People had long been drawn to the towns not only to obtain services and commodities but also to access the state and to acquire knowledge of its ‘procedures’. This was always a risky strategy, because the urban frontier was subject to the unpredictable threat of repressive or exclusionary government force emanating from the town centres or military barracks. Unsurprisingly, the nodal, urban state has been characterised as dangerously capricious in the existing literature on South Sudan's history, in common with much analysis of post-colonial African states. Yet the idea that government works according to fixed, predictable rules and systems has nevertheless been taken up over the last century; by the 2005–11 interim period, people were asserting that by knowing ‘the system’, they could claim rights, resources and the protection of the state.