PATCHWORK STATES: THE LOCALIZATION OF STATE TERRITORIALITY ON THE SOUTH SUDAN–UGANDA BORDER, 1914–2014 *


 This paper takes a localized conflict over a non-demarcated stretch of the Uganda–South Sudan boundary in 2014 as a starting point for examining the history of territorial state formation on either side of this border since its colonial creation in 1914. It argues that the conflict was an outcome of the long-term constitution of local government territories as patches of the state, making the international border simultaneously a boundary of the local state. Some scholars have seen the limited control of central governments over their borderlands and the intensification of local territorialities as signs of African state fragmentation and failure. But the article argues that this local territoriality should instead be seen as an outcome of ongoing state-formation processes in which state territory has been co-produced through local engagement and appropriation. The paper is thus of wider relevance beyond African or postcolonial history, firstly in contributing a spatial approach to studies of state formation which have sought to replace centre–periphery models with an emphasis on the centrality of the local state. Secondly it advances the broader field of borderlands studies by arguing that international boundaries have been shaped by processes of internal territorialisation as well as by the specific dynamics of cross-border relations and governance. Thirdly it advocates a historical and processual approach to understanding territory, arguing that the patchwork of these states has been fabricated and reworked over the past century, entangling multiple, changing forms and scales of territory in the ongoing constitution of state boundaries.

surprising and unprecedented. 2 Despite recurrent armed rebellions spilling across the border, the Kuku and Ma'di themselves had a long history of peaceful relations, intermarriage, trade and common farming livelihoods in the green hills above the west bank of the Nile. Never formally demarcated, this international border has been described as the epitome of an 'artificial' colonial boundary, resisted or ignored by local communities with enduring cross-border solidarities. 3 'We are the same people, same blood', representatives of the closely allied national governments had declared in 2011, seeking to defuse the rising local tensions over the border. 4 So why had this boundary become such a focus of tension and conflict on the ground, and why was it the local -rather than centralgovernment administrations on either side that were leading the competing assertions of state territorial limits?
Answering these questions entails addressing more fundamental questions about the nature and history of state territory in these countries, with implications for how we approach state formation as a spatial process more broadly. This article draws on oral histories from Moyo and Kajokeji and largely district-level documentation to reorient our understanding of border-making and state-formation processes from the centre to the local. This approach reveals the historical and contemporary role of local-level actors in constituting state territorial sovereignty by investing in their own jurisdictional and political patches. The result has been the ongoing emergence of these states as patchworks of local government territories, making the international border simultaneously a boundary of the local state.
This argument runs counter to the tendency of scholarly and media analysis to see the intensification of local territorialitywhether understood as the resilience of primordial ethnic divisions 5 or as newer populist political reactions to globalization 6 -as a sign of the fragmentation and failure of states in Africa and beyond. 7 Such approaches often imply that state control of territory depends on the capacity and will of the centre to project or 'broadcast' its power across the periphery. 8 Yet the work of borderlands scholars has increasingly demonstrated that states can also be constructed from the outside in, as borderland inhabitants play a crucial role in giving meaning and value to national boundaries on the ground. 9 To some extent, however, such approaches continue to replicate centre-periphery spatial models, even if they seek to reverse these by placing borderlands at the centre of the analysis. Rather than emphasizing the distinctive features of international boundaries, this article suggests that the Moyo-Kajokeji border dynamics reflect broader internal processes of boundary-making across Uganda and South Sudan. 10 And while these borderlands undoubtedly represent some of the most marginalized and alienated peripheries of either state, this centreperiphery geography has been cross-cut by the horizontal tensions between neighbouring territories and partially counteracted by the resulting local appeals to higher state authority.
This article thus explores the territorial implications of approaches to state formation that have sought to replace centre-periphery models with an emphasis on the centrality of the local state. The term 'patchwork' is intended not only to describe patterns of state territoriality but also as a spatial metaphor for the way in which state authority has been coproduced through local engagement and appropriation. As scholars have increasingly argued in relation to other periods and places, this 'localization of state power' has been central to state formation rather than a sign of state weakness or fragmentation. 11 It is not unusual, of course, to describe states and nations as patchworks of regions, localities, ethnicities or federated units.
But often the implication is that states have been superimposed onto prior, smaller territorial identities or polities. 12 Instead this article uses the term 'patchwork' more precisely to characterize the mutual constitution of local and national state territories. The metaphor is particularly apt because a patchwork involves the fabrication of both the individual patches and the overall quilt. The 'patches' in Sudan and Uganda did not lie intact waiting for state power to stitch them together, but have been imagined, drawn, cut and sewn -and recut and resewn -by multiple actors engaged and invested in state territoriality at the local level. 13 In turn, the state is not a mere 'décor' or 'façade', as has been argued in relation to the postcolonial African state more widely, 14 but is fundamentally made of these constituent patches. A patchwork can be reworked, unstitched and restitched, thus emphasizing territory as a 'work' always in progress. It can be rough and messy, allowing for the fraying of seams and entanglements of prior geographies in the production of state territory. As political geographers emphasize, 'entanglement' is a similarly useful spatial metaphor for describing the 'threadings, knottings and weavings' of power relations as these are 'spun out across and through the material spaces of the world'. 15 The material environment has also given patterns to the political construction of space: 16 natural features are seen as a source of historical evidence in continuing debates 12  over the South Sudan-Uganda border, for example, and played an active role in determining working boundary lines made on the ground by local officials. 17 A patchwork state is not, then, simply a conglomeration of smaller entities or identities (as any state might appear), but a dynamic work-in-process in specific contexts where local territories emerge through and as a fundamental part of state formation. Such processes are particularly apparent in many African contexts, where twentieth-century colonialism entailed an unprecedented attempt to contain, govern and define people within bounded territories. 18 The shift from personal, plural and overlapping jurisdictions to territorial sovereignty occurred as a much longer-term process in Western Europe, for example. 19 But European governments took an increasing interest in defining and defending their boundaries and, from the late eighteenth century, in unifying and controlling the fabric of national space. 20 In contexts like Sudan and Uganda, by contrast, governance strategies have instead worked to accentuate and multiply the internal seams. While territory may be an outcome of state formation everywhere, its particular patchwork patterns in these contexts reflect political and economic dynamics that have rendered territorial control and identification more important for political power and resource access at the local level than at the national level. These dynamics will be explored through the rest of the article and include recurrent decentralization programmes, changing land values and the territorialization and politicization of ethnicity as the basis for citizenship.
The sporadic and limited interest of central governments in defining or demarcating the boundary between Uganda and Sudan (now South Sudan) is apparent in the archival record 17  and previous studies of the border. 21 The new perspective presented in this article on local-level investment in state boundaries derives from new documentary and oral sources as well as from the analytical approach to state formation outlined above. Interviews and local-level documentation produced in Moyo and Kajokeji immediately before and after the 2014 conflict narrated the history of the international border through a series of key markers in both space and time, in order to evidence contemporary territorial claims. The conflict context no doubt produced newly virulent rival assertions of the border -both oral histories and the archival record simultaneously emphasized the historical prevalence of more peaceful cross-border relations. But the very production of rival historical narratives is an aspect of the local investment in the international boundary with which this article is concerned. As Newman and Paasi argue, it is through such narratives that boundaries are constructed; 22 telling the story of the border through key moments in time was working to fix its location in people's spatial imaginaries, demonstrating the temporal and processual nature of territory. The article therefore takes these narratives seriously and in their own terms, not to suggest that the boundary has always been as significant or contentious as in recent years, nor to try to verify one or other side of the story, but because they reveal what local actors have identified as the key moments and factors in a longterm process by which the international boundary came to be a focus of conflict -something that they too often described as a historical puzzle. These key moments also appear in the archival records, along with the repeated initiatives by local government officials, chiefs, councillors and politicians to try to define and demarcate the international boundary in the face of central government disinterest. Strikingly, both oral and documentary sources also revealed similar struggles over internal boundaries, as the unfulfilled colonial vision of bounded 'tribal' territories has 21 23 Even a later British colonial official in Uganda pronounced this 'the world's most idiotic' boundary description, asking 'If the Kuku tribe decide to move, do they carry the international boundary with them?' 24 Yet this is a question which has continued to be asked of internal administrative jurisdictions in these states -are they exercised over (mobile) subjects or over bounded territories? The continuing disputes over this question demonstrate that the constitution of territory is an ongoing and incomplete process. 25 By defining part of the Sudan-Uganda boundary in such tribal terms and more generally assuming ethnic identities to be territorial, the British colonial administrations established a basis for changing and emerging local definitions of ethnic territory to work their way into rival assertions of the boundary line. Section I of this article therefore begins by exploring recent, predominantly oral, local accounts of territorial history in this borderland to emphasize the impossibility of entirely disentangling 'indigenous' from 'government' territorialities or uncovering a distinct precolonial basis for the current patchwork. Section II argues that the colonial ambition to map and fix people within boundaries was repeatedly undone by the limits of central government capacity or will, and by the resistance of borderland inhabitants, but that the patchwork state territories nevertheless began to take shape through the initiative of local government actors between the 1920s and 1940s. Section III contends that, despite an increased central government investment in asserting territorial sovereignty around and after Sudanese and Ugandan independence, it was largely at the local state level that the international boundary was a focus of concern and action in the period from the 1950s to 1980s. The final section of the article focuses on the parallel policies of decentralization espoused both in Uganda by the This period has seen an intensification of local government territoriality, encouraged also by the channelling of international development resources to the local level and by the commercialization of land and natural resources. As boundary disputes have proliferated, the entanglement of multiple territorial layers and logics has become more evident than ever in the ongoing production of these states as patchworks.
Africanist historians often contrast pre-colonial/indigenous and colonial forms of territoriality, and associate the latter with the imposition of linear boundaries and more ethnically defined and exclusionary ideas of territory. 26 Yet interviewees in Kajokeji and Moyo were swift to assert that 'boundaries are known' and to emphasize the deep historicity of the territorial arrangements that upheld their competing definitions of the international boundary. Their accounts, however, drew on multiple threads of legitimation for their territorial claims, from oral traditions of ancestral migration to the markers of colonial and post-colonial boundaries. There were some national differences in these accounts: Sudanese in Kajokeji reached much further back in history to support their claims that 'the southern boundary of the Kuku tribe' reached well south of the Ugandan constitutional definition, even claiming that there had once been a boundary signpost on Lake Albert, or in Moyo town. 28 At the same time they asserted ancestral Kuku land rights in the borderlands, based on the histories of individual 'clans'. These different claims show that the threads of contemporary territoriality cannot simply be disentangled to reveal an underlying precolonial patchwork, though the idea that such a patchwork exists has long been asserted as the basis for boundary definitions by a range of state actors.
The South Sudanese references to historic boundary markers located deep in what is now Ugandan territory -though dismissed as ludicrous by Ugandans -are rooted in the messy history of imperialism and boundary adjustments in the region. 29 This was a frontier zone even in the mid to late nineteenth century, at the violent edges of ivory and slave trading emanating both northwards from the east African coast via the lacustrine kingdoms, and southwards from Sudan and Egypt, closely followed by the expanding frontier of Turco-Egyptian imperialism. The latter reached into what is now northern Uganda until the overthrow of Turco-Egyptian rule by Mahdist forces in the 1880s. Initially a focus of intense interest for European explorers, by the 1890s the upper Nile had become the object of competing European imperialisms. The Belgians were first to establish a presence on the ground and a claim to territory that would eventually be restricted by the 1906 Anglo-Congolese Agreement to a lifetime lease of the 'Lado Enclave' to King Leopold administered from Kajokeji in Sudan. But the British administrations of Sudan and Uganda soon decided to adjust their boundary to include the West Nile region in Uganda in return for Sudan acquiring territory east of the Nile. This history of dramatically shifting boundaries explains some of the more extreme South Sudanese claims to Ugandan territory now, and is also expressed in local stories of boundary marker stones being carried back and forth by various individuals from each side until they were eventually left somewhere in the middle. 30 That boundaries move with people is also implicit in the territorial logic embedded in clan histories and ideas of spiritual authority over land. Oral traditions focus not on tribal origins of 'the Kuku' or 'the Ma'di' but on the origins and relations of the numerous clans that are now said to make up these ethnic groups. Each exogamous clan is said to be descended patrilineally from a particular heroic ancestor who migrated from elsewhere to settle as the 'firstcomer' in the place now defined as clan territory (usually several square miles in extent). One of his direct descendants inherits ritual responsibility for this clan land as its 'custodian' or 'landlord'. Oral traditions also tell of other people who came later and were invited to settle around the firstcomers to act like a protective 'fence'; again there is the idea that people can constitute a boundary. 31 'It is like a zariba [fenced/fortified enclosure]: those in the north, south, east and west defend us and we landlords are here in the middle. And [we] intermarry with these tribes until they become one now'. 