Why, I wondered, should the nationalities of these forces matter in the face of questions of legal accountability? If UNMISS’s goal was to build a state, and if the rule of law is essential to that project, then how can individual UN agents be legally immune from the consequences of their actions? The claim seemed to be that these agents’ citizenship—and their status of employment—put the rule of law in abeyance. I could not abide this contradiction, given the UN’s preaching about the necessity of state-building. Nor does the hypocrisy end there. How, I wondered, could the International
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