Introduction
The last decade of bloody contestation and humanitarian woe in South Sudan stands as a sombre case of almost entirely laissez-faire profiteering during a period of significant political realignment. Despite a marked decrease in violence against civilians in 2021, humanitarian suffering and poverty remains on par with that of the civil war of 2013–2018 (United Nations 2022b; UN OCHA 2022). Rhetorical commitments to the Revitalised Agreement of 2018 (Intergovernmental Authority on Development 2018) have done little to change the militarised inequality plaguing South Sudan (Martin and Kamande 2022, 5). This is because societal stability is built on more than just official politics. There is more to the picture than interethnic animosity, formal integration of rival parties, and personalistic, factional strife in the capital (primarily, though not exclusively, between President Salva Kiir and First Vice President Riek Machar) (United Nations 2022a; ADBG 2018, 26–27). Violence in South Sudan is highly diverse and diffuse, spurred and exploited by everyone from kleptocrats warring over oil rents to militias ambushing the lucrative cattle routes that crisscross East Africa. This violence revolves around the wholly unregulated and unmitigated acquisition and accumulation of economic resources (Watson 2021). Wealth is largely concentrated in the hands of the few, who secure fortunes by arming and exploiting the labour of the many. Surplus labour and the attendant expendability of human lives has become an essential component of these predatory economies, forming veritable commodity markets of young fighters and attendants.
Several key questions need to be examined:
Is the violence in South Sudan about more than just rival political factions and duelling ethnic groups?
Is the race to acquire personal wealth just as essential to the country’s ongoing violence?
How do these predatory processes play out in South Sudan? What are the structural incentives for predatory economics, both domestic and transnational?
Wealth and violence
The line of reasoning put forward here stems from the assumption that economic opportunity (greed) and necessity (grievance) exert an important influence on the initiation, escalation, and sustainability of armed conflict (Collier and Hoeffler 2004). Research has often focused on trying to prove or disprove statistical correlations between indicators of greed or grievance and the onset or worsening of intrastate violence (De Soysa 2002; Jakobsen and De Soysa 2009; Lu and Thies 2011). In contrast, this paper draws from qualitative developments in South Sudan that link the pursuit of wealth to violent interactions. It demonstrates how the same figures bickering over political power-sharing agreements are often reliant on armed groups and patronage networks involved in the violent acquisition and maintenance of personal fortunes and business empires.
The two case studies have been chosen for their centrality to the South Sudanese political economy, and their well-documented connections to violence in South Sudan. While the once-lucrative oil fields offer a high-profile case of predatory economics, cattle markets and the raiding that sustains them are far more decentralised and localised institutions. This analysis is not bound by simplified national–local conflict dichotomies. It demonstrates how ‘national’ party bosses are fundamentally reliant on, and participants in, ‘local’ militarisation and predation. It also shows how, conversely, predators in the field support elites’ claims to power as long as this is what is best for their coercive enterprises. This is not an exhaustive review of the types and causes of coercive political economy in South Sudan, but an exploration of how actors from various sections of society exploit or directly sanction violence to accumulate wealth, particularly in these two dominant industries. The perverse incentives and methods for accumulation must be identified because, despite a business model reliant on violence, these economies are not as unsustainable as might be assumed.
It is important to note that South Sudan is a new country in name only. Processes of militarisation and exploitation stretch back decades through the region’s tortuous liberation struggle and internecine competition. The seeds of predation are as important to explore as the fruit they have borne. The rebels of pre-independence southern Sudan are the key leaders and stakeholders today precisely because they armed their power bases and hoarded enough wealth to appear as credible interlocutors at the negotiation table and to their international patrons. This process is not unique to South Sudan. It has been a particularly cynical tragicomedy whereby uncharismatic individuals devoid of ideology are accorded representation because they were the most effective and profitable in their violence. International actors working for ‘peace’ before and after South Sudan’s 2011 independence therefore bear significant responsibility for legitimising powerful factions that stay afloat by raiding each other and instrumentalising intercommunal animosities.
