section_path: Background
section_name: Background
paragraph_text: Background
  
  Since gaining independence in 1956, Sudan has experienced 20 military coup attempts, the most of any African nation. Sudan has usually been ruled by the military, interspersed with short periods of democratic parliamentary rule.
  
  Two civil wars – the first from 1955 to 1972 and the second, 1983 to 2005 – between the central government and the southern regions, which led to the independence of South Sudan in 2011, killed 1.5 million people, and a conflict in the western region of Darfur displaced two million people and killed more than 200,000 others.