Who Owns the Past? Memory, Silence, and the Politics of Atrocity Narration in South Sudan

Who Owns the Past? Memory, Silence, and the Politics of Atrocity Narration in South Sudan examines the struggle over whose suffering becomes public history and whose suffering is rendered politically disposable. The article places South Sudan at the centre of the analysis, but it resists treating the case as uniquely exceptional or analytically sealed off from wider African and global debates. Instead, it brings Memory studies (Olick; Nora; Halbwachs); transitional justice and memory (Collins; Wilson); post-colonial epistemology (Mignolo; Spivak). Examines the political contest over how South Sudan's civil wars are narrated, remembered, and officially commemorated — and whose suffering is recognised. into one conversation and develops the concept of narrative sovereignty to explain how formal norms, institutional design, and practical struggles over authority become fused. Using Oral history interviews with conflict survivors across multiple ethnic communities; discourse analysis of official state commemorations, school curricula, and political leadership speeches; comparative analysis with Rwanda's Gacaca and Sierra Leone's TRC memory-making; institutional ethnography of South Sudan's Commission for Truth, Reconciliation and Healing., the paper reconstructs three linked propositions. First, it shows that memory entrepreneurs and selective commemoration. Second, it demonstrates that silence as a technology of political order. Third, it argues that oral history, truth telling, and contested archives. The paper answers the central puzzle posed by the research agenda—how do competing political factions within the r-arcss settlement mobilise competing memories of the 1991 nasir split, the 2013 juba massacres, and the equatoria displacement — and how do these memory contests