Oil fuels ambition
There were so many generals, you would think the [Central Bank] was the army headquarters. (Anonymous observer at an event divvying up foreign reserves, quoted in Foltyn 2016)
Oil as a catalyst
A key sticking point in the Sudan–South Sudan negotiations and then the Kiir–Machar power struggle was control over the once-dominant oil industry (responsible for 98% of state revenue in 2013) (Djounguep 2022). Before and after independence, South Sudan has been plagued by state capture and revenue embezzlement from the historically abundant oil fields in Unity and Upper Nile states, which were also some of the main battlegrounds and strongholds of Kiir and Machar, respectively, during the civil war (Foltyn 2016; de Waal 2014; ICG 2021). Although oil has become less relevant as South Sudan decarbonises and elites diversify their investments, the dynamics of this familiar petro-kleptocracy are important for understanding the initiation and sustainability of rent-seeking conflict in South Sudan. From the private embezzlement of export revenues to the actual control of oil fields, this toxic resource has been a pervasive driver of violence in South Sudan, serving as the ultimate prize for duelling political factions and armed groups.
The events leading up to the civil war are demonstrative of the patronage and contestation that surrounds South Sudan’s oil industry (ICG 2021, 4). When President Salva Kiir blocked the pipelines to Port Sudan in 2012 to extract greater concessions from Sudan, the foolhardy negotiation tactic precipitated a short border war with Khartoum, a perilous turn to oil-backed loans from Chinese and Malaysian firms, and the crumbling of government unity in the capital (ICG 2021, 4). Elites ‘playing nice’ to strengthen their image among international partners and their bargaining position with Sudan suddenly found the common pot of oil revenue drastically restricted (Rolandsen 2011, 562). Deep factional cleavages and animosities from the South–South violence of the 1990s could no longer be papered over. Kiir clamped down on opposition within the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement and Army (SPLM/A) and solidified his circle’s control over the oil industry, initiating a process that would define competition and corruption in Juba for years to come (ICG 2021, 4). He also reversed position and abandoned the Blue Nile and South Kordofan regions (rival Machar’s close allies) to Sudan after Khartoum retaliated with its own threat to block the pipelines (Djounguep 2022). Months of antagonistic stalemate ensued, with each faction hesitant to initiate direct violence (Djounguep 2022). But in December 2013, street battles erupted in Juba between presidential guards loyal to the two leaders, leading to a five-year civil war fought by militias often directly funded by stolen oil revenues (The Sentry 2018, 2). The drama of closing South Sudan’s pipelines (and therefore its kleptocracy) was a tipping point for long-time rivals.
This series of events demonstrates that the dash for oil has been a centrepiece in South Sudan’s history. The 1976 discovery of oil in the south is often offered as the prime reason that President Jaafar Nimeiry ended the only stretch of official peace that contemporary Sudan has known (1972–1982) (Malwal 2015, 114–116; Ali and Matthews 1999, 193). In 1980, after the south’s regional government rebuked his attempt to redraw borders and access the oil fields, Nimeiry created Unity state, a new province that took the fields entirely out of the south’s jurisdiction (Ali and Matthews 1999, 193). As tensions rose, southern military leaders founded the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) and Nimeiry armed and organised his own proxy militias, with the Second Sudanese Civil War starting soon after (1983–2005) (Ali and Matthews 1999, 193). The development of the oil fields and the vital pipeline to Port Sudan would be intimately connected to the subsequent decades of systematic mobilisation and suffering (James 2015, 11–12). Chevron, which had been responsible for the original exploration and contracting, became hesitant to resume operations when the oil fields became key targets in the civil war (ibid., 11). With heavy involvement from the new government of Omar al-Bashir, a Chinese, Malaysian and Canadian oil partnership took over, and Khartoum’s armed forces often used the infrastructure built by these companies for their military operations (ibid., 12). Militias would displace and kill those who lived near the fields, destroying villages and becoming ‘oil protection’ forces to be paid off by all sides (often using the profits from the fields) (ibid.). SPLA leaders enriched themselves and transferred their wealth offshore, while the oil protection forces established themselves as key players in oil-rich Unity and Upper Nile states: they were some of the most active and brutal in the southern infighting of the 1990s, as well as in the 2013 civil war (ibid.; ICG 2021, 3–4). From the 1980s onward, the economy of exploration, extraction and protection fundamentally relied on a generalised state of militarisation and expendability of local communities and fighters.
