Until the southern third of the country seceded in 2011, Sudan was the largest country in Africa, bordering nine states in north, east and central Africa. Even with the loss of South Sudan, it remains a land of diverse peoples and features. Politically, the country has gone through long stretches of military rule, broken by popular uprisings and replaced by a few years of messy democracy marked by partisan infighting and political paralysis. Since a 1989 coup, the government has been run by Islamists and military men, who have overseen the escalation and then the end of the north-south civil war, an oil-led economic boom (concentrated in Khartoum), the conflict in Darfur, social and political crackdowns on non-Islamists, the harboring of Osama Bin Laden in Sudan in the 1990s, the secession of South Sudan and subsequent economic crises, and the outbreak of war in South Kordofan and Blue Nile.

In 2005 the Khartoum-based governmentand southern rebels signed a peace agreement following half a century of on-and-off civil war that killed over 2 million and displaced millions more. The north and the south of Sudan, differentiated by religious and ethnic cleavages as well as climate and topography, were lumped into one state by the British when they granted independence in 1956. The illusion of unity ended with the 2011 secession.