INTRODUCTION

Sudan has always been a land of multiplicity, a crossroads of Africa and the Arab world, home to hundreds of ethnic communities and more than a hundred languages. For centuries, it has been a meeting place of trade, poetry, and memory. The very name Bilad al-Sudan once referred to a vast region of powerful kingdoms, but it also encoded racial hierarchies that shaped how Africa was imagined by Arab and European worlds.

Today, this historical complexity is flattened. This essay argues that Sudan’s catastrophic war is ignored not because it is unknowable, but because global media and political economies systematically deprioritise slow, African wars, producing a hierarchy of empathy in which neglect itself becomes a form of violence.

Today, the global imagination reduces Sudan to a headline of war, famine, and displacement. Since April 2023, more than eight million people have been forcibly displaced, making Sudan the world’s largest internal displacement crisis as of 2024, while thousands of civilian deaths have been recorded amid ongoing fighting (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 2024; ACLED, 2024). Yet coverage has largely been shaped by dominant Western and Arab media ecosystems whose editorial priorities mirror geopolitical interests and audience demand. Sudan’s people are among the forgotten, not because their suffering is invisible, but because it is inconvenient.

CONTEXT AND CONSEQUENCES

When South Sudan seceded in 2011, many international observers hailed it as a triumph of self-determination. In reality, the split exposed the fragility of Sudan’s nationhood, fractured by decades of war, marginalisation, and uneven development. The current conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces has devastated the country. Cities such as El Fasher and Nyala lie in ruins. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Early Warning Project, patterns of targeted ethnic violence, forced displacement, and starvation in Darfur and Kordofan display indicators consistent with an elevated risk of mass atrocities and possible genocide, as identified by international early-warning frameworks (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2024).

A HIERARCHY OF VICTIMS

Why does Sudan not move the world? Because the world has built a hierarchy of empathy. Conflicts in Europe or parts of the Middle East dominate front pages, while African wars receive sustained attention only when violence spikes dramatically. News does not merely reflect reality. It signals importance. Within that signal, Sudan consistently falls to the margins.

Western and Arab media alike reproduce this hierarchy. Sudanese journalists documented the 2011 revolution, the 2019 uprising, and the current war through citizen media, diaspora networks, and outlets such as Radio Dabanga and Ayin Network (Radio Dabanga, 2024; Ayin Network, 2024). Yet these accounts struggle to travel beyond regional or activist circles. Global attention remains uneven, shaped not only by suffering but by familiarity, framing, and geopolitical relevance.

COLONIAL INHERITANCE AND IMPERIAL CONTINUITY

This silence did not emerge in a vacuum. British colonial rule entrenched ethnic and regional hierarchies, governing through classification and division. While today’s war is primarily a struggle for political power between armed elites, violence against civilians still follows racialised and ethnicised patterns shaped by this inheritance. Colonial categories did not create the war, but they shaped how identity became a tool of domination, often obscuring governance failure, inequality, and foreign interference.

Sudan is not a forgotten periphery but a site of extractive interest. The Rapid Support Forces are sustained through regional networks tied to gold extraction and military patronage. The United Arab Emirates and Russia are directly entangled in the conflict through financing, arms flows, and commercial interests identified in reporting by United Nations expert panels (United Nations Security Council, 2024). These are material forms of involvement that actively sustain the war.

THE ECONOMICS OF ATTENTION

Behind this moral failure lies an economic one. Newsrooms operate within an attention economy shaped by algorithms that reward immediacy and spectacle rather than long, unresolved conflicts. Wars without clear endings or familiar narratives struggle to hold attention. Sudan, therefore, competes with conflicts that are easier to frame, easier to moralise, and easier to circulate digitally. Social media can elevate crises, but it can also entrench inequality when access, safety, and connectivity limit who can sustain visibility.

Sustainable journalism requires structural support. Grant-based crisis reporting from organisations such as the Pulitzer Centre or the Rory Peck Trust already supports journalists working on underreported crises and allows stories to be followed beyond the initial news cycle (Pulitzer Centre, 2024; Rory Peck Trust, 2024). Partnerships between international outlets and African universities can provide reporting residencies and editorial backing. Long-term collaboration with Sudanese outlets such as Radio Dabanga and Ayin Network would anchor coverage locally rather than episodically.

BREAKING THE CYCLE OF SILENCE

If silence is manufactured, it can also be dismantled. Media institutions shape moral attention. International organisations such as the BBC World Service, CNN International, Al Jazeera English, Reuters, and AFP should invest in sustained regional reporting rather than short parachute coverage. Transparency also matters. Large news organisations could publish data on regional coverage distribution to reveal how attention is allocated across conflicts. Regional institutions, including Arab and African media blocs, must also treat Sudan as a shared political crisis rather than a peripheral tragedy.

A MORAL RECKONING

Sudan is not a story of chaos, but of how neglect allows violence to grow. The states directly entangled in the conflict provide the resources that sustain the war. Western governments and global media are complicit in a different way. They are not intervening militarily, but silence, selective outrage, and strategic caution allow atrocities to continue without consequence.

Sudan does not need pity. It needs presence. The cost of silence is measured in lives buried beyond the news cycle.