Sudan

The middle Nile valley that today forms Sudan was home to some of the earliest organised societies in Africa. From around 2500 BCE the kingdom of Kerma flourished in Nubia, trading with pharaonic Egypt and at times rivalling it. After a long period of Egyptian domination during the New Kingdom, indigenous rule revived under the Kushite kings of Napata, who in the eighth century BCE conquered Egypt itself and ruled as the Twenty-fifth Dynasty. The successor kingdom of Meroe, with its distinctive pyramids and ironworking tradition, persisted until roughly the fourth century CE, when it was eclipsed by the rising power of Aksum.

In the sixth century missionaries from Byzantium converted the post-Meroitic states of Nobatia, Makuria, and Alodia to Christianity, and these kingdoms held the southern frontier against the spread of Islam for several centuries. Makuria's accommodation with the early caliphates, the so-called baqt treaty, preserved a measure of independence until Arab migration and the rise of the Funj Sultanate of Sennar in the early sixteenth century brought the central riverine lands firmly into the Islamic world. Further west, the Sultanate of Darfur emerged as a powerful and long-lived state, surviving into the late nineteenth century. In 1820 and 1821 the armies of Muhammad Ali of Egypt invaded and absorbed the Funj domains, inaugurating the Turkiyya, a period of Turco-Egyptian administration based at the new town of Khartoum.

Egyptian rule provoked a millenarian revolt led by Muhammad Ahmad, who proclaimed himself the Mahdi in 1881; his followers captured Khartoum in 1885 and killed the Egyptian governor Charles Gordon, establishing a Mahdist state that lasted until its destruction by an Anglo-Egyptian force at Omdurman in 1898. The territory was then governed as the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, a condominium dominated in practice by Britain, which administered the largely Muslim north and the predominantly non-Muslim south as separate spheres. Sudan achieved independence on 1 January 1956, becoming a parliamentary republic with Khartoum as its capital.

Independent Sudan's politics were quickly destabilised by north-south tensions that had erupted into civil war in 1955. A first military coup in 1958 was followed by a brief democratic interlude and then by the regime of Jaafar Nimeiri from 1969 to 1985. The Addis Ababa Agreement of 1972 paused the southern conflict, but Nimeiri's introduction of sharia law in 1983 reignited it, beginning a second civil war led by John Garang's Sudan People's Liberation Movement. In 1989 Omar al-Bashir seized power in a coup backed by Islamist allies, presiding over decades of conflict that included a separate insurgency in Darfur from 2003 and the country's diplomatic isolation following the indictment of Bashir by the International Criminal Court.

The Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005 ended the southern war and led to a referendum in which South Sudan voted for independence, formally seceding on 9 July 2011. A popular uprising in 2018 and 2019 toppled Bashir, ushering in a fragile transitional arrangement under a civilian-military Sovereignty Council. That arrangement collapsed in October 2021 with a further military takeover, and in April 2023 fighting erupted between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, producing one of the world's largest displacement crises. Sudan today is constituted as a federal presidential republic, although effective authority is contested between rival military formations and competing governing claims.