South Sudan became independent from Sudan in July 2011 following a 2005 peace agreement and a near-unanimous 2011 referendum, but the disputed, oil-producing Abyei border area was left unresolved, with a promised referendum there never held. In December 2013, a political and military split between President Salva Kiir (Dinka) and former Vice President Riek Machar (Nuer) escalated into a civil war marked by ethnically targeted violence; a 2018 peace deal and unity government only partially stemmed the fighting. The war displaced roughly 4 million people, including about 2.2 million refugees in Uganda, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya and elsewhere and 1.8 million internally displaced, with death toll estimates ranging from about 190,000 to 380,000. A UN Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan documented widespread atrocities, including ethnically targeted killings and sexual violence, by multiple armed actors.
South Sudan seceded from Sudan in 2011 after a referendum; a 2013 power struggle between President Salva Kiir and former Vice President Riek Machar's forces triggered a civil war fought largely along ethnic lines
The 2008 Sudanese census counted 8.26 million people in the southern states, a figure the Juba authorities rejected as a substantial undercount; UN estimates put South Sudan at about 10.3-10.5 million at independence in 2011. At the peak of the civil war some 2.3 million people were refugees, chiefly in Uganda, Sudan and Ethiopia, and about 1.9 million were displaced internally, with roughly 200,000 sheltering in UN protection-of-civilians sites.
The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine's 2018 statistical study estimated roughly 383,000 excess deaths between December 2013 and April 2018 — widely reported as about 400,000 — of which around half, some 190,000, were violent deaths, the remainder attributable to disease and hunger caused by the conflict. The headline figure is frequently misquoted as the number of people 'killed', which the study's own decomposition does not support. More than 4 million people were displaced, about 2.5 million of them across borders.
The UN Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan and UNMISS documented ethnically targeted massacres such as the December 2013 killings of Nuer civilians in Juba and the 2014 Bentiu massacre of more than 400 people, conflict-related sexual violence used systematically, and the obstruction of aid and destruction of villages that drove the LSHTM-measured excess mortality.
S. Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan