Violation of principles? How donors undermine SSR assistance: lessons from South Sudan

Security sector reform (SSR) has become a cornerstone of internationally supported peacebuilding in countries recovering from war. However, despite extensive support, its success has been limited. Scholarship on aid effectiveness attributes this to a lack of aid coordination, which arises from the politics of aid and donor proliferation. This paper argues that the coordination challenge in SSR also stems from operational practices within this field. Drawing on collective action theory and critiques of the development-security nexus, and using empirical evidence from South Sudan, the analysis demonstrates how coordination drivers in the new aid effectiveness framework under the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness: donor proliferation, shared understanding of coordination objectives, the demand for coordination, and credible commitment to coordination instruments, are undermined by operational practices and embedded incentive structures within the SSR assistance field. Delivering holistic SSR requires engaging an extended range of diverse actors, but on the ground dynamics: inter-agency competition, organizational mandates, and entrenched delivery networks, counter coordination efforts. By emphasizing donor-side operational practices, the paper contributes to a more nuanced understanding of coordination failures in SSR assistance beyond the politics of aid and donor proliferation argument. It illustrates how operational-level practices create structural conditions in which coordination mechanisms break down and openings for aid misuse by aid recipients emerge.