Christopher Vaughan

Bio: Christopher Vaughan is an academic researcher from Liverpool John Moores University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Politics & Colonialism. The author has an hindex of 5, co-authored 9 publications receiving 61 citations.

The borderlands of South Sudan: authority and identity in contemporary and historical perspectives

Abstract: Current international discourse on the new state of South Sudan seems fixated on the "state construction." This book aims to broaden the debate by examining the character of regulatory authority in South Sudan's borderlands in both contemporary and historical perspective. The contributions gathered here show that emerging border governance practices challenge the bounded categorization of "state" and "non-state", especially in the complex interactions between state, military, and business actors and power structures. It thus provides a timely and sophisticated contribution to the literature on African borderlands, examining a new state in creation at its borders, and providing an anthropologically and historically informed view of a rapidly evolving situation.

The politics of regionalism and federation in East Africa, 1958-1964

Abstract: Recent scholarship discussing the ‘federal moment’ in world history after 1945 has re-examined alternatives to the nation-state in the years of decolonisation, arguing against any inevitable transition from empire to nation. This article focuses on the case of East Africa, where federation seemed an attractive and likely prospect by 1963, yet never came to pass. Here the politics of federation should be understood as a constitutive part of the contested nation-state making process, rather than a viable alternative to it. For the leaders who initiated the politics of federation in the 1960s, regional unity promised the further centralisation of power, and a means of defeating tribalist opposition. For their opponents, federation was seized on as a means of promoting the autonomy of provinces or kingdoms within a larger federal unit. Yet ultimately, regionalist aspiration was inseparable from national politics: and negotiations among the leaders of East African states demanded the definition of national interests, which divided states rather than united them. Such conclusions suggest that historians of the federal moment might more productively focus on the functions of federalist discourse in the making of nation-states, rather than debating the viability of federalist projects.

Introduction: Negotiating borders, defining South Sudan

Abstract: In Maridi, a town near South Sudan’s border with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), in 2009 residents judged their situation harshly: “We see ourselves as unlucky because of the kind of border we have,” said a senior church leader.1 He talked about how those living in other towns near the border were benefitting through cross-border trade, through access to services, and through exchange: “Because in Yei, they have an open border with DRC and Uganda; they can improve their trade and education. Same in Kajo Keji and so on. With us here, there is no cross-border trade, no road.” In Maridi, it was not even clear where the country’s border ended and the next began. Nobody from the government in the capital city of Juba seemed to particularly care. Other South Sudanese borders—with the Republic of Sudan, Uganda, or Ethiopia—were much more important.

Reinventing the Wheel? Local Government and Neo-Traditional Authority in Late-Colonial Northern Sudan*

Abstract: I know all about councils-talking themselves white in the face And deciding on what suits nobody and doing it all over the place. This quotation from a piece in a 1950s issue of Punch, entitled "Frustrated Export to New Britain," is a cynical comment on the establishment of elected local councils in Britain's imperial territories after World War II.1 It amused the director of local government in Sudan sufficiently for him to keep it among his personal papers. But the image of "talking themselves white in the face" hints at how the introduction of "Local Government" in the British Empire was part of a wider project of postwar imperial policy to make "other" political cultures look less "other" and more like the metropole itself. Imperial subjects sitting on councils were now ordering their business in line with metropolitan models of ritualized council meetings, thus partially entering what was still a privileged sphere of whiteness. In doing so, they were imagined by the colonial state to become statesmen of the future, authentically local, yet simultaneously modern leaders of their communities, able to speak both the language of their people and the language of the bureaucratic state. But they were also hoped to form a bulwark against the spread of nationalism among local communities. Local government was thus envisaged as both a disciplinary training ground for future political independence as well as a means of stalling movement towards that very eventuality. The "second colonial occupation" of post World War II British-ruled Africa, and the resistance it provoked, has received much attention from historians.2 Nevertheless, among the compelling narratives leading up to decolonization, shifts in the structures of local government have been accorded less study than they deserve.3 Reform of local administration might at first sight fit easily into narratives of late-imperial modernization projects, and moves towards self-government. As "modern" institutions of local government, councils were intended to facilitate development, not to hold it back as "traditional" authorities might. John Cell writes in a standard history of the British Empire that "once the British began to think seriously about the possibility of African selfgovernment, Indirect Rule was discarded."4 Killingray and Rathbone argue that after World War II "the educated elite was enlisted as a partner of the colonial state; traditional rulers and the systems of authority slowly assembled in the inter-war years were abandoned and gradually wound down."5 But to what extent is this an accurate portrait of postwar local administration? Mamdani takes a far more skeptical view: elected representatives rubbed shoulders with appointed traditional leaders in ethnically defined district councils. Meanwhile on the ground administration remained a chiefly affair. The point of the reform, after all, was to weld together a coalition of traditional leaders and middle strata through a process of concession and conciliation short of doing away with ground-level despotism.6 In this view, then, local government was a cosmetic change, intended to buy time for colonial government to make more effective bargains with an ever more demanding educated elite, while real local power remained in the hands of the established allies of the state, so-called "traditional" notables or chiefs. Eckert also argues specifically of late colonial Tanganyika that "local government" was really "indirect rule with a representative outlook."7 Anglo-Egyptian Condominium Sudan (in practice a British-ruled territory) was very much a participant in the move towards conciliar forms of local government after 1942. Government rhetoric presented local councils as a "laboratory for self-government."8 Councils were to be defined territorially, not ethnically, bringing together rival groups under a single administrative unit, in order to encourage a broader political outlook that would benefit a future independent Sudanese nation-state. …

Rethinking Sudan Studies: a Post-2011 Manifesto

Abstract: This essay appraises “Sudan Studies” following the 2011 secession of South Sudan. It asks two questions. First, what has Sudan Studies been as a colonial and postcolonial field of academic inquiry and how should or must it change? Second, should we continue to write about a single arena of Sudan Studies now that Sudan has split apart? The authors advance a “manifesto” for Sudan Studies by urging scholars to map out more intellectual terrain by attending to non-elite actors and women; grass-roots and local history; the environment and the arts; oral sources; and interdisciplinary studies of culture, politics, and society. They propose that scholars can transcend the changing boundaries of the nation-state, and recognize connections forged through past and present migrations and contacts, by studying the Sudan as a zone rather than a fixed country. Finally, in their introduction to this bilingual special issue, they highlight the increasing relevance of French scholarship to the endeavor of rethinking Sudan...

Improvising border security: 'A situation of security pluralism' along South Sudan's borders with the Democratic Republic of the Congo

Abstract: This article compares two cases of securitization along South Sudan’s border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo. By comparing how a security concern – the presence of the Lord’s Resistance Army – was interpreted and responded to, the article shows that border security practices in two borderscapes are improvised, contradictory and contested, and serve to establish authority rather than actually securing the border. This is apparent on three levels: (a) through the multiplicity of security actors vying for authority; (b) in how they interpret security concerns; and (c) in terms of what practice follows. The article argues that by allowing authority at the border to be taken by actors that are not under direct control of the central government, the South Sudanese state is developing as one that controls parts of the country in absentia, either by granting discretionary powers to low-level government authorities at the border or through tactical neglect. Processes of securitization by both state and non-state actors in the borderland are largely disconnected from the South Sudanese central government, which does not claim authority over this border and thus seemingly does not consider the lack of security for its citizens, and the parallel authorities, as a threat to central stability.