South Sudan’s Crisis: A UN Trusteeship or Joint Administration is Outlandish

Since mid-December, 2013, when the conflict started in South Sudan, several international experts and analysts have come up with a flurry of ideas on how to end the violence and chart a way forward for the bleeding nation. Some of these suggestions are outlandish or controversial and deserve contextual reviews or responses. Although there are several ideas, we would like to focus on the suggestions of UN Trusteeship and Joint Administration as possible mechanisms to bring stability to South Sudan. For a number of explanations we outline below, we argue that the international community should not be involved in South Sudan in a manner that either constitutes trusteeship or joint administration.