Building Political Community beyond the Nation-State: Theory and Practice from the South Sudanese Diaspora

How are the world's newest citizens building political community? On 9 July 2011, the independent state of South Sudan officially seceded from Sudan, the conclusion of a peace deal that sought to end sixty years of conflict over the south's marginalization, victimization, and underdevelopment. Over four million (about a third) of the new country's people had fled these wars, creating displaced, refugee, and diaspora populations across the Horn of Africa and around the world. After just over two years of independence, civil war broke out again in South Sudan, displacing—and re-displacing—four million of its new citizens, including over a million who fled to Sudan.

These migrant citizens of South Sudan and their growing diasporic communities are the focus of this special issue. Generations of violent and traumatic displacement, refugee encampment, international resettlement, and migration for study and work opportunities have all constructed networks of kin and connection across the Horn of Africa and worldwide. This relatively new global community has long expertise in navigating complex systems of refugee paperwork and punitive governments. The secession of South Sudan from Sudan left millions of people in legal limbo over their citizenship, and many people across South Sudan's six international borders live by managing shifting sets of identity documents. The South Sudan civil war beginning in 2013 was rooted in questions of unequal access to political and economic rights based on politicized ethnic identifications, and spread conflict across the diaspora, as funding, families, stress, mis/information, and armed men moved across the region and the world. Even with the reconstruction of a fragile peace deal in 2019, the last ten years has left many South Sudanese people questioning whether their state or nation really exists.

Like other war-made diasporas, South Sudanese communities are thus at the sharp end of global tensions around the state of the nation-state, the rise of defensively aggressive ethno-nationalisms, and the shaping of new trans-national and trans-local political communities. South Sudanese people are experts on these questions of diaspora organization and societal fragmentation, the exploitation of migrant labor, legal and de facto statelessness, and the utility and morality of manipulating national and international identity paperwork. Drawing together new qualitative research that cuts across these questions, this journal's edition focuses on the South Sudanese community as a way of bringing these intersecting issues together.

The Question of Citizenship

This issue frames its discussion through the idea of citizenship, which here is a tool for articulating questions of relationships to the state, power, rights, property, and political and social belonging. We draw on current debates in critical citizenship studies "around rights making, the constitution of political subjectivities, and re-defining notions of the political and political community" (Ataç, Rygiel, and Stierl 2016, 530). This challenges older Marshallian ideas of what constitutes citizenship (i.e., a territorially delimited political community with exclusionary rules and membership) but also recognizes this "non-citizenship" for people who cannot, or refuse to, engage with these legal regimes and memberships.

In this view, state citizenship is an (often violently) exclusive political subjectivity. Globally, today, it is much easier to access the rights and powers associated with common state ideals of a "good citizen" if you are in an over-developed country and you are white, wealthy, heterosexual, and male. The racial, social, gendered, and sexual power structures of nation-states have created hierarchies of political membership (and the policing and exclusion of those who are not "good citizens") (J. Turner 2016, 142).

In weak, authoritarian states, in both Europe and Africa, tight controls are placed on who can access the full range of rights and access state welfare and opportunities. This is done via impoverishment, forcing people to concentrate on survival; creating climates of fear, division, and prejudice; and through direct violence. In this analysis, many among the population are forced into circumstances of complex dependency, and encouraged to turn against each other in order to claim access to resources dispensed from this powerful center, while a...