Forty-four sovereign countries are landlocked, meaning they have no coastline on an ocean or open sea. They divide into 16 in Africa, 14 in Europe, 12 in Asia and 2 in South America. North America, Oceania and Antarctica contain none, and two countries — Liechtenstein and Uzbekistan — are doubly landlocked, surrounded entirely by other landlocked states.
Counting to Forty-Four
The total is 44, but the figure is worth unpacking because it is sensitive to two judgement calls.
The first is what counts as a coastline. A country bordering a landlocked body of water is still landlocked in the sense that matters: Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan both have long shores on the Caspian Sea, but the Caspian connects to no ocean, so neither state can put a ship to sea without crossing another country's territory. By the same reasoning, countries on the Dead Sea or Lake Victoria gain nothing maritime from them. A country bordering the Black Sea, by contrast, is not landlocked, because the Bosporus and Dardanelles provide a route out — however politically fraught that route sometimes is.
The second is which entities count as sovereign states. The 44 figure covers UN member states plus Vatican City, which is a widely recognised observer state. Adding Kosovo, recognised by roughly half the world's countries, would make 45. Palestine has a Gaza coastline and so does not enter the question.
Landlocked states cover about 20 per cent of the world's land area and hold roughly 6 to 7 per cent of its population — a little under 500 million people.
Africa's Sixteen and the Straight-Line Problem
Africa holds more landlocked countries than any other continent: Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, the Central African Republic, Chad, Eswatini, Ethiopia, Lesotho, Malawi, Mali, Niger, Rwanda, South Sudan, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
The concentration is a direct legacy of the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 and the partition that followed. European powers drew boundaries to divide territory between themselves, not to give future states viable access to the sea. Because each colonial power controlled its own stretch of coast, interior territories were administered through a metropolitan port and had no need of their own. When independence arrived in the 1950s and 1960s, those administrative interiors became sovereign countries with the borders intact.
Two African states became landlocked much more recently, through secession rather than partition. Ethiopia had a Red Sea coast until Eritrea's independence in 1993 and, with a population above 120 million, is now by far the world's most populous landlocked country. South Sudan became landlocked at independence in 2011 and remains dependent on a single pipeline through Sudan to export the oil that supplies almost all of its government revenue — a chokepoint that has been closed by disputes more than once.
Chad shows the geographic version of the same problem: its nearest port, Douala in Cameroon, lies roughly 1,700 kilometres from N'Djamena over roads that deteriorate badly in the rainy season.
From the Alps to the Steppe: Europe and Asia
Europe's fourteen are Andorra, Austria, Belarus, Czechia, Hungary, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Moldova, North Macedonia, San Marino, Serbia, Slovakia, Switzerland, and Vatican City. They form a rough belt through the Alps and the Danube basin into the Balkans, and their landlocked status is the residue of centuries of dynastic boundary-drawing, not of colonial partition. Serbia is the newest: it lost its coast when Montenegro voted for independence in 2006.
What distinguishes Europe's group is that being landlocked has cost them almost nothing. The Rhine and Danube are navigable for large barges deep into the interior, the Rhine–Main–Danube Canal has linked the North Sea to the Black Sea since 1992, and the continent's rail and motorway density means no European capital is far from a port in practical terms. Rotterdam and Antwerp function as Switzerland's and Austria's ports in all but name, and Switzerland maintains its own merchant fleet registered in Basel on the Rhine.
Asia's twelve are Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bhutan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Mongolia, Nepal, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Five of them make up the whole of Central Asia, a bloc that is landlocked in a way Europe is not: the region sits thousands of kilometres from any ocean in every direction, with mountain ranges and deserts in between.
Kazakhstan is the largest landlocked country on Earth at 2.72 million square kilometres — bigger than Western Europe — and its export routes run either north through Russia or east through China, both of which are political as well as logistical decisions. Nepal and Bhutan are landlocked by the Himalayas on one side and India on the other, which makes India the effective gatekeeper for both; Nepal has experienced border blockades that halted fuel imports within days.
Bolivia, Paraguay and a War Over a Coastline
South America has exactly two landlocked countries, and one of them has spent 140 years trying to stop being one.
Bolivia lost its Pacific coastline — the mineral-rich Litoral department, including the port of Antofagasta — to Chile in the War of the Pacific, fought between 1879 and 1884 and formalised by the 1904 Treaty of Peace and Friendship. Bolivia has never accepted the loss as settled. It maintains a navy of several thousand personnel that patrols Lake Titicaca and the country's rivers, observes an annual Día del Mar on 23 March, and took its claim to the International Court of Justice, which ruled in 2018 that Chile is under no legal obligation to negotiate sovereign access. Chile grants Bolivia duty-free transit rights through Arica under the 1904 treaty, but transit is not sovereignty, and the dispute remains live.
