This paper considers the ways the utopian plan to relocate South Sudan’s capital from the city of Juba to a village named Ramciel has become a potent medium for debating and enacting the South Sudanese state and its future. For Ramciel-connected people, the plan has been a source of work and profit as well as a point of frustration over unmet expectations of new political centrality and economic opportunity. For state actors, meanwhile, the plan has offered a tantalizingly simple solution for sidestepping the infrastructural and jurisdictional challenges they face in Juba. State leaders have also found the plan to be a useful resource for aligning international investment with state-directed priorities and imaginings. To detractors, the stalled (some would say “failed”) relocation has come to symbolize the new government’s worst tendencies to squander wealth and enact ethnic favoritism. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Juba and Ramciel between 2012 and 2015, I situate these varied interpretations and expectations while tracing the plan’s genesis and partial implementation. I compare the plan to capital relocations from around the world and historically situate it among other attempts to remake and relocate Juba. In doing so, I demonstrate how planning in itself becomes a potent force for reshaping lives and livelihoods, for making and remaking the state, and for altering the dimensions of possibility in the face of precarity.
This paper has been accepted to the panel: ‘Making sense of ‘crisis’ in South Sudan’ (submission id 222)