Kings of Disaster: Dualism, Centralism and the Scapegoat King in Southeastern Sudan

By Simon Simonse

This is the long awaited, revised and illustrated edition of Kings of Disaster, the study of the Rainmakers of the Nilotic Sudan that is in many ways a breakthrough in anthropological thinking on African political systems. Taking his inspiration from Ren Girard s theory of consensual scapegoating, the author shows that the longstanding distinction of states and stateless societies as two fundamentally different political types does not hold. Centralized and segmentary systems only differ in the relative emphasis put on the victimary role of the king as compared with that of enemy. Kings of Disaster so proposes an uninvolved solution to the vexed problem of regicide.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fountain Publishers
• Release date: Sep 26, 2017
• ISBN: 9789970259465

Simon Simonse

Simon Simonse (1943) studied in Leiden and Paris. Kings of Disaster was his doctoral thesis which he defended at the Free University of Amsterdam in 1990. He taught anthropology in D.R. Congo, Uganda, the Netherlands, South Sudan and Indonesia. Since 1993 he has been working as a conflict transformation expert in the Horn and the Great Lakes of Africa.

Book preview