Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how local forms of political community and citizenship have been forged in the western South Sudan-Uganda borderlands over the past century. It suggests that anti-witchcraft measures reveal both the overlaps and spaces between state and local forms of authority and citizenship.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how local forms of political community and citizenship have been forged in the western South Sudan-Uganda borderlands, particularly by those seeking to define, regulate and govern these small-scale communities. Going back to the nineteenth century and drawing on oral histories, the paper will emphasise the long history of migration and movement in this frontier region. Yet in spite - or perhaps because - of the mobility and fluidity of social and political relations and identities in this borderland, local authorities have attempted to assert and govern communities defined by ancestral belonging to a localised territory. In doing so they have drawn on ritual relationships with the land, often asserting these as a counterforce to the dislocating, translocal power of governments, armies and sometimes churches. Yet the increasingly powerful idea of bounded communities emerges also from the long-term interactions with state attempts to categorise and control people on both sides of this boundary, as well as from broader changes in land values and rights. The paper argues that these multiple sources for envisioning and enforcing territorial communities are particularly apparent in the attempts by various local authorities to offer solutions to the threat of witchcraft and poisoning. Because witchcraft is frequently located outside the realm and capacity of the state legal regime, it is particularly useful as a focus of action for those working to carve out and defend more localised regimes of authority and citizenship, even as they define their jurisdictions in relation to the state.