Play as · WW3 2026 · L1 · Newest State · Oil-Dependent
South Sudan - 2026
South Sudan is the world's newest sovereign state - independent in July 2011 after the post-2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement and the 2011 secession referendum that produced 99% support - and the country whose post-2013 civil war between Salva Kiir Mayardit's Sudan People's Liberation Movement-In-Government (SPLM-IG) and Riek Machar's Sudan People's Liberation Movement-In-Opposition (SPLM-IO) was substantively ended by the 2018 Revitalised Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in South Sudan, with continuing implementation challenges. Population about 11M, GDP around $20B PPP. The strategic identity is the world's newest state in active reconstruction with the Sudan-civil-war disruption pressing - South Sudan's oil exports run through the South Sudan-Sudan pipeline to Port Sudan, the post-April-2023 Sudan civil war has substantially disrupted the pipeline operations, and the entire post-2018 peace-agreement implementation has been compressed by the resulting fiscal-and-economic pressure.
Starting position
The South Sudan People's Defence Forces are about 185,000 active personnel - substantially expanded across the post-2018 unified-army integration that has been a continuous implementation challenge for the peace agreement, with the historical SPLM-IG, SPLM-IO, and various other-armed-group elements being progressively merged. Equipment is mixed and aged. The United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) maintains about 17,000 personnel under the continuing mandate that has been periodically renewed since 2011. The post-April-2023 Sudan civil war pipeline disruption has compressed the oil-export revenue that funds approximately 90% of the South Sudan government budget, producing a continuing fiscal crisis that has interacted with the peace-agreement implementation requirements (financing for the unified army, the constitutional process, the elections preparation).
What turns the campaign
What South Sudan under Kiir-Machar wants is the Revitalised Agreement implementation completed at the operational scale the timeline has progressively extended for, the elections (postponed from 2024 to December 2026 under the most recent extension) actually held on the new timeline, the oil-pipeline operations restored at the scale that the Sudan-civil-war environment will permit (the SAF-RSF dynamic on the pipeline-route territory has been variable), the UNMISS continuation through the next mandate cycles preserved, and the regional-cooperation through the East African Community and IGAD frameworks deepened against the periodic stress that the implementation challenges have produced. What South Sudan fears is a renewed civil-war outbreak if the Kiir-Machar political settlement breaks down, a Sudan-civil-war pipeline disruption that exceeds the current degraded operational level and produces a fiscal collapse, and a UNMISS withdrawal that removes the residual peace-agreement-enforcement capacity.
Signature challenge
The newest state, still building
South Sudan's central strategic problem is that the post-2011 state-building project has been continuously compressed by the post-2013 civil war, the post-2018 peace-agreement implementation challenges, the post-2023 Sudan-civil-war fiscal-and-economic disruption, and the persistent inter-communal violence patterns that no political-institutional configuration has substantively addressed. The world's newest state has had less time to consolidate institutional capacity than any of its African comparators, and the consolidation work has been progressively interrupted. NationFall surfaces this as the South Sudan campaign's defining tension: a state whose entire institutional-political-economic architecture is being constructed in real time against external-and-internal disruptions that the institutional capacity is stretched to address, in a regional environment where the comparator post-conflict reconstruction trajectories have demonstrated how decades-long the work actually is.
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