The Fragile South Sudan: Exploring the Domestic Sources of National Interests for South Sudan’s Balanced Development

National interests related to states and thereby international relations. They were intermestic policy issues with foothold on domestic sources. Nevertheless, their orthodoxy was the prolonged link to foreign policy. In that respect, undefining national interests presented the central dilemma the study answered with extra transcendence. In the process. the objectives it pursued included defining national interests; exploring the domestic sources of national interests; interpreting upholding national interests; and explaining honoring national interests as essential avenues perceived to solve the persistent ferocity, underdevelopment and wretchedness bedeviling South Sudan's balanced development hitherto. The researcher employed interpretive mixed-method approach that integrated historical institutionalism and ethnographic designs. The type of data it used was qualitative data merged with a tint of quantitative data collected by techniques of observations, interviews, focus-group discussions and documentations. Further, the study critiqued the data by applying immanent-critique blended with hermeneutic technique. Critical social theory or the Frankfurt School, which frankly is a corpus of theories, offered a unique trait suitable to augment the researcher's conceptual framework. The study found nothing similar published in the knowledge space then. Thus, the study produced a niche of additional scientific knowledge. In the final analysis, by having explored national interests for South Sudan's balanced development; the researcher altered general attitudes at the national system-level and/or the national actor thus changed the approach to national choices. In practice, the study foresaw an incremental step-by-step statewide execution of the suggested recommendations thereof. For that reason, the thesis sought the legitimate indulgence of all prospective system-levels (citizenry. national, supranational and international) as units of analysis with vested interests in the political economy of South Sudan.