As consumers of modern news and social media, we are inundated by conflict — bleak descriptions of drone attacks in Ukraine, such as the recent September 28 attacks on Kyiv, or mass civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip as Israel continues its aerial bombardment this week, are plastered across Western publications. These geopolitical conflicts are rooted in cultural significance; they feature human rights abuses and types of asymmetric warfare that undoubtedly warrant our continued attention.
There is, however, a particular myopia in the West regarding certain conflicts. In the media, humanitarian organizations, and during world summits, there is often a neglect of the conflicts within the Global South. A lack of attention and discussion with tangible policy impacts. Ask yourself, how many headlines have you seen about Ukraine or Gaza? Now think about how much you’ve seen about the fighting between rebel groups and the army in Sudan’s civil war, which is considered the worst displacement crisis globally according to the UN Refugee Agency’s June 2025 report. Or how much is reported about Yemen’s continued strife and humanitarian crisis? Even after U.S. bombardment ceased following a peace agreement in 2022, where fighting in Yemen largely died down, 18.2 million people still require humanitarian aid, according to Human Rights Watch. The M23 conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), or the continued Taliban political violence in Afghanistan, also represent conflicts that go largely ignored by mainstream media.
American, Canadian, and European media tend to bias Western, and fiscally or culturally Western-aligned, conflicts in their coverage. The self-centred bent of Western media doesn’t just have intellectual ramifications. These culturally produced biases affect lobbying in the UN General Assembly, the provision of foreign aid, and global infrastructural funding. The endemic ignorance of Global South conflicts has tangible, fiscal impacts on nations that lack the benefits of regional hegemonic power balancing, seen when large superpowers seek to assert their regional dominance through proxy states. While we must be vigilant in our support of the publicized conflicts, they are not the sole battlegrounds of the world.
Sudan’s civil war is currently the world’s largest conflict in terms of displacement. The war between the nation’s military and a paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has caused 14.3 million Sudanese people to be forced to leave their homes between April 2023 and the end of 2024, according to the UNHCR. Meanwhile, the UNHCR calculates that 8.8 million have been displaced in Ukraine. This encompasses individuals who have relocated within and outside of Ukraine, since the war’s inception in 2022 through the end of 2024. Highlighting this is not to undermine the tremendous loss from the war in Ukraine, but rather to ask that, given the undeniable death toll of Sudan’s civil war, why do we see such limited coverage of the war and other similar Global South conflicts? A German study from news channel Tagesschau solidifies this perception, finding that over 5,500 broadcasts from 1996 to 2019 allocated roughly 10 per cent of their broadcast time to the Global South, despite the region representing 85 per cent of the world’s population.
This trend is not solely the result of locale or informational availability. The West’s blind spots result from a combination of the proximity of conflicts to Europe, the representation of peripheral violence as endemic, and whether conflicts reflect traditional forms of combat and violence or more covert, structural ones.
Perhaps the most significant reason for our media myopia is the commonly held perception that the Global South, particularly Sub-Saharan Africa, is doomed to continuous conflict and is thus not worth our collective attention. This “Afropessimism” demonstrates low readership within the West for issues that are not invested in relief efforts or international court rulings, such as violence in the Global South that is therefore seen as ever-present and thus immutable. Furthermore, Western media consumers are attracted to change, to sporadic developments and fast-paced reporting. As a result, the assumed unchanging state of “third world affairs” is not appealing to Western readership or publications
Currently, ensuing conflicts in the Global South often arise in more subtle ways than what was seen in Ukraine or other Western-aligned conflicts. Systemic and ongoing crises like the war in Sudan often involve structural political violence instead of “conventional warfare.” Sudan’s civil war has resulted in a mass forced migration and displacement. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) reported Sudan’s combat casualties at 28,700, a likely conservative figure, but still markedly lower than the military casualties in the Russia-Ukraine war, which the New York Times places at nearly 1.4 million troops. While there is undeniable extreme violence in the aforementioned Sub-Saharan conflicts, the lower casualty numbers but higher amounts of displacement reflect this generally slower means of political violence and subjugation. Ultimately, cultural, geographical, and structural factors coalesce in developing countries, failing to meet the West’s newsworthiness criteria.
Our collective negligence has tangible implications for foreign aid, International Criminal Court lobbying, and foreign policy in afflicted regions like the DRC, Sudan, and Yemen. This is because the media’s coverage does not just demonstrate Western- tinted understandings of interstate war, but these biases are reflected within the international judicial apparatus. Conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa continue to be chronically underfunded and under-discussed by UN relief organizations like the UNHCR or the UN’s Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF.) Public awareness of conflicts can be directly correlated to institutional advocacy, and while the UN creates special provisions for what it deems as “underfunded emergencies,” peripheral wars lack the general assembly lobbying and mass recognition required for fundamental and institutional change.
We don’t need to change the fervour of our support for the causes that fill today’s major headlines; we simply must diversify our attention. We must seek out global stories and uncover the overlooked crises. Moreover, we must encourage the same in our newspapers and the broader media. This isn’t just about empathy for those overlooked, but about the prospect of effective aid and meaningful diplomacy moving forward.