32 In common with many other African oral traditions, these accounts reveal the inclusive and flexible nature of clan kinship and territoriality, in which clans sought to build strength in numbers, or 'wealth-in-people', by absorbing newcomers through marriage, alliance or subordination. 33 Nowadays clan territories are often asserted to be clearly bounded: 'Every person knows the boundaries, because we are divided into clans and the clan boundaries are known '. 34 Yet at the same time boundary-drawing is considered a morally and spiritually dangerous exercise, connoting an antisocial divisiveness. Like falsely claiming land or disputing boundaries, it is seen to provoke the dangerous spiritual forces associated with the soil and streams. Land custodians are said to point out boundaries to people, but 'they don't put marks like a signpost; they use natural things, like trees, streams, hills. If any of us uses a hoe and starts making a boundary, that is already a curse' -'that is a sign of division and it will bring curses, death'. 35 In effect, this means that boundaries are constituted in the knowledge and memory of clan land custodians and other respected elders (preserving a central role for them in boundary disputes) more than they are visible on the ground -a technique of territoriality not entirely different from the existence of boundaries as lines on maps, interpretable on the ground only by those with the necessary technical expertise and equipment. 36 Clan traditions thus suggest the existence of territory before or beneath the creation of states, in the sense that the firstcomer/ custodian families claim to have long exercised exclusive -albeit largely ritualized and latent -authority over land and its resources within bounded clan territories, which form an intricate small-scale patchwork across the region. But this depiction is complicated by the limits of clan-based authority and existence of multiple wider forms of political power, such as rainmakers or local allies of the nineteenth-century commercial and military forces. 37 Oral  traditions are also influenced by changing understandings of clan territoriality in the twenty-first century as the increasing monetization of land transactions has given new value to the ritual and historical expertise claimed by land custodians. As we shall see, increasing disputes over administrative boundaries have further entangled and politicized clan boundaries in the assertion of larger ethnic territories. Yet the strikingly consistent thing about the clan traditions is that they tell of multiple origins: all the founding fathers of clans in both Kajokeji and Moyo are said to have come from other places and from different ethnic origins; the same clans are also found now within different ethnic groups. 38 The process of becoming Kuku or Ma'di appears to have emerged through coresidence in a particular area and the gradual ascendancy of one or other language and identity. This is a process that was certainly encouraged, if not coerced, by colonial administrations. European colonialists arrived in the region on the expansionist tide of confidence in their technological capacity to control vast territory and with a zeal for imposing 'a geometry of lines and areas', as they already had across much of Europe and beyond. 39 Yet boundaries were not simply decided by arbitrary haggling and line-drawing in European boardrooms. 40 For the broader cartographic obsession of the nineteenth century also sought the control and categorization of space within territories, exemplified in the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India -though the illusory power of maps frequently belied the limits of imperial knowledge and the complex realities on the ground. 41 In much of Africa the illusion of colonial order rested on 'tribal' categorizations. From the earliest stages of boundary negotiation in what would become the Sudan-Uganda borderlands, the same logics of 'tribal mapping' were thus at work in both internal and inter-colonial territorial ordering. During the protracted Anglo-Belgian negotiations over the Lado Enclave, King Leopold's negotiator produced 'an elaborate tribal map of the southern Sudan', derided by British negotiators as 'a fantastic combination of the King's imagination and Junker's explorations made some twenty years before'. 42 The British were soon engaged in their own attempts at such mapping, and decided in 1911 that the new boundary between the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and the Uganda Protectorate 'should be a tribal one'. 43 To the west of the Nile, the subsequent Boundary Commission was instructed to identify a line that would separate Bari language-speakers, that is Kuku and Kakwa, from the Ma'di and Lugbara, despite a Ugandan report of close relations between Kuku and Ma'di. 44 The first British administrator in Kajokeji, Captain Chauncey Stigand, was particularly fond of stereotyping entire tribes, and had already decided in 1911 that the Kuku around his headquarters were of a 'peaceful disposition' while the Ma'di were 'a treacherous and cowardly people'. He also reported that the Kayu/Ayo stream was 'the boundary between the Madi and Kuku country', a definition that would be included in the Commission's decision. 45 Yet in a more detailed account published posthumously, Stigand noted the very recent migrations in the area (reporting that some Kuku had previously lived south of the Kayu stream), and the ethnic 'mixture' in many areas. 46 Captain Kelly, Chief Commissioner of the Sudan-Uganda Boundary Commission, casually acknowledged that creating a tribal boundary might necessitate 'the transplanting of a few villages' and that 'it should remain with the officials conversant with actual local conditions to arrange the exact line which will most conveniently separate the mixed population'. Despite this presumptive confidence in the colonial capacity for territorial 42  reorganization, he admitted that 'the boundary recommended is not based on first-hand knowledge'. 47 The Sudan Director of Surveys suggested 'that a definite settlement should stand over until a reliable map has been prepared', and the Sudan government therefore only agreed to the publication of the Uganda Order on 21 April 1914 'as a provisional measure'. 48 The governments of Sudan and Uganda did not make any immediate effort to clarify the boundary, however. Instead, as the Commission had advised, it was left to provincial and district administrators on the ground to try to make sense of it. From the outset, these local officials were as or more preoccupied with mapping and organizing internal territory. The first British administrator of the new West Nile District of Uganda (including Moyo), A. E. Weatherhead, met Stigand soon after his arrival and was clearly influenced by the latter's categorization of tribes in the area and his goal of amalgamating small communities under chiefs in order ultimately to build 'tribal' administration. 49 Weatherhead complained about the ethnic mixing in the district, including Kuku among Ma'di -a situation he set out to remedy by trying to establish clear boundaries between 'tribes', if necessary by moving settlements. 50 Once again, however, colonial confidence outweighed actual knowledge: a later British officer serving in the same district described a map drawn by Weatherhead in 1920 as 'not merely inaccurate, but completely wrong. Whole tribes are shown in the wrong places, rivers flow in the reverse directions, and distances are mistaken by hundreds per cent'. 51 The creation of the Sudan-Uganda boundary was flawed from the outset by the gap between European cartographic confidence and actual geographic knowledge, and more fundamentally by the assumption that a 'tribal' chequerboard should be the basis for territorial governance within and between colonial states. This set up a lasting tension between 'the social definition of territory' among pre-colonial clans, and the 'territorial definition of society' imposed by colonial states; 52 between the flexibility and fluidity of clan affiliation, authority and settlement patterns and the colonial vision of a permanent and precise tribal boundary. The partial entanglement of clan territories into a new patchwork of ethnic, administrative and national territorialities would be a complicated and gradual (indeed still ongoing) process that was little noticed or remarked by colonial officials. Yet this process would draw clan territoriality into even the highest levels of inter-colonial border negotiations by the 1930s.