Oil as a weapon
After the ‘peace’ deal of 2005, in which the negotiations focused heavily on the division of oil rents, and again after the events of 2012 described above, a level of predictability was established in South Sudan’s economic relationship with Sudan (though these relations are hardly amicable or even peaceful, especially in the disputed Abyei region) (Patey 2010, 627–628). In keeping with the past 30 years, elite capture continued being systematised as an essential part of the south’s administrative apparatus (Patey 2010, 628–629). Despite murky details on the extent of the financial flows, significant reporting has been dedicated to the general looting and corruption associated with the state oil company, Nile Petroleum Corporation (Nilepet) (The Sentry 2018, 2). There has been a complete lack of regulation and oversight for a company that was a mainstay of regional supply chains, allowing President Kiir to turn Nilepet into the coffer for his political ambitions, violent operations and personal enrichment (Global Witness 2018, 18). Some of the key beneficiaries of this looting have been the disparate Dinka militias that make up Kiir's network of co-ethnic patronage, highly militarised by years of war against both Khartoum and Machar (The Sentry 2018, 3).
Documents obtained by The Sentry (2018) detailed 84 transactions, totalling US$80 million, from Nilepet to various parts of the government war effort in 2014–2015 (the worst period of fighting). Everything from small arms, rations and pocket money to tanks and armoured personnel carriers can be traced to revenues moved from Nilepet through companies owned by Kiir’s inner circle (The Sentry 2018). Included in these transactions were an airline partly owned by Kiir’s wife, an auto company owned by allied businessman Obac William Olawo (sanctioned by the US Treasury in 2018), and straightforward requests for money by Nilepet Board member Akol Koor Kuc, who also happened to be Director General of the feared Internal Security Bureau (ISB) (The Sentry 2018; US Department of the Treasury 2018; Global Witness 2018, 3). Kiir’s wife and children have at various times owned significant stakes in various oil-related companies (among other industries), including Nilepet, and reportedly manage lavish estates in Nairobi, Kampala and Addis Ababa (The Sentry 2016, 20–21). The Sentry also traced the illicit gains of other important, immensely wealthy allies to the president: these include former SPLA chief of staff General Paul Malong Awan, who oversaw much of the violence in Juba in 2013, and his deputy chief of staff General Malek Reuben Riak, who helped plan and supply a brutal government offensive in Unity state in 2015 (The Sentry 2016, 34, 43; United Nations Security Council 2018). General Malong, often known as ‘King Paul’, once owned a stake in the same oil company as one of Kiir’s sons, along with several Chinese and Zimbabwean businessmen (The Sentry 2016, 35). Such domestic and international partnerships are essential to the systemic, opaque corruption plaguing South Sudan.
It is not a coincidence that some of South Sudan’s wealthiest men are also key military leaders from the height of the civil war. Soldiers need weapons, food, transport and a dozen other support items, and their commanding officers owned the companies procuring these supplies, paid for with stolen oil money (The Sentry 2020, 25). Additionally, there is a complete lack of financial oversight in a procurement system where military leaders themselves, not civilian personnel, handle the public funds relevant to their operations (Mukhono 2020, 47–49). As top leaders made fortunes from these dual points of profiteering and embezzlement, lower-ranking officers would steal and sell the provisions at higher rates, leaving their troops to pillage communities in search of food and supplies (Dumo 2019; ICG 2021, 3–4). In South Sudan’s civil war, factional violence, public corruption and community extortion were virtually indistinguishable from one another, infecting both the uniformed forces and their proxy militias, with lasting legacies for both (Mukhono 2020, 31; The Sentry 2020, 21).
