Myopia and mirages: The unmaking of UNMISS

Abstract

Building on the earlier analysis, this chapter examines the establishment of the United Nations (UN) Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) and the first two years of its statebuilding mandate. Following a typical logic of extension of state authority and capacitybuilding of the state, UNMISS had one of the largest statebuilding tasks in the history of the UN, one that was described as building up the South Sudanese state ‘from scratch’. Despite massive resources and a sweeping mandate, however, UNMISS witnessed the rapid disintegration of South Sudan into a new civil war. Employing complexity theory, this chapter offers an explanation for this failure: South Sudan’s system of governance was strongly resistant to the kind of state-centric capacitybuilding at the heart of UNMISS’ work. Instead, resources and political energy ostensibly directed towards state institutions became caught up in the system’s strong attractors, directed into an ‘ethno-military’ network that stretched well beyond the state institutions at the heart of UNMISS’ work. The South Sudanese governance system not only resisted UNMISS’ statebuilding efforts, but complexity theory illuminates how the UN unintentionally bolstered some of its most predatory, violent tendencies.