After the First World War, colonial territorial ambitions were largely confined within agreed boundaries and directed towards the ordering of space within these. In this 'age of territory', Maier emphasizes the spreading and powerful idea that identity space and political space should be congruent. 53 In the African context this manifested in colonial attempts to construct territorial hierarchies of chiefdoms and ethnically defined local government districts, within which subjects could be controlled and taxed. 54 Boundaries between colonial territories were now subject less to European rivalries than to the same imperatives of containment and regulation of colonial subjects that drove internal territorial ordering. This was given added urgency in the case of the Sudan-Uganda boundary by concerns about the northward spread of sleeping sickness. But even in this era, colonial ambitions to map, impose and regulate boundaries did not follow through into the creation of a clear boundary line between Sudan and Uganda, or succeed in confining people within territorial chiefdoms, districts or colonies. That these territories began to materialize owes far more instead to the 52  initiative of local administrators and chiefs with more direct interests in clarifying or extending the boundaries of their jurisdictional patches.
The sleeping sickness campaign was one of the most centrally directed interventions in the borderlands, yet the boundary that it created was not a clear line but a wide uninhabited no-man'sland, which in the long run has contributed more confusion than clarity to the borderline. The creation of boundaries as sanitary cordons has earlier parallels in European history. 55 In colonial Africa, the whole approach to sleeping sickness was territorial and focused on preventing its spread across borders. 56 This justified the creation of 'an uninhabited belt of ten miles on each side of the Sudan-Uganda boundary' through a coercive resettlement programme. 57 'My uncles resisted moving, so the British administration set their houses on fire to drive them out of the land by force'. 58 Colonial officers and Anglican missionaries in Sudan reported continuing cross-border movement on hidden pathways by people 'visiting their Uganda relatives', despite the threat of punishment. 59 But the extended relocation of the borderland inhabitants was nevertheless brought up by interviewees as a key aspect of boundary creation: While sleeping sickness was in itself a very real concern, it also provided district officials with the opportunity to resettle people in more concentrated villages along the roads and closer to the government-recognized chiefs. Both colonial administrations had established a new institution of chiefship, known among Bari-speakers like the Kuku as the matat lo gela/miri, 'the chief of the whites/government'. 61 In both Kajokeji and Moyo, the recognized chiefs had some prior authority as rainmakers or war leaders. But the idea of a single chief having executive authority over multiple clans was alien, and their new role as the tax collectors and enforcers of colonial orders was often a fraught one. The governments gave them their own courts and police to enhance their authority, and sought to establish territorial chiefdoms within which they would collect taxes and maintain roads. But chiefly jurisdiction retained considerable uncertainty as to whether it was strictly territorially defined, as the governor of Sudan's Equatoria province (in which Kajokeji sub-district was located) complained in 1947: We must have things in terms of territorial as opposed to tribal or clan administration, though of course the ideal is for the two to administer [sic]. We cannot permit persons to live in one Chiefs [sic] area and owe allegiance to another chief. If people want to change their chief they must also be prepared to move their villages and cultivations. 62 Recent oral accounts reflect this uncertainty: Our people settled around the valleys and hills, but the British moved them to live along the roads . . . So proper demarcation of boundaries was not easy -you find people from a particular clan were living far away from their indigenous community. So the chief had to go a long way to 60  Perhaps reflecting change over time, others asserted the opposite: 'People knew in the British time where the tax collection boundaries were because chiefs cannot collect tax in another area'. 64 In an attempt to keep control of people within chiefdoms, chiefs had to keep registers of taxpayers (that is, adult men) and update these annually; compulsion and remuneration for tax collection gave chiefs a vested interest in trying to keep people within their jurisdiction. 65 As the Sudan administration began to condone cross-border labour migration to the plantations in southern Uganda, it was chiefs and elders in Equatoria who complained about its 'very unsettling effect' and the loss of the young men's labour and taxes. 66 In the later 1930s, chiefs were also made responsible for issuing the official sleeping sickness passes required to cross the border legally (and which were contingent on the payment of poll tax), giving them a further role in border governance. 67 The devolution of tax collection to local chiefs and district officials would be a recurrent factor motivating local-level attempts to clarify and enforce the Sudan-Uganda boundary, in order to define the boundaries of local taxation regimes. It prompted the first local-level attempt to demarcate a clearer line in the early 1930s, when the neighbouring British district commissioners (DCs) conducted a 'border march' with their chiefs to agree 'provisionally, where the boundary was' by marking 'prominent trees' and 'rocky outcrops'. 68 The creation of the border thus involved the entwining of British officials' and chiefs' visions of its geography from the outset, as well as being shaped by natural features.
The DCs' demarcation, or 'red line' (see Map, line 4), became the basis for fresh intergovernmental attempts to agree on a final definition of the boundary in the 1930s. But both governments were clearly influenced by the claims of their own subjects, and so local territorial interests reached a surprisingly high level of government dialogue: while the Governor of Uganda asserted Ma'di claims to fishing rights on the Nile, the Governor-General of the Sudan expressed 'grave misgiving' that the boundary 'would deprive the Sudan tribes of the ancestral rainmaking sites to which they attach so much importance', and even named several specific clans with claims to territory as far south as Mount Midigo (Map, lines 2-3). 69 No final settlement was reached, however. As the sleeping sickness restrictions were lifted and people returned to the border areas in the 1940s, the uncertainty of the borderline became more contentious. In 1943, twelve Kuku hunters were killed, reportedly just south of the Kayo/Ayo stream. The authorities reacted swiftly to try to prevent retaliatory conflict and an individual Ma'di man was executed for the killing. 70 But it is striking how frequently interviewees recounted this incident without prompting, as an origin of ongoing Kuku-Ma'di tensions and a motive for revenge on both sides. 71 Hunting conventions were one of the primary ways in which authority over land is said to have been recognized: 'In the past when people hunted or trapped animals, they give the foreleg to the landlord, or he will curse you. So everyone knows whose land it is'. 72 The incident may thus have reflected ongoing disputes and uncertainties over land and boundaries as people returned from extended displacement. 73 Hints such as these in both the colonial records and local memory indicate that clan territoriality was on occasion asserted vociferously enough to reach the attention of local and even central governments, and that there is a long history to contemporary disputes over the relation between clan territory and the international boundary. Far from clarifying the borderline, the colonial governments had established considerable uncertainty over it by their unresolved negotiations and their creation of a wide no-man's-land as a cordon sanitaire. The boundary that came closest to being accepted was the 'red line' made by district-level officials and chiefs in around 1930 (recorded as the '1936 ad hoc administrative agreement', line 4 on Map), driven by local administrative imperatives and the convenience of using prominent natural features. But this does not appear to have been mapped in any detail and it clearly left unresolved questions over the reach of chiefs' jurisdictions as well as clan territorial claims in the borderlands. Uganda-Sudan boundary was at its height in the 1950s and 1960s. Sudan's independence in 1956 followed an uprising in parts of Southern Sudan, where the new, largely northern Sudanese, administration was therefore preoccupied with pursuing the remnants of what it termed 'mutineers' and 'outlaws', many of whom took refuge in the Uganda borderlands. 75 This produced some tension with the still-colonial government of Uganda, and the British were eager to resolve the boundary delimitation before Uganda too became independent. But efforts to establish a boundary commission were hampered by the fact that Uganda's border with Kenya also needed to be resolved, and the British government in Kenya was wary of stirring up the unresolved issue of its own borders with Sudan and Ethiopia. Several years of high-level government correspondence over the Sudan-Uganda border still failed to produce a resolution by the time Uganda became independent in 1962. 76 Even in this era of nationalism and centralizing state authoritarianism, it was thus largely at the local level of government that more practical attempts would be made to create and administer the international boundary. At this district level, the transfer of rule from British to Ugandan or Sudanese administrators, councillors and political representatives produced an intensified interest and investment in local state territory, and it was these interests that would primarily drive disputes over both internal and external borders.
By the late colonial period, districts were becoming the primary territorial units not only of local government administrations but also of emerging political organization and representation. Local government reforms from the late 1930s were not successful in  their aim of diverting African political energies from nationalism, but they established the district as a focus for political action and ambition -often understood, in Uganda at least, in ethnic terms. 77 One effect was to produce demands for new independent districts, and to generate tensions over district boundaries, sparked by localized jurisdictional interests. 78 For example, disputes over tax collection along the Madi-Acholi district boundary in Uganda were reported to be driven primarily by chiefs, while their people enjoyed close relations and had little interest in the boundary. 79 New motives for administrative independence were also emerging among local elites through the district-level organization of cotton cooperatives and ginneries, and by the basis of political constituencies in administrative boundaries. 80  District' as a result of Aringa fears that Madi District sought to annex the county. 82 Districts in Southern Sudan were not usually defined in such overtly ethnic terms, though their territories were still shaped by colonial understandings of tribal boundaries. 83 But the identification of chiefs and councillors with their district was clearly strengthening in the 1940s and 1950s, 84 and here too on occasion disputes over hunting rights or settlement and taxation could prompt the revisiting of district boundaries. 85 Indeed the colonial district territories have retained considerable salience up to now in South Sudan, despite later rearrangements: in 2014, the new rebel opposition proposed a federal government structure based on the twenty-one colonial districts and their boundaries. 86 In Uganda the colonial district boundaries have been retained even as districts have been internally subdivided in recent years (usually along former sub-district/county boundaries). 87 Colonial administration in both countries thus established a patchwork pattern of chiefdoms and local government units with lasting effect. Chiefs, local government officials and councillors in Kajokeji and neighbouring Moyo and Aringa were increasingly invested in the territoriality of their administrations, and hence in the international boundary that would be created by first Sudan's independence in 1956 and then Uganda's in 1962.
In 1958, it was disputes over 'the jurisdiction of local chiefs and the collection of taxes' that prompted a meeting between the  49-51. between Kajokeji and Aringa County. 88 They discovered that their maps differed but agreed to adopt the Ugandan version of the line 'because it was easier to follow on the ground', demonstrating again that administrative pragmatism and natural features did more to shape the boundary than high-level directives. 89 This was apparent again two years later, when a Sudan chief tried to collect taxes from Kuku people who had already paid taxes to the Uganda government. 90 The British DC of Moyo insisted that Jale Hill, on the road between Moyo and Kajokeji, had been accepted as 'the locally recognized border' for the past twenty years. 91 At a meeting held at Kajokeji in 1960, however, the Sudanese representatives disputed the boundary line at both Jale and Keriwa hills. The meeting nevertheless agreed that the existing 'administrative line should be recognized as a purely temporary expedient'; that the current tax arrangements in the borderlands should be preserved and that new settlement in a four-mile-wide border zone deterred. and military activities in the borderlands. Many of the refugees took advantage of their close relations across the border to settle locally in Moyo and West Nile. But already in 1964, a District Intelligence report recommended the removal of Sudanese refugees from West Nile to prevent them laying claim or bringing conflict to 'Uganda's soil'. 94 Over the next two years, the borderlands became increasingly insecure, as the 'Anyanya' rebel movement activity and Sudan government counterinsurgency intensified. In 1966, Sudan army soldiers were reported to have crossed the border at Afoji where they killed one refugee and took others to Sudan. The DC Madi protested this 'invasion' to the Ugandan Prime Minister and requested a Ugandan army presence in the district, and for the refugees to be relocated further inside Uganda. 95 Local government officials thus appealed to the idea of state territorial sovereignty to claim greater central government support in the borderlands.
That support came in the form of an army operation to relocate the Sudanese refugees away from the borderlands, at the same time as the Ugandan army was increasingly co-operating with the Sudan army against the Anyanya rebels. 96 This is another episode in the border history that is bitterly recalled in current narratives in Kajokeji. Yet in Moyo too, interviewees expressed considerable ambivalence about the coerciveness of the operation. 97 At the time, the Ugandan DC of West Nile had to respond to complaints about it in the district council: The operation was intended to take away refugees from the border and put them in an area far from the border and where they could be registered and known. We must know who are living in Uganda. At present people are entering Uganda at will, like a market, and as if this is a ''no-man's'' land. It has been very difficult to plan services for our people because we just don't know who are living in Uganda. Even this Council has already experienced this from shortage of drugs at the dispensaries. 98 This statement epitomizes a recurrent local government discourse, protesting at unregulated cross-border movement and citing service provision and administrative imperatives as the basis for asserting territorial sovereignty.
