Corporate Deniability in South Sudan's War Economy

[John Ashworth]

Attached please find an article by Abraham Kuol Nyuon entitled
"Corporate Deniability in a War Economy: Oil Majors, Contract Opacity,
and Conflict Finance in South Sudan", African Corporate Governance Law
(Law/Business crossover), Vol. 1 No. 1 (2023).

Abstract

This article examines how oil-company governance, contract opacity,
and soft-law human-rights standards interact with state predation and
conflict finance in South Sudan in South Sudanese oil operations with
comparative references to Angola, Chad, and Nigeria. It asks how
corporate deniability under conflict extraction structures political
order during the post-CPA oil settlement through the post-2013
conflict period, combining corporate governance theory, business and
human rights, and the political economy of extractive industries with
a research design centred on analysis of corporate and contract
documents, interpretive use of sustainability reporting and
business-human-rights frameworks, and comparison across
extractive-governance cases. The central argument is that the issue
under study is not best explained as a discrete policy failure or a
short-lived crisis. Rather, it is reproduced through linked
institutional and political mechanisms that reshape incentives,
authority, and access to resources over time (Jensen & Meckling, 1976;
Shleifer & Vishny, 1997) (Ruggie, 2013; United Nations, 2011). Across
the paper, the analysis tracks how these mechanisms operate in
practice, what variation they generate, and why reform agendas that
ignore the underlying political settlement rarely succeed. The article
therefore contributes both a conceptual synthesis and a grounded
comparative interpretation of the focal case. Its wider implication is
that durable reform requires institutional redesign, political
bargaining, and accountability strategies capable of reaching the real
sites where power is exercised (Karl, 1997; Ross, 2012) (Global
Witness, 2018; NRGI, 2023).

https://parj.africa/ajls_corpgovl/article/view/corporate-deniability-in-a-war-economy-oil-majors-contract-opa-2

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