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Paper short abstract:

In the marginal pastoralist region where South Sudan, Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia meet, traditional players and institutions maintain considerable power. The way they relate to those of their respective national contexts traces the conditions and developments dominating them.

Paper long abstract:

My research (2008-2012) in the Ateker region, where closely related tribal communities of South Sudan, Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia border each other, revealed a scenario of inter-related conflict configurations on different levels. Colonial administrative structures; unclear boundaries (most prominently the Elemi Triangle); former rebel armies transforming into party state systems; developing modern ethnic elites and 'strong man' politicians; networks of reciprocity and patronage; NGOs and churches running aid-, development and service sector 'businesses'; large scale investors taking over enormous tracts of land and drilling oil; and a pastoralist majority, organised into tribes, sections and age-sets, led by local assemblies of men and charismatic trans-local prophets, still maintaining the only assuredly sustainable production system while continuously fighting over livestock and land - all these elements compose a landscape of selective cooperation and inter-related factional contest that could serve as a textbook example for multipolar power structures that mirror local, national and international conditions in complex but traceable traits of aspiration, struggle and integration. My aim is to depict how those traits are related to particular forms of social organisation that divide the social landscape into collectives specialising in particular forms of accumulation of economic, social and symbolic capital, and how this division shapes the situation in the region.