Three years ago this week, civil war broke out in Sudan. Recent estimates suggest that hundreds of thousands of people have died in that war, millions have been displaced, and countless others have been subjected to famine and sexual assault. On top of all that, the U.S. determined last January that one of the sides in the war, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), was responsible for committing genocide.
And yet, news of what’s happening in Sudan has struggled to break through during this time. While headlines about the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, and now Iran, have dominated both the news cycle and our public discourse, Sudan doesn’t seem to be nearly as high on most American’s radar. And a few months ago, a Code Switch listener wrote in wanting to know: Why? At a time when so many people clearly care deeply about genocide, and our country’s obligation to try and stop it, why have we had so little to say about Sudan?
(Photo by MATTHIEU DELATY/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images)
But there was another, in some ways messier question that came out of all these discussions, which was: What does it mean for Americans to turn their attention to conflicts in other parts of the world? Do American eyes on a war actually help resolve the violence? The answer was not a straightforward yes. After all, as the anthropologist Alex de Waal told me, back in the early 2000s, many Americans were paying attention to Sudan, when the country was going through another period of extreme violence: “But in doing that, it also meant imposing a very particular style of action and sort of dictation of what is right and what is wrong, what is possible, what is not possible, that actually just didn't work,” he told me. So while the violence eventually did die down, de Waal said, the deeper issues that needed to be resolved in order to foster long term peace never actually got addressed.
It seems clear that American attention isn’t automatically helpful when it comes to resolving issues abroad. But our lack of attention can bring its own set of dangers, given the outsized role the U.S. plays in "policing the world." So what is a concerned citizen to do? One suggestion, from the political scientist Mai Hassan: use our platforms to amplify local voices, and the perspectives of the people who are directly being affected by the violence. That path may require a lot more listening and a lot less speaking than some of us are used to. And that’s probably a good thing.
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