The South Sudanese political activist and Cambridge PhD candidate in politics, Peter Biar Ajak, was arrested as he boarded a plane in Juba, the capital of South Sudan, on his way to attend a youth conference in July 2018. At the time of writing, he is still detained without charge in a prison run by South Sudan’s National Security Services. He has not been granted access to legal representation nor has he been allowed much communication with the outside world.

His arrest is part of an ongoing effort by the ruling Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) to repress dissident voices in the seven-year old country. The SPLM was spun off from the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in 2005 following the signing of the comprehensive peace agreement. The agreement ended the twenty-year war leading to the country’s independence in 2011. Though ostensibly independent, the party remains closely linked to the army which retains the SPLA name. The current president, Salva Kiir, was the former military head of the rebellion who ascended to the presidency following the mysterious death of Dr. John Garang, the SPLA/M founder, in a helicopter crash.

The campaign to #FreePeterBiar has generated considerable support with tens of thousands signing a petition calling for his release. Framing Peter as the brave advocate for reform that he is, the international campaign simultaneously elides his more complex relationship to the ruling party responsible for much of the country’s woes. Peter, a former “Lost Boy,” the name given to some forty-thousand youth displaced by the war for independence, is a founder of the Red Army Foundation, the former youth wing of the SPLA/M.

Though it claims to be working for political reform in South Sudan, the Red Army’s relationship to the violence that has ripped the country apart since 2013 is unclear. According to a recent report, over 380,000 people have perished in the fighting, a number comparable to the death toll in Syria though with far less international outcry. Peter, the son of an SPLA general, is on record calling for a generational shift in the leadership of the ruling party. His efforts to mobilize the Red Army and South Sudanese youth more broadly to take power has never rejected the violent politics that have brought the country to its current malaise.

A few weeks prior to his arrest he unleashed a scathing critique of the SPLA leadership on his public Facebook page:

our so-called leaders are too corrupt and morally bankrupt. They’ve forgotten why we fought for so many years. They are now ready to betray the ideals of our liberation in order to simply remain in power, which they used to loot our resources and terrorize our people.

Though never openly calling for violence, at least publicly, he made his intention to oust Kiir explicit: “The way forward is for us—the great people of South Sudan—to mobilize and organize ourselves and reclaim our country from these traitors masquerading as leaders!”

His arrest brings to the fore difficult questions about the legitimacy of violence in bringing political change, especially in a context in which non-violent activists have little space for action. Is violence necessary when seeking to overthrow a brutal autocracy? What is the relationship between violent and non-violent activism? And how should outsiders engage with political actors whose commitment to non-violence is less than sacrosanct?

For those of us outside of South Sudan, the question of how to interact with political figures inside the country is especially pressing. The country’s creation would not have been possible without the efforts of an unholy alliance of War on Terror apparatchiks, pro-Israel advocacy groups, Evangelical Christians, anti-genocide activists, and African-American political figures who supported the country’s independence bid while painting the SPLA/M as a liberal and inclusive party despite clear evidence to the contrary. With the limits of militarized nationalism now revealed, outsiders have largely abandoned the country at precisely the moment we should be questioning how so many of us got it so wrong.