Yet the border itself has frequently taken the form of a noman's-land rather than a clear line. This was again exacerbated by the intensifying Sudanese conflict in late 1966: 'the border up to a radius of four miles inside Uganda became more and more dangerous to live in and people are increasingly deserting their homes'. 99 Even in the midst of such insecurity, there are hints that the borderline was already a source of tension in some of the villages disputed up to now between Moyo and Kajokeji: It is also rumoured that some refugees of Afoji and Chunyu have refused to move inward and claimed that those places belong to the Sudan and if the Madi would try to interfere with their settlement they are prepared to fight by any means. It is believed that the Anyanya would be willing to assist them in case of any fight [emphasis added]. 100 Meanwhile in 1967, the government of Uganda under Milton Obote published its own definition of the Sudan boundary in its new constitution, running across the summits of Keriwa and Jale hills, the latter now said to be marked with a surface beacon (Map, line 6). 101  vociferous Sudanese protests against such Ugandan claims in 1960; by 1967, Sudan was under a caretaker coalition government, and both its international reputation in the region and its territorial control in the border areas had been increasingly eroded by the rebels. 103 Indeed the local concerns over the border would receive diminishing interest from either national government from now on. Ugandan policy was shifting as Obote's army chief, Idi Amin, pursued closer relations with the Anyanya and their supporter, Israel. 104 Amin, who would seize power from Obote in the coup of January 1971, was himself of a 'liminal identity' from the westernmost Uganda-Sudan borderlands, 105 and his period of rule did much to further blur the international boundary; Hansen suggests that 'he regarded the national frontier as penetrable and subordinate to ethnic considerations'. 106 He heavily recruited Southern Sudanese as well as West Nile Ugandans into his military and security forces and administration. The 1972 peace agreement in Sudan led to the re-opening of the border and gradual return of Sudanese refugees, and in subsequent years, peace and 'cordial relations' were reported, with 'free movement and contact' across the border. 107 Once again it was left to local and provincial authorities to handle the implications of this movement. A border meeting between the local administrations at Keriwa in 1974 resolved to tighten controls on cross-border movement of people, livestock and trade goods and agreed that 'People at Keriwa village are to pay taxes where they want to and the respective Chiefs to issue receipts', suggesting that chiefly jurisdictions were still uncertain in the borderland. 108 Soon after, Sudanese crossing into Uganda in this area complained of being taxed again by the Ugandan local authorities, despite carrying Sudanese poll-tax receipts. 109 As the Ugandan economy collapsed in the later years of Amin's government, the informal economy, or 'magendo' emerged as a major and enduring source of income and survival, creating new vested interests in cross-border trade and smuggling. 110 As Tidemand points out, however, the collapse of the formal economy in Uganda had limited impact on district administrations, since their revenue base was 'graduated taxes and market dues rather than taxes on formal sector incomes'. 111 This also heightened the concerns about local tax collection on both sides of the border, as local governments struggled to get this revenue in the absence of central government support. 112 While Amin's regime may have done more to blur and subvert the international boundary than to define it, conversely it also contributed to the hardening of internal boundaries in Uganda and thus to the overall strengthening of a patchwork geography. From 1972 the government began redrawing district and regional boundaries, claiming 'to meet the aspirations of various small societies which had hitherto been pressed into unwanted associations with their neighbours'. 113 The move was ultimately part of attempts to secure greater centralized control over the districts, however, and local administrative positions were increasingly taken over by military personnel. Divide-and-rule tactics even within Amin's home region of West Nile contributed to the fragmentation of any regional identity and the 'contraction of boundaries', 114 a process that would only accelerate in later decades.
Such local differentiation did not prevent reprisals against the people of West Nile in general following Amin's overthrow in 1979, leading to their flight across the Sudanese and Congolese borders. Some Ma'di refugees settled among the Kuku of Kajokeji and may have even 'adopted a Kuku identity for a period'. 115 By around 1986, Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) attacks forced a reverse migration once again, with both Ma'di and Kuku returning to Uganda. Again, many Kuku were able to settle among relatives and friends in Moyo and neighbouring districts. 116 This capacity to self-settle near the border and to shift ethnic or national identity has been an important strategy for the borderland inhabitants. But refugee movements also created tensions among them and sharpened national identities. The relocation of Sudanese refugees from Moyo to neighbouring districts in the late 1990s was referred to by several interviewees as a cause of deteriorating relations, as one man from Kajokeji emphasized: In 1987 I left [Kajokeji] and ran just across the border and joined school there [in Moyo]; I even went to school with some of the current leaders there. There were always some tensions; we were seen as refugees. In 1997, when I was in Senior 4, we were evicted from Moyo; all the refugees were sent away from Moyo and Metu because we were foreigners . . . It was a really bad experience; it soured relations. We were taken to Waka camp in 1997-8, and there were a lot of problems with insecurity because of the West Nile Bank Front attacks. 117 The Ugandan rebel West Nile Bank Front targeted the refugee settlements from its bases across the border in Sudan because it suspected refugees of supporting the SPLA, as was the Ugandan government. More general refugee-host tensions emerged over resources, services and jobs in the humanitarian agencies, and Ugandans reportedly associated crime and insecurity with the refugee presence. 118 While refugee movements might in some ways blur borders then, in other ways they could provoke the defence of territorial interests among 'hosts', harden the distinction between 'nationals' and 'foreigners' (particularly in relation to land rights), and thus increase the value of territorial belonging and homeland for refugees. 119 In recent years, debates over the disputed border areas often focus on whether particular groups of people were settled in these areas temporarily as refugees or were internally displaced within their own country. 120 Following the outbreak of war in Uganda in 1979, the Ma'di took refuge in Dwani Wano. They were received warmly and allowed to settle among the people before they were repatriated to Uganda. During this time the Ma'di refugees paid taxes to Sudanese authorities. Now the district local authorities in Moyo have extended claim over Dwani Wano through which the disputed road passes. Yet the land is undoubtedly Kuku land in which is located salt water where rituals used to be performed. 121 This statement from the 'Kuku community' reveals the entanglement of a ritual landscape of clan-based authority with the logics of state territoriality defined by the boundaries of taxation regimes. These threads would be woven ever more closely into the patchwork of local state territoriality from the 1990s, even as the patches themselves were being cut up and re-stitched.

