South Sudan’s independence on 9 July 2011 was treated, in much international commentary and programming, as a point of origin. A new country was presumed to require new institutions, new habits of authority, and new forms of legitimacy. The assumption was not always stated, but it shaped sequencing: formal ministries first; technical systems next; politics to be contained within an agreed transition. The record suggests the opposite ordering applied. South Sudan entered independence with functioning systems of authority already in place—simply not the ones outsiders most readily recognised. [UN Peacekeeping—UNMISS]
The “blank slate” idea was never empirically plausible. The political leadership was forged in a long insurgency; local governance rested on customary authority and negotiated administration; the security arena reflected wartime command, patronage, and factional bargaining; and the fiscal state was structurally rent-financed through oil rather than domestically tax-based. Those continuities were not background texture. They were the operating conditions under which any formal institution would either adapt or fail.
A useful discipline, therefore, is to treat independence as a change in international legal personality, not a reset of institutional reality. Independence can alter access to diplomatic recognition, aid modalities, and sovereign borrowing, but it does not erase the prior distribution of coercive power, local legitimacy, or revenue control. South Sudan’s first decade is best read as a misalignment between the state that existed in practice and the state that was repeatedly assumed in design.
The practical baseline the blank-slate story neglected
From the outset, South Sudan combined three constraints that are difficult to “capacity-build” around quickly. First, the state’s revenue base was exceptionally concentrated. The World Bank has repeatedly described South Sudan as oil-dependent, with oil typically accounting for around 90 per cent of government revenue and nearly all exports in normal conditions. That is not merely an economic statistic. It is a political design: the centre is financed by controlling a gate rather than by taxing a dispersed economy. [World Bank Macro Poverty Outlook: South Sudan]
Secondly, the state’s physical reach was thin. The same World Bank material notes that only around 2 per cent of roads are paved, and household access to electricity is extremely low (around 5 per cent). In such environments, administration travels through intermediaries—chiefs, commanders, local brokers—more than through reliable transport networks, payroll systems, or service delivery chains. Formal institutions can exist, but they struggle to become the primary way authority is experienced. [World Bank Macro Poverty Outlook: South Sudan]
Thirdly, humanitarian dependence was not episodic; it became a standing feature of governance. The 2025 Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan frames 9.3 million people (69 per cent) as needing assistance, with 5.4 million targeted, and an appeal of US$1.7 billion. Whatever one thinks of the humanitarian system’s performance, numbers of this scale indicate that relief operations are part of the national political economy, not an external add-on. [OCHA/HNRP 2025—Humanitarian Action]
These conditions help explain why a “new institutions” approach repeatedly produced surprise. The binding constraints were not chiefly technical. They were structural: a rent-financed centre, limited territorial integration, and a large parallel system of external provision and logistics.
Why South Sudan was misframed as a “new beginning”
The international system has a preference for legibility. It understands states through recognisable forms: ministries, budgets, constitutions, elections, and treaties. Independence supplied those forms and, with them, a powerful temptation to treat South Sudan as a governance start-up. Peacekeeping and international support frameworks also tend to assume an arc from conflict to transition to stabilisation, with institutions built along the way. [UN Peacekeeping—UNMISS]
Yet South Sudan’s statehood did not arise from a negotiated internal settlement followed by technocratic institution-building. It emerged from a hard-won separation in which the principal organised force was a liberation movement, and the principal source of fiscal power was oil. A system built under those conditions typically prizes control of distribution over impersonal administration. The formal state can be built quickly in appearance—titles, offices, and laws—but the deeper institutions of authority are slower to shift because they are anchored in security relationships and revenue allocation.
The blank-slate framing also encouraged a particular error of moral accounting. When institutions underperformed, the diagnosis defaulted to “weak capacity” rather than to “strong alternative systems”. In practice, South Sudan did not lack institutions. It possessed institutions that were not designed to produce the outcomes donors assumed as default—predictable public finance, neutral service delivery, or constrained coercion. The state was not absent. It was differently organised.
