Prophecy, Mediation, and Power: Religion, Political Authority, and Peacebuilding in South Sudan

Prophecy, Mediation, and Power: Religion, Political Authority, and Peacebuilding in South Sudan examines the ambivalent location of faith actors between moral resistance to violence and institutional proximity to armed authority. 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 Political theology (Cavanaugh; Philpott); religion and peacebuilding (Appleby; Johnston & Sampson); sociology of religion in African politics (Ellis & ter Haar). Examines the ambivalent political role of faith communities — simultaneously legitimating armed authority and sustaining moral resistance to organised violence. into one conversation and develops the concept of constrained prophetic peacebuilding to explain how formal norms, institutional design, and practical struggles over authority become fused. Using Archival research in church records (SSCC, AEC, Catholic Diocese of Juba); interviews with church leaders, pastors, imams, and traditional spiritual practitioners; ethnographic observation at religious reconciliation ceremonies; comparative analysis with faith-based peacebuilding in Mozambique, Rwanda, and Northern Ireland., the paper reconstructs three linked propositions. First, it shows that faith institutions inside structured political constraint. Second, it demonstrates that mediation moments and the wunlit legacy. Third, it argues that syncretic healing and community repair. The paper answers the central puzzle posed by the research agenda—how have south sudan's dominant faith institutions — the catholic church, episcopal church of sudan, south sudan council of churches — navigated the tension between pastoral prophetic witness