that prioritise communities and families at the expense of individual rights, but this unique case shows that they are sources of trust and consistency that are resilient, adaptable and can contribute to human security.

This article examines the public authority of chiefs' courts within the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) Protection of Civilians Sites (PoCs). After December 2013, UNMISS peacekeepers opened the gates of their bases to around 200,000 civilians fleeing war. This unintentionally created a legal and political anomaly. Over time, conflicts and crimes rose within the sites, and UNMISS improvised a form of administration. But while the internationals sought technical solutions, people displaced within the sites turned to familiar 'customary' methods to manage problems of insecurity, establishing chiefs' courts. The PoC sites became an arena of plural authorities, with chiefs working alongside camp administrators, peacekeepers and humanitarian actors. We explore how and why the chiefs responded to insecurity within the sites and whether they engaged with, or diverged from United Nations actors and international norms. We demonstrate that justice remains central to the provision of security in contexts of war and displacement. International peace interventions are rightly wary of 'customary' justice processes that prioritise communities and families at the expense of individual rights, but this unique case shows that they are sources of trust and consistency that are resilient, adaptable and can contribute to human security.

AbstractMany contemporary humanitarian organisations derive their legitimacy from their claims to protect civilians. Yet, what these organisations do in its name includes a diverse and contested range of activities that are often far from what global publics and affected populations understand as constituting protection. As others have argued, this detracts from honest discussions about when and how humanitarians are well placed to keep civilians safe from violence and threats. To begin to address this gap, we review what three well‐known humanitarian organisations publicly say they have done to protect strangers across three violent protracted crises. We capture how they portray their activities, the logics they attribute to them and what is left unsaid. Our findings suggest that humanitarians must, once again, collaborate over a shared protection framework that better signals what others can expect from them. We also identify an emerging convergence around the notion that peer‐to‐peer denunciations, conflict resolution, supporting self‐protection and community protection strategies and improving state‐society relations can be important forms of protection activity. There is, therefore, a need for a public stocktake over what can, cannot, should and should not be done to protect civilians in such contexts.