Protracted conflict and development in South Sudan: A feminist analysis of women’s subjugation in the making of a nation argues that international interventions in South Sudan from the period of British colonization to present day South Sudan perpetuate and [re]inscribe formations of women’s oppression and agency. Foreign presence affects identity constructions, conflict, and governance. I demonstrate how international interventions, militarization, and protracted conflict, compromise women’s rights, health, and self-determination as they permeate understandings of gender, sex, reproduction, and security. I integrate an analysis of customary and civil law to establish how the expression and implementation of law and rights inform relationships to women’s freedom and justice. Further, I investigate techniques the United Nations and NGOs used to influence cultural shifts that reproduce structural inequities based on gender, body, class, and nation. Foregrounding power, politics, and local knowledges, my ethnography is a practice of emancipatory anthropology to excavate techniques and procedures of normalizing gender, reproductive and sexual health, and biopolitical governance (Foucault 2008, 4). Informed by an ethnography of United Nations and NGO staff, I argue that international interventions in South Sudan introduce formations of biopolitical governance mediated by donor-driven, development agendas, by superimposing relationships to sex, gender, reproduction, and health, which are both culturally contested and unsustainable.

Download