War and Genocide in South Sudan

Clemence Pinaud’s book, War and Genocide in South Sudan, is one of the few books on South Sudan that attaches importance to oral tradition as a means for reconstructing unwritten history. War and Genocide in South Sudan adds to the historiography on a range of topics relative to the Sudan: war, conflict, the politics of liberation, the economy, and genocide. Future scholars who wish to write about the Second and Third Civil Wars will start from where Pinaud’s research stops.

A deeply researched, arresting, and often brutal account of civil war in South Sudan, the violent events of which Pinaud argues constitute genocide. Based on 550 interviews across a range of locations, it is the detailed, first-person accounts of people’s experiences of the war that brings the intimate experience of violence into sharp, and often brutal, relief. Required reading for the many people who care about South Sudan and its future.

Pinaud’s approach is clear-eyed and systematic. She walks a careful line, avoiding oversimplifications that would characterize the war as an ‘ethnic’ conflict while demonstrating the central role that instrumentalized ethnicity played in fomenting and prosecuting events and is nuanced in her analysis of the various factions. Pinaud’s book will be essential reading for anyone hoping to understand the roots of the present South Sudanese conflict; it also makes a significant contribution to sociological understanding of the political formation of mass atrocity.

Clémence Pinaud is Assistant Professor at Indiana University. Follow her on X @ClemencePinaud.

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