A further distortion followed. If a country is assumed to be beginning, then short horizons feel appropriate: a transitional timetable, a narrow list of reforms, an electoral calendar treated as a milestone. If a country is treated as a continuation, longer horizons become unavoidable: decades of political bargaining, gradual fiscal diversification, and a slow rebalancing between armed authority and civilian administration.
The persistence of pre-state power structures
South Sudan’s pre-independence political order cannot be reduced to “conflict” as an event. It was governance as a mode of survival. That matters because wartime governance tends to leave institutional residues: command hierarchies, loyalties purchased through access to resources, and habits of decision-making that privilege cohesion over transparency. Research on the institutional legacies of rebel governance makes a general point: rebel governance can persist after victory, shaping how authority is exercised and how stability is pursued. [Swisspeace Working Paper 1/2020]
In South Sudan, these residues were visible in the security arena and in the political marketplace around it. A political marketplace study of the country’s security arena describes how power bargaining, clientship, and monetised relationships remained central features of the post-CPA and post-independence environment. In such a system, “security sector reform” is not a technical training agenda. It is an attempt to alter the terms under which loyalty is maintained and violence is deterred. [LSE/CRP—The Security Arena in South Sudan, 2019]
Local authority structures also exhibited continuity. Customary authority—particularly chiefs and customary courts—remained a principal arena through which many citizens encountered governance. Rift Valley Institute work on customary authority describes how chiefs’ courts function as central mechanisms of local order, even in contexts of administrative disorder, and how authority is negotiated at the local level. Programmes that concentrate narrowly on formal courts or statutory law risk addressing a system that is often secondary to lived governance. [RVI—Making Order Out of Disorder, 2019]
Administrative forms were likewise inherited rather than invented. South Sudan’s local government architecture and decentralisation debates pre-date independence and were formalised in law during the autonomy period. The Local Government Act (2009) establishes tiers and structures (including county, payam, and boma) that reflect earlier administrative practice and political compromise. This is not to suggest the system functioned smoothly, but it demonstrates continuity in the formal skeleton as well as in informal authority. [South Sudan Local Government Act, 2009]
The core point is that independence did not produce a governance vacuum. It re-labelled and partially re-legalised an existing set of power arrangements: armed authority, customary mediation, and administrative tiers shaped by earlier settlements. Any effort to build a “new state” without accounting for these inheritances would inevitably build on top of them—whether acknowledged or not.
How international actors misread continuity versus rupture
Much international engagement in South Sudan was built around a belief in institutional engineering: establish formal ministries, build public financial management systems, support elections, and rely on peace agreements to reset political incentives. These are standard instruments, and in many contexts they are sensible. In South Sudan they often functioned as a parallel architecture: coherent on paper, but only partially connected to the real loci of enforcement and distribution.
