South Sudan

The territory of present-day South Sudan was inhabited from antiquity by Nilotic peoples whose descendants, principally the Dinka, Nuer, and Shilluk, remain the largest communities in the country. From roughly the sixteenth century the Shilluk Kingdom emerged along the White Nile under a sacred king known as the reth, while neighbouring Dinka and Nuer societies organised themselves through segmentary lineages and prophetic religious leaders rather than centralised states. To the southwest, the Azande extended influence into the Nile-Congo watershed, and small Funj and Sennar tributary networks touched the northern fringes. Trade in ivory, cattle, and, increasingly, captives linked the region to the Sahel and the Red Sea long before European maps named it.

Egyptian expansion under Muhammad Ali in the 1820s drew the southern Nile basin into the Turco-Egyptian Sudan, and during the 1860s and 1870s the Khedive's officials, including Samuel Baker and Charles Gordon, attempted to establish the Equatoria province around Gondokoro and Lado. The Mahdist uprising of the 1880s briefly displaced this administration, but in 1899 the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium reasserted control over the entire Sudan. British administrators governed the southern provinces separately under the so-called Southern Policy from 1930, restricting northern Arab and Muslim influence, encouraging Christian missions, and effectively orienting the south toward East Africa rather than Khartoum. This separation was abruptly reversed at the 1947 Juba Conference, which folded the south into a unified Sudan in preparation for independence.

When Sudan became independent on 1 January 1956, southern grievances over political marginalisation and the Arabisation of administration had already ignited the Anyanya rebellion, conventionally dated from the Torit mutiny of August 1955. The First Sudanese Civil War ended with the 1972 Addis Ababa Agreement, which granted the Southern Region limited autonomy under President Jaafar Nimeiri. That settlement collapsed when Nimeiri redivided the south in 1983 and extended sharia law nationally, prompting John Garang to found the Sudan People's Liberation Movement and Army (SPLM/A) and triggering the Second Sudanese Civil War. The conflict, entangled with famine, Cold War proxy interests, and oil discoveries in the Upper Nile, killed an estimated two million people and displaced millions more before the Comprehensive Peace Agreement of January 2005.

Under that agreement the south governed itself as the semi-autonomous Government of Southern Sudan, led after Garang's death later in 2005 by Salva Kiir Mayardit. A referendum held in January 2011 produced an overwhelming vote for separation, and on 9 July 2011 the Republic of South Sudan declared independence, becoming the 193rd member state of the United Nations and joining the African Union shortly after. A dispute with Sudan over the Abyei area and the precise alignment of the border remained unresolved at independence and continues to be addressed through African Union mediation.

In December 2013 a political rupture between President Kiir and former Vice President Riek Machar precipitated a civil war that drew in regional actors and produced successive peace efforts, culminating in the 2018 Revitalised Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict. A Revitalised Transitional Government of National Unity was inaugurated in February 2020 and its mandate has since been extended while preparations for the country's first national elections continue. South Sudan today is a presidential republic with a transitional bicameral legislature, organised into ten states and three administrative areas, with executive authority concentrated in the presidency.