The Local Making of a South Sudanese State

Timm has been doing research in Sudan and South Sudan since 2006. His first research focused on political narratives of marginalization in northern Sudan, highlighting the dissonance between the media discourse, personal and family experiences. For his PhD, begun in 2010, he examines state formation processes in South Sudan from an anthropological viewpoint, allowing him to enquire into the mechanisms of legitimation and negotiation in state formation. The low degree of institutionalization with its low barriers of access during the emergence of South Sudanese statehood allowed him to analyze the scope and influence of manifold individual and collective actors. More recently, he concentrates on the digital processes by which state stability and legitimation is supported, and how knowledge, ‘truth’ and evidence are shaped through the control of information flow. He received his master’s degree in Social Anthropology, Human Geography and Computer Science from the Free University of Berlin in 2010. And is currently a researcher at the Max-Planck-Institute for Social Anthropology and PhD-candidate at the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg.