Beyond Humanitarian Relief: Building a Rights-Based Social Protection System in Post-Conflict South Sudan

South Sudan's humanitarian crisis has generated one of the most urgent policy questions in contemporary African social development: how can a country still facing conflict, displacement, flooding, food insecurity and weak public institutions move beyond repeated emergency relief toward a predictable, accountable and rights-based social protection system? This article argues that humanitarian assistance remains indispensable in South Sudan, but that relief alone cannot constitute a durable social contract. A rights-based system would treat social protection not as charity, project benefit or political favour, but as an enforceable public guarantee grounded in human dignity, non-discrimination, progressive realisation and citizen participation. Using a qualitative policy-analysis approach, the article synthesises international human rights standards, social protection floor theory, transformative social protection literature and post-conflict governance debates to design a practical framework for South Sudan. The proposed model contains five pillars: a legal entitlement framework, a minimum social protection floor, a unified but privacy-protective social registry, decentralised delivery with grievance redress, and a financing compact that combines domestic budgetary commitment with predictable donor transition support. The article further proposes shock-responsive top-ups, community validation, gender-sensitive design, disability inclusion and routine social accountability as necessary safeguards against exclusion, elite capture and dependency. It concludes that the future of social protection in South Sudan depends not on replacing humanitarian actors overnight, but on converting fragmented relief channels into a nationally owned system that protects rights during crisis