Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates the historical origins of one of the current disputes between Sudan and South Sudan over borderland territory, and suggests that events in the colonial period underlie both current tensions and local demands for the protection of local rights by the state.

Paper long abstract:

One of the zones disputed by Sudan and South Sudan along their common border is a fourteen mile stretch of territory south of the river Bahr el-Arab or Kiir, territory historically used by two nomadic pastoralist groups as a zone of dry season grazing: the Rizeigat Baggara (now defined as citizens of Sudan) and the Malual Dinka (now defined as citizens of South Sudan). The vigour of protest among Malual populations against the possibility of 'giving away' this territory to Sudan briefly seemed to threaten the authority of South Sudan's government in late 2012. This protest seems to reflect a feeling that this territory was won with the blood of those who fought in the Sudanese civil wars, righting the historical wrongs of the British colonial state, which handed this territory to the Rizeigat in the early twentieth century, regardless of the Malual's deeper historical claims.

This paper argues that the process of drawing state actors into local borderland politics, including the demands that the state protect the rights of local populations, has been a ongoing political dynamic in this area since the colonial period. Moreover it suggests that the (internal) border of the colonial period in this area was never the clear 'legible' line of theoretical imagination: but rather remained an area of fuzzy, overlapping zones of local interaction, which state actors only ever had limited control over. In practice this area has long been a zone of shared sovereignty, whatever the line on the map suggests.