Kings of Disaster: Dualism, Centralism and the Scapegoat King in Southeastern Sudan Paperback – 26 September 2017

‘Simon Simonse’s Kings of Disaster is a monumental achievement. I believe it is the most important work on the long-mooted topic of divine kingship yet written, a book that brings the questions debated since the time of Sir James Frazer and Evans-Pritchard to a final, definitive resolution: everything from “did Africans really kill their sacred kings?” to “what is the real nature of the principle of sovereignty that still lies behind the bureaucratic forms of the modern nation-state?” The answers are never quite what we expected. If there is such a thing as progress in anthropology, and not just shifting fashion, then this book must stand as the starting-point for any future discussion on these topics.’– David Graeber, London School of Economics,

‘It is impossible to overstate the achievement of this book. With an exemplary combination of empirical rigour and theoretical daring, Kings of Disaster transforms the landscape of African studies while forcing us to think in new ways about the origins of political power and the state.’– Mark Anspach, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris

‘The ethnographic richness of this volume is astonishing: the author has ransacked archives, combed historical accounts, and carried out superb fieldworkhimself… From this viewpoint, the volume offers a more unified vision of the region and of the problems raised by these kingdoms than the isolated monographs about these peoples written in the wake of Evans-Pritchard.’– Jean-Claude Muller, Université de Montréal, in Anthropologie et Sociétés

Simon Simonse (1943) studied in Leiden and Paris. Kings of Disaster was his doctoral thesis which he defended at the Free University of Amsterdam in 1990. He taught anthropology in D.R. Congo, Uganda, the Netherlands, South Sudan and Indonesia. Since 1993 he has been working as a conflict transformation expert in the Horn and the Great Lakes of Africa.