When the mission in South Sudan was first set up in 2011, the impulse behind it was essentially to do a state-building project. In 2013, the civil war that broke out between the president and the vice-president essentially closed off a lot of the space for the kind of process we were doing. Then we had to change our posture to a certain extent away from the focusing on this state building and much more on reconciliation between these two sides and the protection of civilians.
Over time, several years into this civil war, there wasn't a very clear political track or role for the UN to actually broker that. We kind of had to make it up. We had an office in Addis trying to broker a deal. My understanding there is that the traditional peacekeeping set-up—where you have an agreement and the peacekeepers are deployed to oversee the agreement—wasn't there. We were already there on the ground, and then the civil war broke out. It was a kind of non-traditional peacekeeping setting where there wasn't much of a political entry point for the UN at the time.