IV 'TOO MANY CUSTODIANS OF BORDERS'? DECENTRALIZING TERRITORIAL SOVEREIGNTY SINCE THE 1990S
With the end of the Cold War and growing attention to 'globalization' and regional integration policies in Europe, Maier suggests that territorial priorities were becoming seen as 'anachronistic' in the West by the late twentieth century. 122 The revival of the East African Community in 2000 promised a similar softening and opening of borders here, while peace agreements in Sudan and Uganda in 2005 and 2006 enabled a massive acceleration of cross-border trade and investment. In the same period, however, disputes proliferated along this international border, and over internal boundaries in both Uganda and South(ern) Sudan, signifying an intensification rather than disappearance of territoriality -epitomized perhaps above all in the secession of South Sudan from Sudan in 2011. 123 Yet within the new state and its neighbour Uganda, the overall effect has been to strengthen state territorial sovereignty, as local authorities and citizens appeal to its logics and assert its boundaries in pursuit of local interests. The localization of state power and territoriality has received particular impetus from programmes of decentralization in both Uganda and South Sudan since the 1990s. 124 In Uganda, the National Resistance Movement/Army of Yoweri Museveni followed up its military victory in 1986 with the consolidation of a five-tier system of Local (initially 'Resistance') Councils (LCs), from village to district levels, with substantial financial decentralization to the district councils. These reforms have thus re-intensified the concentration of power and politics at the district level, leading to heightened competition for positions and to proliferating demands for the creation of new districts, often expressed in ethnic terms. The result was an increase from thirty-three districts in 1986 to 121 in 2017. 125 Uganda's LC system has been much heralded for bringing local democracy, development and genuine decentralization after the centralized authoritarianism of Obote and Amin. But critics have also argued that new district creation has become an electioneering and patrimonial strategy, rewarding local politicians loyal to the ruling party, and confining much political debate and competition to the district rather than national level. 126 Campaigns for new districts have 'allowed local extremists to assume power and exacerbate ethnic tensions', leading to increasing conflicts over old and new boundaries. 127 The channelling of aid and development directly to the districts by international agencies has also furthered the 'build-up of assets' at this level. 128 This reflects broader processes by which development programmes assume a territorial definition of recipient communities or localities and thus enhance the value of controlling local administrative territories. 129 Similar processes are evident across the border in South Sudan, where by the late 1990s the SPLM/A had begun to establish its own local government system in the 'liberated' areas of Equatoria, including Kajokeji. Districts were renamed counties, and new sub-county divisions created, often based on chiefdoms. These structures would be formalized by the Local Government Act of 2009 and inherited by the new state in 2011. 130 There has been little sign here of the extent of decentralization occurring in Uganda. But local governments still became the focus for competition over their limited resources, in the form of intermittently salaried positions and control over local taxes, court revenues, land transactions and aid projects. As in Uganda, there has therefore been a rapid fragmentation and proliferation of new counties and lower units, including chiefdoms, and widespread disputes and conflicts over boundaries. 131 The increasing value of controlling local government territories has been furthered by growing concern and competition over land in both countries, and the associated politicization of customary land governance. In first Uganda and later South Sudan, customary land tenure has been given novel constitutional and legal recognition by the current ruling regimes, accompanied by declarations that 'land belongs to the people'. Yet at the same time, state and military interests have frequently ridden roughshod over these rights in the commercial exploitation of land and natural resources, generating new insecurities over land tenure among ordinary people. 132 In addition, the rapid growth of cities, towns and smaller market centres along roads has created new pressures on land in particular areas, and fuelled an unprecedented market for leases or land titles, formal and informal. The new value of land was further enhanced by a revival of commercial farming, land leases for government or NGO infrastructure and development projects, and a vague but confident anticipation of 'investors', which was particularly intensified by oil and mineral prospecting in north-western Uganda. 133 Both northern Uganda and South Sudan were the focus for massive externally funded programmes of post-conflict reconstruction after 2005, which if nothing else contributed to a boom in infrastructural development, construction and crossborder trade. 134 This combination of factors had an obvious impact on customary land governance just when it had also been given new legal recognition. Local governments established land committees and worked with clan land authorities and customary chiefs to handle increasingly lucrative land transactions and disputes. 135 Competition for land was generating more exclusionary definitions of land rights, based more strictly on patrilineal descent, fuelling disputes over history, genealogy and law even among close neighbours and relatives. 136 Similar principles were extended to the level of administrative boundaries, as neighbouring local governments laid claim to territory and key sites like markets on the basis of ethnic and customary land boundaries. Rights and access to resources were becoming defined by whether or not one could claim ancestral belonging to a particular clan and ethnic territory, so that migrants and minorities feared having less rights unless they could claim their own sub-territory with its own administration. As well as driving the proliferation of new administrative units, these logics presume that administrative boundaries should align with clan and ethnic boundaries. The historical knowledge and spiritual authority claimed by clan land authorities has thus gained new political and even commercial value as the basis for defining control over and rights to land and territory. 137 The effect has been to further rework and entangle clan territoriality in the stitching, cutting and re-stitching of the seams between local administrative patches in both states, and to engage more people than ever in this work as they seek to protect or extend their own land rights.
Horizontal tensions between neighbouring territorial administrations have tended to work ultimately to reinforce vertical political relations, thus strengthening rather than fragmenting state power. By 2014, both Moyo District in Uganda and Kajokeji County in South Sudan were embroiled in multiple boundary disputes, including between Moyo and neighbouring Yumbe District (formerly Aringa County). Threats of bloodshed over this boundary compelled central government intervention in the form of a delegation of junior ministers and lands ministry personnel, which met with district representatives in Moyo in 2017. The delegation sought to assert the sovereignty and technical capacity of central state institutions: 'the custodian of all borders is the Ministry of Lands; otherwise there are too many custodians of borders'. But even state technocratic solutions were vulnerable to local appropriation, according to district spokespersons who claimed that the GPS machine used in a previous demarcation attempt had been programmed to understand only one of the local languages -a potent expression of the way that seemingly neutral technologies of state territoriality could become entangled in local territorial rivalries. The delegation repeatedly criticized local politicians and district administrations for inciting conflict, including by creating new administrative subunits in the disputed areas: 'We realize the two local governments have rushed to those areas to put villages and give names in their own tribal languages'. 138 As we have seen, there is a long history to the idea that boundaries could be carried by people, and to the strategy of using local administration, taxation, infrastructure and services to stretch the seams of the territorial patchwork. Even while the Sudanese war was still ongoing in the 1990s, tensions were reported in the long-disputed international borderland at Keriwa, where, according to an SPLA officer, 'the local people (Sudanese) believe that these areas have been encroached upon' by the Uganda local government authority having 'extended services -schools, health clinics and roads to these areas' and 'even gone further to encourage the local Sudanese people to pay tax known in Uganda as ''Machoro'' '. Border meetings held in 1997 had failed to resolve the issue, because the meetings were only 'locally initiated' -once again, the border was being left to local governance. 139  Liwolo Payam of Kajokeji County, who claimed that part of their territory and people had become the sub-county of Keriwa in Yumbe District: The Uganda government brought services, so people considered Uganda as the only government which helps them, but people in that sub-county are on their own land, not Ugandan land; they did not go there as refugees. But the Uganda government created positions for them as LCs, village chiefs -that is the Uganda administration. 