South Sudan

South Sudan is a landlocked country in East Africa bordered by Sudan to the north, Ethiopia to the east, Kenya to the southeast, Uganda to the south, the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the southwest and the Central African Republic to the west, covering 644,329 square kilometers of plains and plateaus, dry and tropical savannahs, inland floodplains and forested mountains, dominated at its center by the Sudd, one of the world's largest swamps, and defined by the Nile River system. Juba is its capital and largest city, and its population was about 12.7 million in 2024, mostly Nilotic peoples with roughly half the population under 18 years old and a majority Christian or following traditional faiths, with a Muslim minority. South Sudan became an independent state on 9 July 2011, after a referendum in which 98.8 percent of voters supported independence, making it the most recently created sovereign state as of 2026; the country descended into civil war from 2013 to 2020, with an estimated 400,000 deaths, before a peace agreement restored a coalition government. It is governed today as a federal presidential republic under a Transitional Constitution, with Salva Kiir Mayardit as president and Riek Machar as first vice president, and ranks among the least developed countries in the world by Human Development Index.