When some of the most brutal fighting broke out with a government offensive in Upper Nile state in 2015, General Akol Koor’s ISB directly armed Pandang Dinka proxy militias, while future Minister of Finance and Planning Stephen Dhieu Dau corresponded with the Ministry of Petroleum to supply and coordinate the militias (Global Witness 2018, 3–4). This Padang Dinka ‘White Army’ is also often called the ‘Oil Protection Force’ and, according to Amnesty International (2017, 6), massacred ethnic Shilluk civilians and ‘rampaged freely’ during the offensive. Like elsewhere in the country, this support for proxies created a complex feedback loop. SPLM/A officials used oil revenues to delegate violent capabilities to the Padang Dinka as combatants in their national conflict, and in return the militias gained (and retain) the capabilities and support to engage in their own intercommunal power struggles, retributive violence, and rent-seeking raiding (Human Rights Watch 2022; Radio Tamazuj 2015).
Oil as a prize
Rather than viewing this as a game of mutual benefit and betrayal between distant SPLM/A elites and ground-level militias, the SPLM/A and the militias should be understood as being co-located within a ‘multiplicity of competitive stakeholders’ in the coercive economy (Omeje 2021, 85). Militias in South Sudan are as much competing with military units for material and strategic gain as they are being paid off by them. This is evidenced by the numerous instances of unsuccessful and often bloody campaigns by military forces to disarm co-ethnic youth militias and bring them under their control (Luedke 2020, 16–17). This is not just a matter of oil revenues fuelling conflict between Kiir and Machar, or Padang and Shilluk; it is also a story of diffuse, structural conflict over oil itself. Oil was not only the coffer to feed the war effort, but the prize to be jealously guarded against rival factions. Before and after independence, entrance into the entire political apparatus revolved around private enrichment (offshore accounts or mansions in Uganda and Kenya) and public perks (government jets and expensive healthcare) (The Sentry 2016, 2; Anderson and Gibb 2019). On numerous occasions, Salva Kiir privately chastised his subordinates for corruption in and outside of the oil industry, an example of ‘do as I say, not as I do’ (Holland 2012; Dumo 2019). Impunity and plunder continued throughout the 2010s despite conflict, structural inefficiencies and declining outputs (Anderson and Gibb 2019). A great deal of this public and private spending relied not on oil revenues but on prepayments for future oil sales, a controversial practice that has saddled the state with massive debts (Anderson and Gibb 2019). In 2021, Transparency International (2021) ranked South Sudan the most corrupt country in the world.
More than just stolen funds, the oil prize has left South Sudan with decades of violence and a woefully incapable state. The centripetal force of easy profit initially united many of the factions in SPLM/A to negotiate independence from Sudan, but as soon as the new state’s resources were made lootable, unity no longer mattered, especially to the faction best positioned for the looting (Kiranda et al. 2016). Lacking oil rents with which to bribe militias, Machar’s dispossessed Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-in-Opposition (SPLM-IO) rallied Nuer raiders around its decades-old campaign of ethnic fearmongering and mutual economic opportunism (de Waal 2014, 366; Jok and Hutchinson 1999, 125–126; Hutchinson 2000, 6). It then launched bitter campaigns to take oil fields in areas such as Bentiu, Unity state, and Malakal, Upper Nile state (de Waal 2014, 366). Much of the violence revolved around trying either to take or to keep this essential source of patronage and mobilisation. All the while, official ministries and positions were reshuffled and monopolised, a process highly vulnerable to elites shaping and undermining institutions to guarantee their own wealth and prestige (Pinaud 2014, 209–210). Thus, not only was thievery carried over from pre-independence and systematised as part of a ‘new’ state, but second-order institutions related to oversight, regulation, equity or justice were never built to begin with (ICG 2021, 20–21). For example, Nilepet is technically a private company, freeing it of the burden of even pretending to be transparent or accountable (Global Witness 2018, 5). Effective and inclusive institutions are rendered unnecessary when power players have easy access to resources and no interest in sharing them or facing consequences for how they were acquired. Though oil is now a fading prize, the deadly competition it spurred has created a broader reliance on theft, weapons and ‘expendable’ labour for economic viability.
