Religion and Return Migration: A Global History of Reintegration in South Sudan

• In Event: Actors, Agency, + Responsibility in Global Governance

Abstract

This paper examines the formation of transnational religious networks amid forced migration, displacement, and resettlement. It concerns the effects of these networks on postcolonial African states and the histories they entail within and across the global North and South. Its central case study is a little-examined resettlement project that returned a group of refugees, trained as physicians while in exile, to South Sudan after Sudan’s second civil war (1983-2005). This encompassed complex relations among refugees, diasporic populations, churches, faith-based NGOs and public and private actors that have yet to be fully understood – creating a historical trajectory that links post-Cold War faith-based politics to the Cuba internationalist educational project of the late 1970s. I argue that, in addition to highlighting critical processes of repatriation and post-conflict reconstruction, this project demonstrates how religious identities and practices take shape in relation to mechanisms of international political order, reworking experiences of displacement and enabling new forms of political agency. IR conventionally neglects these aspects of religion and international politics, focusing instead on ethno-religious contestation or, more recently, the normatively desirable outcomes of religious-political activities. However, greater attention to the transformative interconnections between religion and global governance, and the histories they entail, is critical for understanding linkages between transnational religious networks, peacebuilding in postcolonial states, and the global mediation of political dislocation.

Author

• Jonathan Agensky, Ohio University