ABSTRACT
Juba, the world’s newest capital city, has been described in terms parallel to dismissals of South Sudan as a “failed state,” claiming it to be a wasteland, a hollowed-out war zone, or more akin to a refugee camp than a city. Such descriptions, in rendering urban contexts as closed spaces of bare survival, ignore the vibrancy and creativity of urbanites who turn the city’s economic dynamics and international intersections to their advantage. This chapter explores the varied ways that people improvise this city at the edge of the Indian Ocean world, showing how they bind together to create social infrastructures and forge new ventures that produce predictability. By creating socially based infrastructures and forging new social allegiances and ventures, Jubans create a present of relative normality, dampen the effects of recent violence, and maintain autonomy and flexibility in the face of ever-shifting state power. By being attendant to quotidian practices though which urbanites engage the layers of regional and international convergence in cities to create new communities and realities, the chapter offers an understanding of the ways people make precarity productive and produce stable presents (and futures) in urban spaces throughout the Indian Ocean world.