Herds feed raiders
God asked man, ‘Which one shall I give you, Black Man; there is the Cow and the thing called “What”, which of the two would you like?’ The man said, ‘I do not want “What”.’ God said, ‘But “What” is better than the Cow!’ The man said, ‘No.’ Then God said, ‘If you like the Cow, you had better taste its milk before you choose it finally.’ The man squeezed some milk into his hand, tasted it, and said, ‘Let us have the milk and never see “What”.’ (Dinka proverb, quoted in Thomas 2019, 89).
Pastoralism in flux
Most conversations in South Sudan drift back to cattle. This is because 78% of the population are primarily pastoralists and 85% keep some livestock (Protection Cluster South Sudan 2019, 1; Sebit 2017, 2). Cattle rustling, exploiting a livelihood that runs through the blood of many South Sudanese communities, has become a lucrative and highly violent enterprise for actors at all levels. As the oil runs dry and South Sudan’s economy decarbonises, cattle herds have only gained importance in the sphere of violent economics (Thomas 2019, 13). One might say the militarised commodification of South Sudan’s cattle is the ‘What’ of the Dinka proverb above: it is a better way of doing business for some, but the majority probably wish they had never seen it.
Cattle rustling is not a recent practice: it has existed for as long as one community had more cattle than another (Wild, Jok, and Patel 2018, 3). Unsurprisingly, it was duelling leaders like Machar and Kiir who turned this moderately violent practice, once tempered by traditional mediation mechanisms and religious rituals, into a far deadlier cycle of ambushes, massacres and pitched battles (ibid., 4). By demystifying certain beliefs around theft, firearms and murder, and by inundating their co-ethnic communities with small arms and light weapons, politicians, community leaders and businesspeople harnessed potent bands of young raiders for factional enrichment and strategic gain (ibid.). Former Dinka Titweng cattle raiders would become Kiir’s essential Döt ku Beny (Rescue the President) guards who participated in the opening salvos of South Sudan’s civil war (ibid., 5–6; Manyok 2016, 3–4). The Nuer White Army, initially decentralised groups protecting their cattle from raids, was thoroughly militarised and organised by Machar in the 1980s and 1990s: it became his favourite tool as he rallied against Kiir and his oil fields (Wild, Jok, and Patel 2018, 4–5; Manyok 2016, 46). An estimated 5,000 civilians were killed in cattle raids between 2011 and 2017, with the Titweng and White Army perpetrating some of the worst atrocities of the war (Morgan 2017; Idris 2018, 9–10).
Much of this violence was not at the behest of their elite patrons, even if their increased capabilities stemmed from them. These raider bands were never substantively integrated into more formal community militias or party forces, and would frequently desert or change loyalties, even killing co-ethnic elites who crossed them (Idris 2018, 9–10). The ubiquity of cattle, weapons and able young men to harness the two has meant that an enterprising militia of any size can become moderately successful and self-sufficient without bending the knee to a specific faction. Instead, they can take part in larger operations as they see fit, selling their labour for material gain and strategic advantage over rival communities (Luedke 2020, 14–15).
At a macro level, dual processes have changed the dynamics of predation in South Sudan in recent years. On the one hand, the civil war technically ended in 2018 and violence became far more localised (though often intricately connected to power players around the country), with 80% of civilian deaths in 2021 attributable to communal militias (United Nations 2021). In the same period, official mismanagement, low oil prices and the depletion of oil wells drastically reduced the profitability of the oil sector, causing a radical shake-up in patronage networks from Juba down (Watson 2021). President Kiir is in the process of shaking off the many beneficiaries of the state and army’s bloated budget, leaving scores of regional bosses and militia leaders, well-versed in coercive, illicit enterprise, to build their own sources of personal enrichment and patronage (Watson 2021).
