Abstract
This chapter provides historical and ethnographic data that show how peoples of the borderlands actively make use of national borders. Contrary to the dominant state-centric literature that perceives state borders as a constraint to the people inhabiting the border areas, the chapter highlights local agency of the Nuer people living on both sides of the Ethiopian–South Sudan border. The chapter argues that to the Nuer the border is not a constraint but a resource with which they renegotiated their marginality on both sides of the border.
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Notes
See Douglas Johnson, Nuer Prophets: A History of Prophecy from the Upper Nile in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994);
and Edward Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940).
Robert O. Collins, Shadows in the Grass: Britain in the Southern Sudan, 1918–1956 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983).
Douglas H. Johnson, “On the Nilotic Frontier: Imperial Ethiopia in the Southern Sudan, 1898–1936,” in The Southern Marches of Imperial Ethiopia, eds D. L. Donham and W. James (Oxford: James Currey, 1986), 219–254.
Robert O. Collins, Land beyond the Rivers: The Southern Sudan 1898–1918 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971), 133.
O. Ojullu, “The Anywaa and Their Neighbors to ca. 1970: An Essay on Local Politics” (BA thesis, Addis Ababa University, 1987), 43; Evans-Pritchard also reported the Italian support for the Nuer in their fights against the Jor Anywaa: see Edward Evans-Pritchard, The Political System of the Anuak of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (New York: AMS Press, 1947), 72–73.
Øystein Rolandsen, “The Making of the Anya-Nya Insurgency in the Southern Sudan, 1961–64.” Journal of Eastern African Studies 5:2 (2011): 211–232.
Douglas H. Johnson, The Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil Wars (Oxford: James Currey, 2003).
E. Kurimoto, “Politicization of Ethnicity in Gambela,” in Ethiopia in Broader Perspective II, eds Katsuyoshi Fukui E. Kurimoto and Masayoshi Shigeta (Kyoto: Shokado, 1997), 798–815.
Dianna J. Shandy, “Transnational Linkages between Refugees in Africa and in the Diaspora.” Forced Migration Review 16 (2002): 7–8.
Dereje Feyissa, “The Experience of the Gambela Regional State,” in Ethnic Federalism: The Ethiopian Experience in Comparative Perspective, ed. David Turton (Oxford: James Currey, 2006), 208–209.
For further detail on the Anywads call for a firm border, see Dereje, “More State Than the State? Anywaa’s Call for a Rigidification of the Ethio-Sudanese Border,” in Borders and Borderlands As Resources in the Horn of Africa, eds Dereje Feyissa and Markus Hoehne (New York: James Currey, 2010).
Carola Lentz, “First-Corners and Late-Corners: The Role of Narratives in Land Claims,” in Competing jurisdictions: Settling Land Claims in Africa, eds S. Evers, M. Spierenburg, and H. Wels (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2005).
Paul Howell, A Manual of Nuer Law (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), 181.
See Dereje Feyissa, Playing Different Games: The Paradox of Anywaa and Nuer Identification Strategies in the Gambella Region, Ethiopia (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2011), 251–254.
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© 2013 Christopher Vaughan, Mareike Schomerus, and Lotje de Vries
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Feyissa, D. (2013). Alternative Citizenship: The Nuer between Ethiopia and the Sudan. 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_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137340894_6
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