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" The Post-state State: "
Doll, Christian Joseph
Smith, James H.
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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1104816
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| Doc. No
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TLpq2270096187
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| Main Entry
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Doll, Christian Joseph
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Smith, James H.
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| Title & Author
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The Post-state State:\ Doll, Christian JosephSmith, James H.
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| College
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University of California, Davis
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| Date
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2019
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| student score
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2019
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Page No
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242
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| Abstract
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This dissertation is an ethnographic engagement based on research carried out in the years following South Sudan’s independence in 2011. Focusing on dynamics within the capital city, Juba, I explore the ways people have built and sustained their notions of statehood and their expectations for the future in the face of ongoing conflict and perpetual economic turmoil. With independence, South Sudanese people felt they were determining their future for the first time in generations. Their hope that a national future of peace and prosperity could come through building a new state was balanced by a sense that past states—whether colonial governments, theocratic military dictatorships, or armed militias—had been the source of violent coercion for decades. Building a new state continued to loom large in the South Sudanese imagination even as conflict emanating from the top echelons of government threw South Sudan into turmoil in late 2013. I argue that within a context defined by uncertainty, the future becomes the central basis for action and imagining. I explore how and why the normative political order of the state remains appealing and how this can be the case even in a nation forged by counter-hegemonic rebellion and within a cultural space famous to anthropologists for acephalous political ordering and ritual king-killing. I call the contested process of seeking, fearing, and struggling to define and control the South Sudanese state “post-state state making,” drawing attention to the ambivalences and contradictions at play within this moment of seismic change. I explore the way South Sudanese people face state-making with both hope and fear. I argue that futurity and future-based action permeates South Sudan, especially Juba. Within a context defined by both deep uncertainty and a sense of incompletion and open-ended-ness, hopes for the future are not just aspirational fantasies and utopian dreams: they are the force propelling actions and the substance through which alternatives can be sought out and made real. My look at South Sudan’s post-state state making offers an understanding of the politics and futures that emerge and proliferate in a world where the state has been hollowed out, yet the dream of the state still permeates political action and everyday existence.
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African studies
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Cultural anthropology
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Political science
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