At the community level, various pressures are exerted on raiders, and profiteers are no longer bound by traditional resolution mechanisms and rituals. As raiders and community militias became entrenched political and economic actors through the 1983 and 2013 civil wars, another traditional institution was shaken: the bride price, often considered the measure of a man’s wealth and standing (Udier 2019; Yual 2012). The average bride price since 2013 has soared from 20 to 100 head of cattle, inflated by wealthy urbanites paying as much as they could as a sign of status (Udier 2019). In a matter of years, most young men became unable to marry and ascend to ‘manhood’ without stealing cattle from other communities (Udier 2019). In a 2021 survey of 120 young male respondents, bride price ranked just below food as the most important reason to own cattle (Cullis 2021, 33). Expectations regarding wealth, prestige and marriage pair with patronage networks, arms proliferation and ethnic mobilisation to create a firestorm of intercommunal conflict. Dan Watson (2021) of ACLED thus aptly labelled the shifting dynamics of violence in South Sudan as ‘subnational’, whereby diffuse, opportunistic conflict is influenced by events and relationships in Juba, but in reality is inextricable from village-specific socioeconomic circumstances. Events in Juba themselves cannot be separated from these circumstances, considering how the vanguard forces and the very objectives in ‘political’ violence are frequently indistinguishable from ongoing economic contestation.
Pastoralism for profit
‘Cattle warlords’, often with ties to the political and military establishment, now employ bands of as many as 500 well-armed, otherwise unemployed or underemployed young men to steal and guard their cattle (Musoke 2020; Yual 2012). Cattle can be used for meat, milk, leather, transport or barter, making them an inherently multisectoral, dynamic resource upon which any ruthless strongman can build an economic empire and a respected name (Udier 2019). Hundreds or even thousands of cattle can be driven off and stolen at a time, with dozens of defenders and bystanders killed in some of the larger raids (Gebreyes 2016, Annex V).
Stolen herds are also travelling further than ever from the point of theft to large commercial markets (HealthNet TPO 2021). Militia opportunism is exacerbated by porous borders and similarly hyper-capitalist cattle raiding and guarding that has developed in neighbouring countries. Beyond the traditional pastoral lifestyle, cattle have become big business across East and Central Africa; not always legal, often violent, and highly dependent on the commodity market of surplus labour created by rampant inequality, unemployment and weapons proliferation (Kimokoti 2022, 119–120; Daghar and Okumu 2021). Raider leaders are increasingly integrated into transnational markets and raiding areas covering multiple countries (Daghar and Okumu 2021). Cattle rustling is often an exponent of organised crime and transnational business connections, empowered by easy access to arms and fighting-age men, as well as poor legal regimes and monitoring of shared borders across East Africa (Gumba 2020). An increasing proportion of cattle are now owned remotely by the many elites living either in cities or out of country: this concentration of wealth has raised the price of cattle while decreasing per capita income (Protection Cluster South Sudan 2019, 2). For South Sudan, all of this comes in a country with one of the highest, if not the highest, rates of animal dependency and ownership per capita (World Vision 2018). Contrary to the image of the small-scale pastoralist ‘left behind’ by society, cattle rustling is a highly ‘modern’ means for some to accumulate wealth, prestige and economic connections. It would not be inaccurate to call this a flourishing regional industry, despite its clear reliance on violence and mercenary labour.
There are multiple forms and causes of cattle rustling. The cattle warlords represent an important form of predatory self-enrichment and exploitation of long-militarised communities. Community elders and leaders also train and direct their own militias to steal or retrieve cattle that they need to keep their communities afloat (Sebit 2017, 64). Some raiding is still linked to retaliation, strategic objectives and revenue opportunities for government forces and opposition groups yet to fully reconcile (Protection Cluster South Sudan 2019, 1–2). But undergirding all forms is the economic viability of a herd, figuratively (and in some cases literally) feeding scores of raiders, militias and soldiers across South Sudan and the broader region.
