Mandate Without Protection: UN Peacekeeping, Command Fragmentation, and the Politics of Non-Intervention in South Sudan

This article develops mandate without protection as an analytical lens for understanding how civilian protection fails when mandates, command systems, and political incentives pull in different directions. Rather than treating the topic as a descriptive case note, the manuscript positions protection of civilians in un peacekeeping: mandate, capability, and the politics of non-intervention in south sudan within wider debates on African political order, state formation, and institutional design. The paper is anchored in South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Bosnia, and it uses the topic brief's theoretical architecture to ask three linked questions: how do troop-contributing country caveats, national interests, and command fragmentation within unmiss prevent a coordinated poc response even when civilian atrocities are occurring within range of deployed forces? What was the institutional failure sequence that produced UNMISS's non-response to the July 2016 Terrain Hotel attack and what does this case reveal about the systemic gap between POC mandate and mission capability and will? Under what conditions do UN Security Council political interests particularly P5 member state economic and strategic interests in South Sudan override the protection mandate? Methodologically, the article translates the proposed design into a publication-ready strategy built around archival analysis of unmiss force disposition records, roe documentation, and internal after-action reports; interviews with unmiss military and civilian leadership; comparative analysis with monusco's protection failure in kiwanja (2008) and unprofor in srebrenica (1995).. It argues that the central analytical payoff lies not only in better explanation of the South Sudanese or regional cases, but in