South Sudan
It’s not every day that a new country is created, but that’s what happened on July 9th 2011 when The Republic of South Sudan came into existence. The nation is so new that Google Maps doesn’t yet show it. However, it encompasses much of the southern part of Sudan, approximately delineated on the current map by the light/dark transition between different sets of satellite images.1 After decades of civil war, the southern region of Sudan first became autonomous in 1972. This lasted only 11 years until a second civil war broke out. A peace settlement in 2005 saw…