Pastoralism and violence
In Jonglei, the geographically largest state in South Sudan, one-third of reported security incidents in 2020 were instances of cattle raiding and 56% of respondents said their household had been a victim of cattle theft (Quist 2020, 6). The practice has facilitated all-out war between communities of the once-autonomous Murle and the government-backed Bor Dinka, with hundreds of raiders participating in engagements reminiscent of South Sudan’s civil war (Quist 2020, 6). Civil defence groups and community militias have come to dominate this form of violence, with their weapons, supplies, tactics and organisation often enhanced by the state. It is not uncommon that raiders are joined or even led by government or opposition forces in attacks (HRD UNMISS 2021, 2). To sustain this enterprise, militia leaders often entice and control young men by seizing a group’s stolen herd and only doling out cattle for bride prices when a particular fighter is no longer needed (Thomas 2019, 38). As Idris (2018, 3) points out, in a no-holds barred civil conflict, depriving a community or an armed group of their cattle is a very effective tactic.
Aside from South Sudan’s multi-purpose community militias, the often-related though less-organised cattle camps are another crucial tool. Young men dispossessed of their homes due to fighting or poverty gravitate to cattle camps, where they are hired out to conduct raids and deliver the spoils to communities or cattle entrepreneurs (POF 2020, 24–25). The inhabitants of these camps are largely pulled from the same village or tribe, becoming veritable rapid-response forces to attack, defend or retaliate in a vicious cycle of raiding (POF 2020, 4). Networks of camps, called Boma, are simultaneously the core of a tribe’s economic well-being (as centres of grazing and trade) and bloody vulnerabilities (as targets of raiding and armed mobilisation) (POF 2020, 2–3). Women in cattle camps are particularly vulnerable, as they lose husbands and sons in offensive raiding or are themselves targeted in attacks upon the camp (Sebit 2017, 77–78). The Titweng and Nuer White Army are the most prominent examples of these quick-reaction pastoralist bands, no longer confined to cattle camps, but still united by clan ties and mutual economic benefit and security.
It is nevertheless inaccurate to say that these cattle camps and raiding bands are mere pawns in some ethnopolitical struggle. Even the government forces and semi-structured proxy militias who support raiding activities are just as much rent seekers as combatants in the formal arena (Idris 2018, 12–13). They are another faction adding to the market of violence and hoping to reap their own profit from it: government forces have been known to supply cattle camps with weapons, or even post their own troops to them (Idris 2018, 76). For example, ‘disarmament’ campaigns are a favoured excuse of government factions looking for material and strategic gain. These are operations where security forces or state-sponsored militias try to disarm rival communities through harassment and coercion, facilitating communal retaliation, government abuses and escalating warfare (Protection Cluster South Sudan 2019, 2). In one instance in 2006, an SPLA disarmament campaign against the Lou Nuer descended into sustained intercommunal violence and major pitched battles (Richardson 2011). Once the dust had settled, 3300 weapons had been confiscated and 1600 fighters left dead (Richardson 2011). Along with its campaigns against co-ethnic militias, the military’s self-interest is veiled behind state-centric narratives of ‘demobilisation’ and ‘expansion of authority’ (Luedke 2020, 17; Kindersley 2022, 179). Rather than legitimising the military as a flawed but ultimately necessary institution in the process of state-building, it should be understood as another buyer and seller in the business of violent accumulation and commodified labour (Pinaud 2014, 194–195).
The predatory accumulation of cattle by entrepreneurial clan elders, military officers and businesspeople has created an almost entirely distinct market of employment and bloodshed for young South Sudanese (Pinaud 2014, 194–195). Decades of food insecurity, government neglect and outright violent plunder make this pastoral-majority country structurally dependent on contentious cattle economics (Catley 2018, 8). Cattle raiding is often the clearest, or the only, way for a community and an individual to survive. When entire herds can be taken in a single successful attack, fortunes are made and lost overnight in a volatile cycle of opportunism (Catley 2018, 8). There remains an overarching wealthy cadre and ‘gun class’ who facilitate and profit from cattle raiding, often as part of diversified business empires (D’Agoôt 2018). Though many have allies or are themselves involved in the political wrangling in Juba and provincial capitals, their personal and political fortunes largely gravitate around participation in the tangible, volatile accumulation of resources on the ground (Catley 2018, 8; D’Agoôt 2018).
