ABSTRACT
South Sudan challenges conventional socio-political analysis on remembrance and forgiveness by advancing the proposition that two concurrent types of socio-political bonds vie for dominance within the multi-ethnic nation-state.(1) Traditional “soft-boundary bonds” unite the nuclear family, with the extended family, the clan, and the ethnic or tribal group, and constitute an intimate community. These bonds represent the total traditional society within which the culture, rules, and regulations govern individual and group behavior in such a manner as to sustain intra-group peace. (2) The second type of bonds are “hard-boundary artificial bonds” that are found in the layers of political and jurisdictional establishments of the modern state: the nation-state, the federal constituent states, and local government which is not embedded within traditional society. Due to the artificial nature of the modern state, “imagined community” has to be learned, and allegiance has to be enforced as they are non-native forms of organization.
The interactions of individuals and groups within these spheres or forms of bonds define the interconnectedness between justice and political and legal accountability. This leads to the question as to whether both remembrance and forgiveness can be conceived and realized in the context of “loose” and “soft” bonds of the modern state, and when the restoration of peace in the modern state is sought amid violence beyond the bounds of traditional authority. The agenda for the restoration of peace is generally better understood in the traditional social bonding, while the modern state relies more heavily on its recognized “monopoly of force,” that is, self-defeating when the protagonists are bonded within their ethnic communities. When the modern state takes over the policing of all human actions, all peace is jeopardized due to its moral emptiness.