Paraguay's situation is milder. It also lost territory in the catastrophic War of the Triple Alliance of 1864–70, but it retains navigable access down the Paraguay and Paraná rivers to the Río de la Plata, and it operates one of the largest barge fleets in the world by number of vessels. River access is not the same as a seaport, but it means Paraguay's soybean and beef exports reach the Atlantic without crossing a foreign land border.
Enclaved, Doubly Landlocked and Other Rare Cases
Two subcategories are worth knowing because they come up constantly in geography questions.
- Doubly landlocked — a landlocked country whose every neighbour is also landlocked, so you must cross at least two international borders to reach the sea. There are precisely two. Liechtenstein sits between Switzerland and Austria. Uzbekistan is bordered by Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan, all landlocked. Uzbekistan only entered this category in 1991; before the Soviet Union dissolved it had no landlocked neighbours because it had only one neighbour that was a separate country at all. The doubly landlocked countries are covered in more detail separately.
- Enclaved — surrounded entirely by a single country. Three qualify: Lesotho, encircled by South Africa; and San Marino and Vatican City, both encircled by Italy. An enclaved state's entire external trade passes through one neighbour, which is the most extreme form of dependence possible.
A few near-misses regularly cause arguments. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is often assumed to be landlocked but holds a 37-kilometre Atlantic frontage at the Congo River mouth, deliberately secured during the colonial period. Iraq has only about 58 kilometres of coast on the Persian Gulf. Bosnia and Herzegovina has roughly 20 kilometres at Neum, which splits Croatia's coast in two and prompted Croatia to build the Pelješac Bridge, opened in 2022, to bypass it.
Why Switzerland Thrives Where Chad Struggles
The economic penalty for being landlocked is real but wildly uneven, and comparing the two extremes shows what actually drives it.
Landlocked developing countries pay transport costs commonly estimated at 1.4 to 2 times those of comparable coastal economies, and shipments take substantially longer. But Switzerland, Austria and Luxembourg are among the wealthiest countries on Earth by GDP per capita. Botswana has run one of Africa's most stable economies for decades. Meanwhile Chad, Niger, the Central African Republic and Burundi rank near the bottom of every development index.
The difference is not distance to the sea; it is the quality of what lies between. Three factors dominate. First, the state of transit infrastructure — a Swiss container reaches Rotterdam on electrified rail, while a Chadian one crosses 1,700 kilometres of variable road. Second, the stability and cooperativeness of neighbours: Switzerland is surrounded by rich, peaceful trading partners, whereas Chad's neighbours include Libya and Sudan. Third, the composition of exports. Landlocking penalises heavy, low-value bulk goods most severely; Switzerland exports pharmaceuticals, precision instruments and financial services, which are light or weightless, while Zambia exports copper, for which freight is a large share of delivered cost.
Mongolia illustrates the trap precisely: vast mineral wealth, two neighbours, and coal that must travel roughly 1,700 kilometres to a Chinese port before it earns anything.
Transit Rights, Dry Ports and the Awaza Decade
International law does provide for this. Part X of the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, principally Article 125, grants landlocked states a right of access to and from the sea and freedom of transit through neighbouring territory. Landlocked states may also register ships and fly a maritime flag — which is why Mongolia and Bolivia both maintain ship registries. In practice the right of transit is exercised through bilateral agreements, and its value depends entirely on the transit state's willingness to honour them.
The United Nations classifies 32 of the 44 as Landlocked Developing Countries, a formal category with its own support programme. The Vienna Programme of Action ran from 2014 to 2024 and has been succeeded by the Awaza Programme of Action for 2024–2034, adopted by the General Assembly in December 2024 and endorsed at the Third UN Conference on Landlocked Developing Countries held in Awaza, Turkmenistan, in August 2025. Its priorities are trade facilitation, transport connectivity, structural economic transformation and climate resilience.
The practical instruments are more prosaic: inland "dry ports" with customs clearance so containers move sealed to the coast, single-window border systems, and corridor agreements such as the Northern Corridor from Mombasa to Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. China's Belt and Road rail links have measurably shortened Central Asian routes to European markets. None of it removes the geographic disadvantage, but it does show that landlocking is a cost to be managed rather than a destiny — a point worth keeping in mind alongside the world's smallest countries, several of which are landlocked and none the poorer for it.
