Abstract
It was the fourth day of the oral pleadings at the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in The Hague, where the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) and the Government of Sudan (GoS) were contesting whether the Abyei Boundaries Commission (ABC) had exceeded the mandate given to it by the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) in 2005. At around midday, Professor James Crawford, one of the lead counsels for GoS, was called upon to present Sudan’s argument.
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Notes
Michel Foucault discusses veridiction at length in The Courage of Truth, when he begins to investigate the relationship between forms of knowledge, and the way such knowledge comes to divide up the world into the true and the false. See Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth: Lectures at the Collège de France 1983–84 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 23–33.
On the reinterpretation of tradition in land rights cases, see Sara Berry’s collection of essays, Chiefi Know Their Boundaries: Essays on Property, Power and the Past in Asante, 1896–1996 (London and Oxford: James Currey, 2000);
for an erudite unpacking of the concept of an assemblage, see the volume by Aihwa Ong and Stephen Collier, eds, Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000).
See Joshua Craze, Creating Facts on the Ground: Conflict Dynamics in Abyei (Geneva: Small Arms Survey, 2011).
See Ian Cunnisson, Baggara Arabs: Power and Lineage in a Sudanese Nomad Tribe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 9–13.
My employment of the concept of neutrality is indebted to Carl Schmitt’s essay “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations.” See Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007 [1929]), 80–97.
A similar process of political instrumentalization of a putatively neutral field occurred during the taking of the Sudanese census in 2008, except that then it was the language of demography that was instrumentalized. See Joshua Craze, “Counting a Divided Nation—On the Sudanese Census.” Anthropology News (May 2010): 14–15.
Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrénées (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 2.
See Daniel Nordman, Frontières de France: De l’espace au territoire. XVI XI Siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1998);
Ladis Kristoff, “The Nature of Frontiers and Boundaries.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 49 (1959): 269–270; Sahlins, Boundaries, 168.
Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–78 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). See, especially, the last two lectures at the end of March 1978.
See Joshua Craze, “No Lines, No Peace? On the Borders of Abyei.” Anthropology News (February 2012).
This is a case of what Wendy James would no doubt call conservatism in la langue and flexibility in la parole; there is a great deal of change in the yearly grazing agreements between the Ngok Dinka and the Misseriya, even if, considered in the longue durée, the “grammar” of the agreements remains rather unchanging. See Wendy James, The Listening Ebony: Moral Knowledge, Religion, and Power among the Uduk of Sudan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 5.
Douglas Johnson, “Why Abyei Matters: The Breaking Point of Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement?” African Affairs 107:426 (2008): 3–5.
David Keen, The Benefits of Famine: A Political Economy of Famine and Relief in Southwestern Sudan, 1983–1989 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 60–62.
Alex de Waal, “Some Comments on Militias in the Contemporary Sudan,” in Civil War in the Sudan, eds Martin Daly and Ahmed Alawad Sikainga (London: British Academic Press, 1993), 144–151.
Douglas Johnson, When Boundaries Become Borders: The Impact of Boundary-Making in Southern Sudan’s Frontier Zones (London: Rift Valley Institute, 2010), 36.
Jago Salmon, A Paramilitary Revolution: The Popular Defence Forces (Geneva: Small Arms Survey, 2007), 12.
Which is to say: these raids were designed to destroy the material means for the mode of reproduction of Ngok Dinka life. For a powerful evocation of the period, see John Ryle, “The Road to Abyei,” Granta 26 (1989): 44–104.
ICG (International Crisis Group), Defining the North-South Border (Juba, Khartoum, Nairobi, and Brussels: ICG, 2010), 13.
In 2007, for instance, the Misseriya reported being forced to pay SPLA soldiers one or two calves per herd to enter the southern provinces, while the Misseriya crossing into Unity State reported having to pay SPLA SDG 15,000 (USD 6,300). In 2008, the majority of the Misseriya cattle herders stayed north of the river Kiir and suffered a shortage of grazing and water. The 2010–2011 grazing season was the first in living memory that the Misseriya did not reach the River Kiir. See Sara Pantuliano, Omer Egemi, Babo Fadlalla, and Mohammed Farah with Mohammed Elamin Abdelgadir, Put Out to Pasture: War, Oil, and the Decline of Missiriya Humr Pastoralism in Sudan (London: Humanitarian Policy Group, Overseas Development Institute Report, 2009), 25.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian Books, 1958), 290–302.
Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (London: Continuum, 1999), 26.
Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, eds G. Burchell, et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
Douglas Johnson, Abyei: Sudan’s West Bank (Washington: Enough Project, 2011), 1.
Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2007), 13.
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© 2013 Christopher Vaughan, Mareike Schomerus, and Lotje de Vries
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Craze, J. (2013). Unclear Lines: State and Non-State Actors in Abyei. In: Vaughan, C., Schomerus, M., de Vries, L. (eds) The Borderlands of South Sudan. Palgrave Series in African Borderlands Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137340894_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137340894_3
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