Peace agreements illustrate the pattern. The Revitalised Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in the Republic of South Sudan (R‑ARCSS) is a comprehensive blueprint that sets out transitional governance arrangements and security provisions, including unification and restructuring commitments. It provides essential diplomatic scaffolding. [R‑ARCSS, 2018] But a blueprint does not automatically become an institution. The question is whether the agreement changes incentives for actors whose power depends on older systems of coercion and distribution. The UN Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan has argued that despite political agreements, entrenched patronage and extraction mechanisms have persisted, with corruption depriving citizens of services and entrenching deprivation. [OHCHR A/HRC/60/CRP.5, 2025]
A second misreading concerned public finance. In a rent-financed political order, formal budget reforms matter, but they are rarely decisive if the most consequential flows occur off-budget or through opaque contracting and advance arrangements. The OHCHR Commission’s analysis describes large-scale diversion and off-budget schemes, and highlights that substantial oil inflows have not translated into broad service delivery. Their press material cites oil inflows exceeding US$25.2 billion since 2011, alongside persistent deprivation. [OHCHR Press Release, 16 Sept 2025]
A third misreading involved external dependency. When the core revenue system depends on cross-border infrastructure, sovereignty is constrained in practical terms. The IMF’s June 2025 statement on its engagement with South Sudan reports that the main export pipeline was damaged in February 2024, halting oil exports and associated fiscal and foreign exchange proceeds for over a year, with resumption from April 2025. This is not a technical detail: it is a reminder that “state capacity” can be abruptly suspended by regional conflict dynamics and corridor fragility. [IMF Press Release PR 25/200, June 2025]
Finally, humanitarian systems were often treated as separate from governance. In reality, humanitarian logistics, access negotiations, checkpoints, contracting, and currency exchange frequently interact with local power. A Small Arms Survey briefing on the political economy since 2018 describes how elites can extract rents from humanitarian operations and how revenue management remains opaque. The policy implication is uncomfortable but necessary: large aid flows become part of the bargaining economy unless actively designed against capture. [Small Arms Survey HSBA Briefing Paper, 2023]
These are not “implementation challenges” around a fundamentally correct model. They indicate model error: a repeated assumption that formal institutions were becoming the primary arena of governance, when in many domains they remained secondary or instrumental.
Governance blind spots created by ignoring legacy systems
The blank-slate approach produced predictable blind spots because it began with the visible state and worked outward, rather than beginning with real authority and working inward.
The first blind spot was to equate state presence with bureaucratic form. In a low-infrastructure setting, administrative presence is often mediated. When only a small proportion of roads are paved and electricity access is minimal, the state’s ability to project routine administration is constrained, and intermediaries become the practical governors. Programmes that treat central ministries as the main vehicle of governance can unintentionally overestimate reach and underestimate brokerage. [World Bank Macro Poverty Outlook: South Sudan]
The second blind spot was to treat corruption as a deviation rather than as a governing mechanism. The OHCHR Commission’s framing is not of petty leakage around otherwise functional institutions, but of structural schemes and politically connected contracting that systematically divert resources away from service delivery. In such contexts, anti-corruption “solutions” that rely on formal compliance mechanisms can become decorative: they improve the appearance of governance without changing incentives in the revenue-distribution system. [OHCHR A/HRC/60/CRP.5, 2025]
The third blind spot concerned justice and legitimacy. Where customary systems are central to dispute resolution, rule-of-law efforts confined to statutory courts risk missing the arena where order is actually produced. This is particularly significant in disputes over land, boundaries, and compensation—issues that can quickly become politically charged. Treating customary authority as a “traditional sector” rather than as part of the governing system creates a mismatch between what is reformed and what is used. [RVI—Making Order Out of Disorder, 2019]
The fourth blind spot was to understate macroeconomic fragility as a governance driver. South Sudan’s poverty and inflation dynamics have not been mere symptoms; they shape state legitimacy and the bargaining environment. A World Bank Poverty & Equity Brief reports 93 per cent multidimensional poverty (2022) and notes a sharp inflation acceleration in its recent nowcast framing (from 18 per cent in 2023 to 183 per cent in 2025). In such conditions, the politics of salary payment, cash availability, and local price stability become governance issues in their own right. [World Bank Poverty & Equity Brief: South Sudan, Oct 2025]
The fifth blind spot was to overinvest in institutional milestones and underinvest in institutional incentives. Elections, commissions, and reform plans can be valuable, but they do not automatically reorder enforcement. In a political marketplace environment, formal milestones can function as bargaining chips rather than as binding commitments. The LSE political marketplace study is explicit that there is no simple state-building template for the country’s security arena, because the arena is shaped by bargaining dynamics that resist technocratic sequencing. [LSE/CRP—The Security Arena in South Sudan, 2019]
None of this implies inevitability, nor does it deny agency. It suggests that governance interventions should have been designed with continuity in view: the persistence of rent-financed bargaining, hybrid authority, and corridor dependence.
