Oil-sector governance in South Sudan reveals how corporate practices, opaque contracting, and soft-law human-rights standards intersect with state predation and conflict financing. Focusing on South Sudanese oil operations—with comparative reference to Angola, Chad, and Nigeria—this study explores how corporate deniability within conflict-linked extraction has shaped political order from the post-Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) settlement through the post-2013 conflict period. The analysis combines insights from corporate governance theory, business and human rights, and the political economy of extractive industries. It is grounded in a research design that integrates close reading of corporate and contract documents, interpretive use of sustainability reporting and human-rights frameworks, and cross-case comparison within extractive governance contexts. The central argument is that the dynamics observed are not reducible to discrete policy failures or episodic crises. Instead, they are sustained through interconnected institutional and political mechanisms that progressively reshape incentives, authority, and control over resources. These mechanisms enable forms of corporate deniability that diffuse responsibility while reinforcing patterns of predation and conflict finance. The study traces how such processes operate in practice, the variation they generate across cases, and why reform initiatives that overlook the underlying political settlement tend to produce limited or short-lived outcomes. By bringing together conceptual insights and comparative evidence, the article offers both a theoretical synthesis and an empirically grounded interpretation of the South Sudan case. Its broader implication is that meaningful reform requires more than technical fixes: it d