Humanitarian Governance in Retreat: Civilian Perceptions of UNMISS Field Office Closures in South Sudan
Supervised by: Dr. Lynda Iroulo, Department of Government, Georgetown University in Qatar
Background
Peacekeeping is normally evaluated through institutional measures: mandates, troop numbers, casualty reduction, or official reports. While these measures are important, they do not always capture how peacekeeping is experienced by the people it is meant to protect.
In South Sudan, UNMISS has played a major role in civilian protection, human rights monitoring, and support for humanitarian access since the country’s independence and especially after the outbreak of civil war in 2013. For many communities, the physical presence of UNMISS field offices has carried both practical and symbolic importance. These offices can represent protection, reassurance, international attention, and a sense that someone is watching when insecurity rises.
As UNMISS reduces or closes some of its field offices, an important question emerges: do local communities understand these closures as signs of improved stability and government self-reliance, or as a reduction in protection and international presence?
Outline
My research will focus on civilian perceptions of UNMISS field office closures in Aweil and Torit. Through remote, semi-structured interviews and analysis of UN reports, humanitarian updates, and local media sources, I will examine how people connected to these communities describe the meaning and consequences of the withdrawal of peacekeeping forces.
The project will explore themes such as safety, reassurance, deterrence, trust, predictability, accountability, and perceptions of government responsibility. Rather than treating peacekeeping withdrawal only as an institutional or logistical decision, the research asks how withdrawal is lived, interpreted, and discussed by communities themselves.
The central research question guiding the project is:
How do local communities perceive UNMISS field office closures in Aweil and Torit, and how do these perceptions complicate traditional measures of peacekeeping effectiveness?
Impact
This project is both personal and scholarly. As someone from South Sudan who has lived through displacement, I understand that security is not only a policy term. It is something people feel in daily life, whether they feel safe moving through town, sending children to school, speaking openly, or trusting that someone will respond when violence returns.
Scholarly, I hope this research contributes to a more people-centered understanding of peacekeeping effectiveness. If peacekeeping is meant to protect civilians, then civilian perceptions should not be treated as secondary evidence. They should be central to how we evaluate whether a mission has truly succeeded.
Through this project, I hope to show that the meaning of peacekeeping withdrawal cannot be fully understood from above. It must also be understood from the perspective of the communities that live with the consequences.