Leadership, Nation-building and War in South Sudan

Sonja Theron is a part-time lecturer in the Department of Political Sciences, University of Pretoria and a researcher at the Centre for Mediation in Africa, University of Pretoria, South Africa.

• Introduction PART ONE: Origins: The Southern Sudan as People, Polity and “Problem” (c. 1821-1983)Conquest and Colonisation Independence and Rebellion PART TWO: The War Continues: The Fight for Nation and State (1983 – 2002)War and New Leadership Inner Turmoil PART THREE: Independence and Civil War: Building a State, Forgetting a Nation (2002 – 2015)Negotiating and Implementing Peace Freedom, Fragility and Fragmentation Conclusion

This is a remarkable book, providing a cogent analysis to a complex question about how a state that was born of a long history of war can graduate from political and social fracturing in order to forge a nation-state and a sense of collective nationhood. The book has advanced to a new level the debate about the role of political leadership in state-building and nation-building in Africa’s newest country and filling an important gap in the literature on South Sudan. It is part political history, part sociology and largely deep ethnography about how people live with and overcome daunting ravages of more than half a century of vicious and devastating Sudanese state violence, fratricidal violence, and politico-military rivalries between the leaders. Sonja Theron has demonstrated how challenging and yet important it is to define such terms as “leadership”, “political will” and “national identity” in their historical specificity and contingency. She convincingly argues that South Sudan is trapped between efforts to build a nation out of multitude of competing entities and the ambition by some groups, regions, and cultural identities to remain autonomous. The result is a brilliant expose of a long struggle for freedom that has now culminated in an independent state but being hamstrung by divisions that are rooted in that long history of conflict, violence and war. This book is a must read for anyone wishing to understand, not just this complex political and social history, but also the difficult question of whether South Sudan will survive as a viable nation.