Conclusion
Many of the processes described in this paper are hardly unique to South Sudan, or the Horn of Africa more broadly. Corruption and state capture is less a master plan executed by the SPLM/A than an unscrupulous race to the bottom. Those with access have for years been taking as much as they can before the pot of resource wealth is emptied and regulation and oversight introduced. Though individual choices are important to sustaining kleptocracy and insecurity in South Sudan, these choices exist within broader societal circumstances that allow for and reinforce predatory initiatives. These include easily extractive industries, militarisation from years of civil war, aid dependency and embezzlement, and the total absence or impotence of institutions promoting justice and good governance (The Sentry 2015). Power players, whether they lead a dozen raiders or sit in a ministry office in Juba, are taking advantage of certain structural gaps, trends and expectations that embed economic interaction in violence and coercion.
The profitability of coercion, mixed with endemic unemployment among South Sudan’s youth, has fuelled an ever-present gun class that extends violent economies into every aspect of socioeconomic survival (D’Agoôt 2018). In times of permissive violence (though permissiveness is a gradient, not a binary), labour is a commodity fundamentally based on the infliction of harm and the calculation of acceptable losses (Cohn 2021, 117–118). In a process stretching back decades, South Sudan’s mobile youth, primarily but not exclusively young men, have become ‘raw materials’ to be bought and spent in violent duels over oil fields, public offices and cattle (Majok 2021, 40). Cattle camps become virtual hiring and holding centres for the coercive economy. Poorly regulated, transnational grazing networks solidify the flexibility, mobility and lack of oversight that raiders and big business herders rely on. Like traditional pastoralists, South Sudanese militias are not restricted to South Sudan’s borders, politics or labour pools. Through intentional militarisation by economic and political figures, and the broader neoliberal marketisation affecting the whole region, this historical livelihood has morphed into another source of coercive capitalism in East Africa (Wild, Jok, and Patel 2018; Lesutis 2019, 600).
South Sudan’s society and economy is fundamentally intertwined with the surrounding region and affected by the actions of the many interested ‘state-builders’ who have been involved for decades. The nature and significant impact of such engagement warrants attention. International liberal peacebuilding in South Sudan has run along several familiarly problematic lines: the political legitimisation of kleptocratic elites and the myopic focus on formal institutions; the corruption and crowding-out effect caused by the structurally inefficient aid industry; and the enabling by international financial institutions, through both sins of omission and commission, of exploitative economics in the name of ‘free markets’ and ‘fiscal consolidation’ (Daoust 2017, 28; Roberts 2013, 65–66; Craze and Marko 2022; Tamale 2021, 15). Although these complex and oft-covered issues have not been the focus of this paper, they are constitutive parts of today’s predatory and alienating economies. Regional marketisation and the globalised commodification of African lives and labour have done as much to break down traditional livelihoods and modes of conflict resolution as opportunistic leaders have (Kindersley and Majok 2022, 3–4; Roberts 2013, 69). When visions of peacebuilding are simply to reinforce the governing faction’s monopoly on violence, then nonviolent economies become a casualty of said ‘peace’ (Dagher 2021, 103).
South Sudan represents a stark example of how exploitative commodity markets have entrenched themselves on the African continent and beyond, spurring and perpetuating violence even in times of official peace. Mbembe (2021, 184, 222) has called the Nile states and the continent more broadly ‘the last frontier of capitalism’, where rapid technological growth and interconnectivity mix with unadulterated resource extraction and militarisation. Having explored several modes of predation on the ground in South Sudan, the next step would be to interrogate the transnational markets, legal regimes and international interventions of which this predation is an essential part. How have the various peace deals and their international sponsors enabled and protected exploitative networks? How does the militarisation of international peacekeeping affect the economic circumstances of South Sudanese communities? Where has civil society succeeded in carving a space for nonviolence and inclusivity, and where is there room for growth? By analysing how personal fortunes, group loyalties and the means of violence undergird these coercive economies, future research can contribute to common understandings and practical responses among those whose labour is exploited. In contrast to the attitude of ‘peace from above’ inherent in modern liberal peacebuilding, a ‘post-liberal’ model from ‘below’ can be developed through continued exploration (Kurimoto 2021, 147; Brabant 2007, 1).