South Sudan
The world's youngest nation, still fighting for stability more than a decade after independence — caught between oil wealth, elite violence, and recurring famine.
The world's youngest nation, still fighting for stability more than a decade after independence — caught between oil wealth, elite violence, and recurring famine.
South Sudan became the world's newest country in 2011, following a referendum in which nearly 99 percent of voters chose independence from Sudan. The jubilation did not last. A political rupture between President Salva Kiir and his former deputy Riek Machar plunged the country into a devastating civil war in 2013, which killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions more. A peace agreement signed in 2018 formally ended the conflict, but the conditions that produced it, ethnic mobilisation, competition over oil revenues, and a political class that has shown little interest in accountable governance, remain in place.
South Sudan sits on significant oil reserves, but those reserves have done little for ordinary South Sudanese. The oil infrastructure runs through Sudan, creating a dependency on a neighbour itself consumed by conflict. Revenue from oil has funded a bloated military and enriched political elites rather than building the roads, schools, and hospitals that a new state requires. Famine conditions have been declared repeatedly in parts of the country, with Jonglei, Unity, and Upper Nile states among the worst affected. The UN estimates that more than half the population is food insecure in any given year.
South Sudan is also a test case for international peace-building. The UN Mission in South Sudan is one of the largest and most expensive peacekeeping operations in the world. The results have been uneven at best. The country illustrates, more clearly than almost anywhere, the limits of international intervention in a conflict driven by elite political competition rather than ideology or territory alone.
How the world's youngest nation became trapped between competing armed factions, oil dependency, and one of the world's worst humanitarian emergencies.
A gold mine attack near Juba kills over 70. Horn Updates analyses the escalating pattern of resource-linked violence tearing through communities across the Horn.
Sudan's civil war has sent hundreds of thousands of refugees south. Amira Hassan examines the displacement crisis and how it compounds South Sudan's own instability.
Nairobi has long played a mediation role in South Sudan. How the Ruto government is approaching that role in 2026, and what it means for the peace process.