10 Important Landlocked Countries: Capitals, Geography & UNCLOS Facts
A landlocked country is a sovereign nation that does not possess direct territorial access to the open oceans or whose coastlines lie exclusively along endorheic inland seas that lack maritime outlets to the global ocean. In contemporary global political geography, there are forty-four universally recognized sovereign landlocked states. Being landlocked presents substantial macroeconomic, infrastructural, and geopolitical challenges: landlocked countries must rely on bilateral transit treaties with neighboring coastal transit states to export commodities, transport bulk freight, and participate in seaborne trade, which often inflates international freight shipping costs by over fifty percent.
Among the world's landlocked nations, Kazakhstan, with its capital at Astana, ranks as the largest by land area, spanning more than 2.72 million square kilometers in Central Asia. Mongolia, with its capital at Ulaanbaatar, represents the second-largest landlocked nation, positioned as a vast plateau buffer between Russia and China. In Europe, Switzerland (capital: Bern) and Austria (capital: Vienna) demonstrate how high-income industrialized nations leverage advanced alpine rail transit, inland waterways like the Danube, and diplomatic treaties to overcome geographical landlockedness. In South America, Bolivia (constitutional capital: Sucre, administrative seat: La Paz) and Paraguay (capital: Asunción) are the continent's only two landlocked states, with Bolivia having lost its Pacific coastline to Chile in the nineteenth-century War of the Pacific.
In Africa, Ethiopia (capital: Addis Ababa) stands as the world's most populous landlocked nation, housing over 120 million people and depending on the port of Djibouti for the vast majority of its international shipping. In South Asia, the Himalayan nations of Nepal (capital: Kathmandu) and Bhutan (capital: Thimphu) maintain essential transit agreements with India to access deep-water ports at Kolkata and Haldia. In addition, geography features two "doubly landlocked" countries—Liechtenstein (capital: Vaduz) and Uzbekistan (capital: Tashkent)—which are surrounded entirely by other landlocked countries. Under Part X of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), landlocked states are granted the legal right of freedom of transit to ensure equitable participation in global commerce.