Cherry Leonardi has published extensively on the role of government in South Sudan, on legal pluralism and the history of urban settlements. Dealing with Government in South Sudan brings all of this together in one comprehensive history (or histories) of government–society relations in South Sudan since the 1840s.

After an excellent introduction that sets out all her main arguments, the book proceeds chronologically in three parts. Part I, the shortest of the three, deals with the period from the first conquest of the South in the 1840s to the onset of increasing bureaucratisation of British colonial rule in the 1920s. Part II discusses the consolidation of local government and chiefs' courts in the late colonial period until independence in 1956 while Part III describes independent Sudan until the South's secession in 2011, a period characterised by militarised repression and exclusion but also by wider participation in the urban realm of bureaucracy and governance. These chapters are full of fascinating details and new nuggets of information gleaned from hundreds of oral testimonies and from the archival records that the author, who is based in Durham, has prime access to.

Yet, some overarching themes are of particular pertinence. In contrast to the colonial-era evolution or invention of chiefship in other parts of the continent, Leonardi shows that South Sudanese chiefs did not root chiefly authority in time immemorial but in their ability to negotiate between rural people and state power which was, and continues to be, associated with urban areas. Thus, men (fewer women) could rise to prominence due to their skill in dealing with government along the ‘internal frontier zone around the urban government centres' (p. 217). Critically, chiefly authority did not necessary entail a position of superior authority in local relations where oftentimes seniority and membership in certain lineages mattered more.

Moreover, in contrast to their frequent portrayal as passive victims of subjugation, slave raiding and exploitation, South Sudanese were in fact able to exert agency, for instance by insisting on cattle as the unit of economic transactions (p. 22). Instead of only as an alien imposition, ‘the history of town and state formation should also be understood in terms of local relations and long-term political cultures' (p. 7) in which some South Sudanese were drawn to the towns and the opportunities they offered while simultaneously trying to shield the community from the state's often predatory reach. The chief's role was thus to regularise and render predictable the forms of extraction by the state and various military actors, including the SPLA.

This is both an untimely and a very timely book. Untimely in that it was published in 2013 and thus before the savage civil war that erupted in December 2013 and continues in various forms at the time of writing (July 2014). For the very same reason, however, this highly informed and informative volume is a great addition to the literature on state-society relations in South Sudan because it goes beyond the high-power machinations inside the governing Sudan People's Liberation Movement and aims to show how ‘the local histories of chiefship […] reveal in turn how state and local community have been mutually constituted since the nineteenth century’ (p. 2). In this objective it succeeds masterfully.

Thus, it is unfortunate that the editors/publishers decided to squeeze it into 224 pages (plus appendix) by using a small font with no spacing, which makes reading a bit of a drag. Nevertheless, Dealing with Government in South Sudan is likely to become a measuring stick for future anthropological works on South Sudan (the list of acknowledgements reads like a who's who of Sudan scholarship) and should also be of interest to scholars of state–society relations and traditional authorities in other parts of Africa as it challenges key assumptions about the evolution of chieftaincy in the colonial period and beyond.