Building a Fragmented State: Land Governance and Conflict in South Sudan

Abstract

Land governance reforms are part of donor-sponsored liberal peacebuilding projects which have state-building as one of their core elements. After the end of the civil war with Sudan (1983–2005), South Sudan undertook a process of institution-building and policy-making supported by international donors to create a decentralised system based on local ‘communities’ and their ‘traditional authorities’. Communal customary rights to land have been legalised to reduce rural people’s economic vulnerability and satisfy one of the major grievances that led to war. In fact, the land reform encouraged the overlapping between the spheres of local state administration and the ethnic community ruled by traditional authorities. To date this has appeared to strengthen ethnic affiliation as a means to access resources and enrich government officers’ repertoires for claiming control over the territory on behalf of the ‘community’, thereby increasing competition in a context marked by the militarisation of ethnic identity.

Keywords:

• state-building
• land
• conflict
• ethnicity
• South Sudan

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The same dynamic is currently at play in the war that started in December 2013 between the government and the SPLM-in-Opposition rebels, led by Riek Machar.

2 This statement was later incorporated into the 22 and the Draft Land Policy (2015) as ‘the land belongs to the people’ to make the principle less ‘divisive’ upon pressure from international actors (Interview 4; personal communication with international consultant, 2015).

3 Legal provisions for the structure of government are also contained in the CPA, Interim Constitution of Southern Sudan (2005), Local Government Framework (2006) and Transitional Constitution of the Republic of South Sudan (2011).

4 By 2014, Urban Local Government Councils had only been established in three towns: Juba, Wau and Malakal.

5 Cherry Leonardi uses this expression to refer to the chiefs’ preference for staying near to government offices, viewed as the symbol of state distributive power (25, 197). The expression was frequently used by many of my local interlocutors speaking about being in town instead of in rural areas.

6 For example, the failure in preventing the survey department officers’ practice of selling urban plots to different people at the same time leaves those who do not have strong patrons in the state government vulnerable to expropriation despite having applied for regular documents, unless they are recognised as members of the community traditionally owning the land where the town grows.

7 Riek Machar’s SPLM faction and other Nuer militias were supported by Khartoum in order to counter the SPLM and keep control of oilfields. Pariang County largely remained under SPLM control.

8 Official population data for towns are not available: the National Bureau of Statistics only releases data breakdown for counties.

9 About $3,800, with the average salary of a local NGO worker (non-managerial position) being about $250–300 a month (data referring to November 2013).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sara De Simone

SARA DE SIMONE is a PhD candidate in African Studies at the Department of Area Studies, University of Naples L’Orientale, in a joint programme with the Doctoral School in Political Science at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.