• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

What’s The World’s Newest Country?

April 28, 2025 by Deborah Bloomfield

It’s easy to think of countries as having been around for a long time, but many of the world’s nations are yet to have even reached 100. In fact, the youngest that’s most widely recognized, South Sudan, is only just about to turn 14 – but it might soon lose its title for “world’s newest country”.

The newest country in the world…

South Sudan – officially known as the Republic of South Sudan – became a country on July 9, 2011, seceding from Sudan after a referendum in January of the same year. That vote saw 99 percent of South Sudanese people polled voting for independence from the north.

At that point, the young republic became a landlocked nation approximately 644,329 square kilometers (248,777 square miles) in size, just a smidge (about 50,000 square kilometers) smaller than Texas. It’s bordered by Sudan to the north (with a border region known as the Abeyi Area claimed by both), Ethiopia to the east, Kenya, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the south, and the Central African Republic to the West.

South Sudan is also young not just in its age as an independent state, but in terms of its population. The country is home to around 12,703,714 people, the average age of whom is just 18.7 years old. In fact, just over 42 percent of the South Sudanese population is under the age of 14; in comparison, only 18 percent of the US population sits within that same age bracket.

…but for how long?

While South Sudan is currently the newest country in the world, it might soon have that title taken away from it by a place nearly 14,000 kilometers (8,700 miles) away: Bougainville.

Officially known as the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, this region is currently still part of Papua New Guinea, an island country in the Pacific Ocean that itself only became independent in 1975. Activists attempted to declare Bougainville an independent nation at the same time, but were unsuccessful in gaining recognition.

Conflict then arose in the late 1980s between the Bougainville Revolutionary Army and the Papua New Guinea Defence Force over the operation of the large Panguna copper mine, later escalating into a full-blown civil war. An estimated 15,000 to 20,000 were killed during the conflict, which eventually came to an end with the signing of the Bougainville Peace Agreement in 2001.

As part of that deal, Bougainville was to establish an autonomous government, and later a referendum on independence. That referendum finally took place in 2019 – and nearly 98 percent of Bougainvilleans voted “yes” for independence.

However, Bougainville is yet to become its own nation. The earliest time it could happen, according to an agreement between the leaders of Bougainville and Papua New Guinea, is this year, and the latest, 2027. Exactly when independence will happen – and what it’ll look like when it does – is still very much on the table.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Garcia jumps back into action after Ryder Cup letdown
  2. NASA’s Artemis I Will Make History This Weekend – Here’s How To Watch Live
  3. 1.2-Million-Year-Old Obsidian Axe Factory Found In Ethiopia
  4. Nuclear Football: Who Actually Has The Nuclear Launch Codes?

Source Link: What’s The World’s Newest Country?

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • What Alternatives Are There To The Big Bang Model?
  • Magnetic Flip Seen Around First Photographed Black Hole Pushes “Models To The Limit”
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version