The United States has long relied on its democratic primacy as the source of its international legitimacy. In the Second World War, it was the US commitment to a moral- democratic framing of foreign policy and its vehement opposition to fascism and autocracy that laid the groundwork for its future claims to liberal supremacy and its role as an international moral police. The Cold War additionally led to an increasingly bipolar balance that placed America at the helm of democratic ideals. While the US has consistently ranked lower on democracy indices than states like Australia, Canada, and the Nordic countries, its place of economic and cultural prominence made it the democratic archetype in the global political imagination.

The repression of civil society is one of the hallmarks of democratic backsliding. As national leaders seek to expand their domestic authority, they must first squash opposing movements, creating fertile ground for expansions in executive power and removing threats to their authority. Trump’s recent responses to anti-ICE protests in both Los Angeles and Minnesota reflect this brand of targeted repression. In June 2025, Trump deployed both National Guard and Marine Corps troops to Los Angeles and the surrounding area to combat the supposed “lawlessness” and “violence” demonstrated in protests. Similarly, the ongoing ICE involvement in Minnesota targeting undocumented US immigrants, involves swathes of heavily armed and masked federal officials who use crowd suppression techniques (like tear gas and pepper spray) and frequent arrests in their campaign. ICE’s presence in Minnesota has also resulted in the deaths of two American citizens this January: Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti. The timelines and public documentation of both killings call the administration’s claims of self- defense on behalf of ICE into question, failing to demonstrate a substantive threat to the lives of the agents. This use of an overwhelming militarized force to suppress protesters is typical of nations experiencing democratic backsliding and executive aggrandizement, the expansion of executive authority through a weakening of checks and balances. In Türkiye, a key example of democratic backsliding, the 2013 protests over the destruction of Gezi Park in Istanbul resulted in the brutal state repression of protesters where armed forces beat and tear gassed civil society, while also burning the tents of peaceful environmental protesters. This incident spurred even more protests throughout the nation’s 81 provinces, which only led to the continued state-sanctioned suppression. Examples of this in the United States and Türkiye bear eerie similarities. These instances involve an armed and violent militant response to a group of relatively peaceful protesters. Both anti-ICE and Gezi Park protests involved mass arrests, the deployment of riot police, and the use of tear gas. Despite these restrictions, both Türkiye and the US also have constitutional protections for civilian protest and assembly. Thus, the restrictions on protests in the two nations not only reflect a suppression of the popular will but a divergence from constitutional principles, another marker of democratic backsliding. While it can be assumed that executive authorities in both the United States and Türkiye would dispute the peaceful nature of the protests, human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and newspapers such as the New York Times assert the peaceful nature of each respective protest and the often-preemptive violent response by heavily armed authorities.

The infringement on constitutional and legal frameworks is another key step bringing a state down the road to democratic backsliding. As the judicial and legislative measures meant to protect citizens are undermined, the practice of democracy will also naturally fade. In El Salvador, a key ally of the US in the fight against immigration, the presidency of Nayib Bukele has been marred with concerns of increasing autocracy, including the suspension of habeas corpus within the Central American nation. In 2022, Bukele enacted a “state of exception” to combat gang violence in El Salvador. The campaign involved arbitrary detentions and due process violations, as well as torture allegations. Notably, Bukele allowed Salvadoran forces to enter and search properties without judicial warrants. This removal of democratic legal procedures is a key check on power as it allows for third-party review of coercive state behavior. The removal of checks and balances is a crucial characteristic of executive aggrandizement and is also central to autocratic regimes like Putinist Russia or theocratic Iran. A recent ICE memo, leaked from an anonymous Congress official, reveals a similar federal directive for agents in Minnesota. The memo authorizes ICE agents to search homes with an administrative warrant. These warrants do not have judicial approval and have a lesser probable cause requirement. While the distinction between a judicial and an administrative warrant may seem semantical, it is directly contrary to the US Constitution, America’s founding document, which protects against “unlawful search and seizure” and expressly requires, “no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause.” Thus, similarly to the suspension of civil liberties and judicial review in Bukele’s El Salvador, ICE’s new warrant policy is directly contrary to the core legal framework of the United States, again demeaning its democratic merit.

Narrative suppression and control are another key mechanism exhibited by leaders of unstable and backsliding democracies. This practice involves the state suppression of media that reports views that oppose the state as well as the proliferation of manipulative information through state- controlled journalism, films, and rhetoric. Hungary, a nation that, according to the V-Dem democracy index, has experienced severe backsliding since 2010, provides a pertinent example of narrative suppression. In January 2020, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán proposed reform to the nation’s educational curriculum, which aimed to encourage nationalism and erase Hungarian military defeats from textbooks. Furthermore, the new National Core Curriculum would remove authors like Hungary’s only Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor, Imre Kertész, from required readings, instead replacing him with antisemites and charged war criminals like Jozsef Nyiro and Albert Wass. Orbán’s policy is reflective of Hungary’s growing authoritarian bent as it encourages a selective remembrance of the nation’s history and government intervention into the propagation of nationalist ideals in the media. Trump’s recent directive to the National Park Service reflects the same type of ideological gerrymandering that typifies Hungary’s unstable democracy. In early 2026, the Trump administration ordered the removal of a number of cultural sites that reflect America’s history of subjugation toward Indigenous peoples and slaves, as well as feminist and queer imagery. The targeted removals included exhibits memorializing the slaves of George Washington, forced removals of Native Americans, and women and immigrants in Massachusetts textile mills. The Trump administration claims the removals are targeted at removing “corrosive ideology,” but in practice, they reflect the same confounding ideals that Hungary uses to hide its losses and disparage its most deserving cultural icons.

As the parallels between American domestic and international politics and nations like Türkiye, El Salvador, and Hungary, the role of the US among the paragons of democracy is an increasingly dubious proposition. We must consider that the impacts of the “democratic recession” of the 21st century may expand beyond the bounds of destabilized minor powers, former Soviet republics, or frontline nations, but to the core of Western democratic thought.

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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.

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