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Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the politics of urban administration in South Sudan’s inter-war period (2015-6), arguing that local governments were caught in conflicting principles related to their functions in both waging war and building peace.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses the politics of local administration in South Sudan's inter-war period between the signing of the peace agreement in August 2015 and the renewed outbreak of armed conflict in July 2016. While the agreement reduced military confrontations between the army and rebel groups, political tensions at national and local level never eased. This paper discusses how this no-war-no-peace situation was reflected in local politics, drawing on empirical insights collected during research visits to several urban administrations in 2016. Historically, local governments played a key role in both waging war and building peace, respectively mobilizing force and ordering societies, widening the political space to accommodate grievances, and delivering material benefits to local populations in the form of services. In the inter-war period, the politics of local administration were caught in these contradicting principles, as well as in an intensifying ethnicization of local politics upon which both functions of local government inherently relied. The paper shows that this led to a suspension of civic statehood at the local level, characterized by the political capture of institutional structures of the local government by conflicting parties, as well as by a growing reliance on ethnic affiliation in the distribution of resources and the citizens' aversion to formalized rule.