What institutional archaeology should have preceded state-building
“Institutional archaeology” is a disciplined reconstruction of the institutions that already govern: not merely in law, but in practice. It is less an academic exercise than an operational prerequisite. It begins with a simple proposition: if the objective is to change governance outcomes, the first task is to identify what currently produces those outcomes.
Five areas should have been excavated systematically before major institutional design was attempted.
First, an authority map rather than an organogram. Formal ministries reveal administrative intent; they do not reveal enforcement. An authority map would have traced who can compel compliance, who settles disputes, who controls movement, and who mediates access—at national and sub-national level. This is not speculative. The presence and alignment of armed actors and local authorities can be mapped, and the Small Arms Survey’s conflict and actor mapping work illustrates how such analysis can be structured. [Small Arms Survey—MAAPSS/HSBA]
Secondly, a revenue map in three layers. Standard public financial management assessments focus on the budget. In South Sudan, the material question is how much of the governing system sits outside the budget, and through what mechanisms. The OHCHR Commission’s emphasis on off-budget schemes and opaque contracting indicates that any reform strategy that begins and ends with budget mechanics risks irrelevance. A layered revenue map would have incorporated formal revenue, shadow arrangements, and the humanitarian economy. [OHCHR A/HRC/60/CRP.5, 2025]
Thirdly, the security arena treated as a marketplace. Traditional security sector reform assumes an end-state of unified, civilian-controlled forces. The political marketplace framing begins with current incentives: the price of loyalty, the mechanisms of promotion and payment, and the points at which violence becomes a bargaining tool. That approach does not excuse fragmentation; it clarifies how fragmentation is sustained and what would be required to change it. [LSE/CRP—The Security Arena in South Sudan, 2019]
Fourthly, customary authority treated as core infrastructure. If chiefs’ courts are central to local order, reform should have begun with a practical integration plan: delineating jurisdiction, improving procedural protections, establishing referral pathways, and reducing incentives for monetised coercion. This is not an endorsement of all customary outcomes; it is a recognition that state legitimacy is produced through systems people use. [RVI—Making Order Out of Disorder, 2019]
Fifthly, external dependency stress-testing. A state whose revenues depend on a single export corridor is structurally exposed. The IMF’s description of the 2024–2025 pipeline disruption is an example of how quickly fiscal and foreign exchange capacity can be suspended. Institutional design should have been stress-tested against such shocks: what happens to salaries, security payments, and sub-national transfers when the corridor fails, and what political bargains follow. [IMF Press Release PR 25/200, June 2025]
Institutional archaeology would not have produced a neat plan. It would have produced a sober one: a programme built around incentives, enforcement realities, and the slow work of changing how resources and coercion are organised.
The longer-horizon implication
South Sudan is often analysed through the episodic lens of crisis: outbreaks of violence, stalled transitions, and humanitarian emergencies. The more consistent story is institutional continuity. Independence created international legitimacy and formal governmental apparatus, but the underlying allocation systems—armed bargaining, patronage distribution, customary mediation, and rent dependence—continued to structure outcomes. That continuity is not a counsel of despair. It is a counsel of accuracy.
An OECD fragility framing is helpful here: fragility is not simply low income or institutional weakness; it is a condition in which political, economic, and security risks interact and reinforce one another over time. South Sudan’s governance challenge sits precisely in that interaction. [OECD States of Fragility 2025]
The policy conclusion is therefore plain. Treating South Sudan as a blank slate encouraged the international community to build for an imagined state—one funded by taxes, enforced through unified institutions, and legitimated through formal service delivery. South Sudan’s actual state has been closer to a negotiated order financed by concentrated rents, mediated by local authority, and stabilised through bargaining in the security arena. Policies built on the wrong state model will continue to miss the binding constraints.
South Sudan did not need romanticisation, nor did it need punitive scepticism. It needed a prior act of institutional recognition: an excavation of how authority and revenue actually functioned, and how they had functioned for decades. Without that, reforms became attempts to paint over a load-bearing structure whose materials were never inspected.