140 Ugandan authorities argue that the ethnicity of the population should be irrelevant to the international border line. 141 The escalation of conflict over the international boundary from around 2007 was similarly triggered by potent assertions of administrative sovereignty, such as naming of villages, construction of a road and telecommunication mast, and most notably the extension of the Uganda national census -the most powerful 'instrument of modern territoriality', according to Gray 142 -to disputed border areas in 2014. Commercial farming initiatives by local elites in the fertile border zone also contributed to the escalating tensions. 143  The Kajokeji-Moyo boundary, with its poor road connections, was of much less significance to higher authorities than the major border crossing points either side of it at Kaya and Nimule, where customs revenue was the focus of competition among different levels of government. 145 Local government leaders in both Moyo and Kajokeji therefore complained at the lack of interest or security provision from their own central governments, who were said to see the dispute as 'just a local border issue'. 146 But they also repeatedly petitioned the national governments for support and to demand border demarcation, appealing to the idea of territorial sovereignty. 147 In 2011, for example, the Moyo district chairman wrote to the Minister of Internal Affairs complaining of South Sudanese incursions across the border and requesting government action: 'To make it abundantly clear that the laws governing this nation are adhered to by all who are within the territorial boundaries of the Republic of Uganda'. 148 Similarly a district council member for Moyo emphasized that 'it is also important to have marks so that the border is clear, because this is a country'. 149 Higher authorities responded by reiterating the joint directive of the South(ern) Sudanese and Ugandan presidents in 2009 that major economic activities or projects in the border zone should be suspended until a boundary commission had resolved the borderline. Once again then, central government policy worked to produce an effective no-man's-land along the border, which is also conspicuous in the mile-wide gap between border posts on the main road between Kajokeji and Moyo. At the same time, higher-level authorities urged 'amicable solutions' at the local level and dialogue between chiefs and elders to resolve any border disputes, reprising the long history of local government responsibility for the international boundary. 150 In 2015, a South Sudanese minister explained this in terms of the more pressing problems of armed rebellion and economic crisis faced by the central government: 'We have boundary issues with all our neighbours, but this is not the time to address them -only that this administration in Moyo stirred up the issue'. 151 The colonial resort to an unmapped ethnic definition of the Kajokeji-Moyo boundary has given particular prominence a century later to ethnic identity and the politicization of clan territories in the borderlands, contributing to conflict along ethnic lines, and to the attempted conflation of national citizenship and territorial sovereignty with ethnic and clan identities. Nearby stretches of the boundary were not defined in such ethnic terms, where other factors such as control of the navigable Nile outweighed the colonial preference for tribal boundaries: like several other ethnicities, the Ma'di east of the Nile were thus divided between Sudan and Uganda. Yet here too, tensions have arisen in recent years as new settlement patterns and lucrative cross-border markets have politicized clan-based land claims, leading to intra-ethnic disputes. In one case, rival Ma'di clans have been supported by neighbouring district administrations in Uganda, with one clan accusing the other of being South Sudanese and hence having no right to land in Uganda. 152 Here the boundary line was more clearly delimited, and the people on both sides share the same ethnicity. Yet here too, local administrative, economic and political ambitions are entangling clan territorialities -which may actually traverse the international boundary -in the assertion of national territorial sovereignties and citizenship. V CONCLUSION International boundaries need to be understood not just as the result of cartographic impositions by and between states, or in terms of centre-periphery relations, or even as products of specific cross-border dynamics, relations and resources, but also as part of the internal territorialization processes across states on either side. These internal processes in Uganda and South Sudan reveal that state territory and sovereignty is coproduced through local-level as well as national political work, by local actors and institutions investing in defining and defending their 'patch' of jurisdiction and constituency.
The stretch of boundary on which this article has focused exemplifies this argument -central governments over the past century have had little direct interest in locating a clear boundary within the no-man's-land created by recurrent state policies and conflicts. Instead it has been left to local institutions and actors to assert the boundaries of state sovereignty via their own jurisdictions. There are obviously stark contrasts with more heavily policed and taxed boundaries around the world, where international borders may be clearly demarcated and where central state institutions may exert more direct control. But even in such contexts, the meaning of external state borders is at least partially produced by the territorial organization within states as well as between them. This is apparent, for example, in Anssi Paasi's case study of a Finnish locality on the Russian border, which, as the East-West frontier, was formally closed and securitized during the Cold War. Yet here too, the local history and meaning of the border for its inhabitants was 'inseparable' from the production and institutionalization of other scales of territory, from the village or commune to the province, region and state. 153 Even in the context of France -often seen to have initiated and epitomized the formation of the unitary, centralized, territorial nation statestate decentralization and heritage policies in recent decades have invigorated and articulated 'multiple local territories' with the 'territoire/s of the nation'. 154 But while state formation everywhere may involve the construction of local and regional as well as national territory, these processes have been particularly intense, entangled and mutually reinforcing in the context examined in this article. From colonial indirect rule to ongoing programmes of decentralization, state sovereignty in South Sudan and Uganda has been produced through the interests of local as well as national elites in the control of territory. The resulting patchwork territoriality of these states exhibits horizontal tensions that to some extent work against centre-periphery tensions, helping to hold the fabric of the state together even as they might seem to pull it apart. As Boone writes, local government institution-building across Africa has 'tied distinct rural peripheries . . . into the national space', through 'patterns of segmented authority whereby regions . . . were tied to the center, but at the same time separated from each other by the very institutions of the state (as under colonial rule)'. 155 Rather than seeing such horizontal tensions as the fragmentation and failure of states then, we should see them as the product of state strategies (at multiple scales) for exercising control over people and territory over the past century. And rather than seeing in the segmentation of local government units a reversion to ethnic solidarities, we might better explore this as a process of 'spatial socialization' over that period, 156 in which discourses of tradition, indigeneity and historical memory are employed in the construction of new forms of territorial identification with administrative boundaries. 157 But this shift to an increasingly 'territorial definition of society' has been an incomplete and ultimately 'ambiguous' process, as Gray argues for the case of colonial Gabon. 158 The boundaries themselves have never been stable, for as Paasi reminds us, 'territorial units and regions, states and nations -and their representations -are in a continual state of flux, rising and disappearing in perpetual regional transformations'. 159 The persistence of the idea that people can carry boundaries with them -as well as the ongoing fragmentation of administrative territoriesdemonstrate the continuing instability of boundaries and identifications in the South Sudan-Uganda borderlands. The structures of political control can also prove to be 'subversive of the territorial integration they were intended to promote', leading to fractures, secessions or coups. 160 The story told in this article is not then a straightforward account of the role of borderlanders in constructing state territory, any more than it is a story of state fragmentation and failure. Rather, it is an illustration of the much more ambiguous, unpredictable and fluctuating processes whereby state territoriality has been localized and local territorialities have been worked and reworked in messy and tangled ways into the fabric of states.

Durham University
Cherry Leonardi