“He Cannot Marry Her”: Excluding the Living and Including the Dead in South Sudanese Citizenship in Sudan

Abstract

Global refugee regimes mean that South Sudanese, living in refugee camps in Sudan, can be considered as living on the political margins of the world and effectively denied citizenship. However, South Sudanese in these camps contest this marginalization. They do this, not by simply claiming citizenship of a state, but by challenging the very meaning of citizenship and connecting citizenship to different ideas of political collectivity. This article specifically considers how chiefs’ courts’ reforms to marriage laws have reshaped ideas of citizenship among South Sudanese in a refugee camp in Sudan. Marriage is particularly potent in its influence on identities and citizenship through its shaping of the legality of reproduction and, therefore, its remaking of political communities at the time and in the future. This article argues that chiefs’ courts mediated and contested humanitarian assumptions about citizenship by re-emphasizing kinship as a basis for political communities. This was despite the wars in South Sudan including intra-kin divisions. Such kinship-based political collectivity and citizenship remade the concept of citizenship as trans-territory and not bounded by the nation state. The article also illustrates the courts’ role in reshaping social obligations towards, and therefore citizenship of, the dead. The article is based on qualitative interviews and observations of Nuer chiefs’ courts in a refugee camp in 2017, 2018, and 2020.