South Sudan

You are the youngest country on Earth, and every institution a nation is supposed to already have — a currency people trust, a budget that isn't 90% dependent on one commodity, a border crossing that doesn't run through someone else's war — you have had to build from a standing start since July 2011, while also fighting, and then ending, and then holding, a civil war that ran from December 2013 to February 2018 and killed hundreds of thousands of your own people.

I want to write to you honestly, because your story does not need embellishing and it does not deserve minimizing either. The Revitalized Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict, signed in September 2018, produced a unity government and has — imperfectly, with repeated delays to its own timetable — held for over seven years. That is not nothing. It is the precondition for everything else in this letter.

Here is what a standard resource-curse narrative misses. Oil funds nearly all of your government's revenue, but it does not simply belong to you the way it belongs to a coastal producer — it leaves the country through a pipeline built in, and controlled from, Sudan, and when Sudan's own civil war damaged that pipeline's pumping infrastructure in 2024, your government went roughly nine months without enough revenue to pay its own civil servants. Few nations anywhere have their entire export economy hostage to a neighboring country's internal conflict this literally, and fewer still have kept functioning through it.

And beneath the oil story sits another one, verified only in 2024 and inscribed only this year: beneath the Boma and Badingilo landscapes, roughly six million white-eared kob, tiang, mongalla gazelle and bohor reedbuck move across nearly unimpeded plains in what researchers now confirm is the largest overland mammal migration on the planet — larger than the Serengeti's. It became your first UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2026, and, honestly, it was inscribed on the List of World Heritage in Danger in the same breath, because the guns that have not entirely gone quiet are also a threat to the herds. That is South Sudan in one fact: a wonder of the world, and a fragile one, in the same sentence.