This policy report, researched with Joseph Diing Majok in 2017, investigates how customary authorities on South Sudan’s border with southern Darfur have managed repeated wars and famines since the 1960s, both for the communities that they claim to represent and for their own survival and benefit. It sets out chiefs’ and elders’ experience of negotiating successive states, rebel movements and local militias during times of famine, flight and fighting, concluding that chiefs and other customary authorities are a fundamental part of the political-military structures of power in South Sudan. Download it here.