Corporate Deniability in a War Economy: Oil Majors, Contract Opacity, and Conflict Finance in South Sudan

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 Shleifer 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).