The creation of Africa's newest state, South Sudan, in 2011, involved national and international recognition of -traditional authorities-, or chiefs. Chiefship has often been misunderstood to be a timeless or non-state institution, but this book argues for the mutual constitution of chiefship and the state since the mid-nineteenth century, based on research in the vicinity of three towns. The book also demonstrates that while South Sudanese towns have previously been analysed as centres of alien state power, people came to the urban -frontier- to seek the resources, regulation and justice of...