The Unbuilding of a State

Abstract

The creation of the new state of South Sudan in 2011 marked a major turning point for Africa and the international community. As the world’s newest country, South Sudan was seen as a state-building opportunity par excellence, with the World Bank referring to building a country “from scratch” and the United Nations (UN) establishing its most ambitious state-building mission in its history. Two years later, South Sudan was engulfed in conflict as the fragile post-war settlement fractured into an all-out civil war, triggering the end of the UN’s support to state-building as the Mission scrambled to protect civilians caught up in the violence. Scholarship has pointed overwhelmingly to deeply rooted ethnic and political divides as the principal cause of the civil war, with some also describing its economic roots in a fragile patronage network based on oil revenues. This chapter builds on these analyses to offer a systemic analysis of the governance system in South Sudan, exploring how an ethno-military network came to dominate the country, performing the core governance functions in lieu of a viable set of state institutions. The chapter suggests that the UN’s overriding focus on building state institutions and extending state authority not only failed to deliver the anticipated results, but may well have fed into the conflict dynamics around the civil war. It concludes that the South Sudanese experience offers insights into future peace operations, including related to how non-state forms of governance emerge, the timing of interventions, the relevance of the so-called “local turn” and the concept of resilience in fragile states.