UNMISS

South Sudan's Security Council file runs on a single, repeatedly renewed instrument: the Revitalized Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in the Republic of South Sudan, signed in September 2018 under IGAD mediation after an earlier 2015 peace deal collapsed within two years of a 2013 civil war.

Kenya's own statements, delivered first through the A3+1 coalition with Niger, Tunisia, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and later through the A3 with Gabon and Ghana, track that agreement's implementation almost benchmark by benchmark across 2021 and 2022: the formation of a Reconstituted Transitional Government, the graduation of a unified national army meant to replace competing factional forces, a permanent constitution-making process, and a transitional period that Kenya's own December 2022 statement notes has just been extended by a further 24 months.

Two threads run underneath that steady, incremental narrative. The first is UNMISS's own founding mandate, established a single day after South Sudan's July 2011 independence: Kenya's statements repeatedly argue the mission should expand beyond civilian protection to again support state and institution building, and specifically that its four mandated tasks should expand to include direct technical assistance and capacity building for South Sudan's own institutions, a request the Council had still not granted by the end of Kenya's term.

The second is the arms embargo and targeted sanctions regime, which Kenya's statements argue outright are "counterproductive" and ask repeatedly to be lifted, in line with IGAD and African Union positions, a request the Council also declines each time it comes up for renewal.

That disagreement produced the one moment on this file where Kenya registered its dissent through an actual vote: in May 2022, Kenya abstained on the resolution renewing South Sudan's sanctions, explaining that it fell short of the lifting IGAD and the AU had called for. It is the only sanctions-renewal vote in this archive, across any file, where Kenya declined to vote yes.

A separate, open track ran through the UN Peacebuilding Commission, where Kenya engaged South Sudan directly on institution-building and cited its own bilateral Technical Assistance and Cooperation Programme, launched in 2007, as a concrete peacebuilding contribution distinct from the Council's own multilateral instruments. This is one of the clearest points in this archive where Kenya's statements draw on its own national programming, alongside collective mechanisms, to make an argument about peacebuilding.