“There should not be a competition between crises. But unfortunately we’re seeing with everything going on in the world, other conflicts, other humanitarian crises and other things making headlines, that unfortunately Sudan is – I wouldn’t even call it forgotten – it’s ignored.” — Leni Kinzli

Kinzli is right. Sudan is ignored. If we go by the numbers, 30 million people in need of humanitarian assistance — that’s roughly two thirds of the population (ACAPS, 2025), 9 million displaced and 3.7 million acutely malnourished children (Goldhagen et al, 2024), then Sudan should be a lot more prominent in the media than it is. According to Oxfam, it is the world’s largest humanitarian crisis. It should be making the headlines in ways that it isn’t. It should be up there alongside Ukraine and Gaza, yet it isn’t. When I read about Zamzam, I wondered why news of what happened there didn’t register back in April. Other things did. Somehow Zamzam escaped notice. Sudan wasn’t on the radar – or at least, not as prominently as it might have been. 

Two things seem clear at this point: one is that media attention and press coverage do not necessarily converge according to numbers of people affected, or areas of greatest need. This reminds me of a lecturer I had at university, asking why most of us in a graduate zoology class were fixated on studying large, visually dominant vertebrates, when the most numerous species in the world were insects. Why, indeed? He called it species bias. The same could be said for geographical bias in terms of global attention and response to crises.

Maybe it’s human psychology to pay attention to things that are flashy and attention grabbing, or to focus our efforts on places that are felt to be like us, close to us, or somehow connected. How a crisis develops can have an impact too: the perceived level of injustice, or the suddenness of onset. Conflicts that are slow to develop, or long-standing, might garner less coverage than flashpoint disasters. A political element, such as the UK’s relationship with the United Arab Emirates outlined here in the case of Sudan, may be at play. Whatever the reasons, it would seem that the collective psyche should be on guard against this tendency to pay selective attention – and that moving towards analysis and investment based on numbers and need is a necessary correction.

Second is the fact that breaking news columns tend to feature an assortment of useless fluff amongst the range of grim realities. Competing with news of genocides and global conflicts, are stories about Taylor Swift’s new love interest, or some development in the personal life of Meghan Markle. For one thing, we only have so much time and attention. Weeding the news is time-consuming. It’s distracting. And it seems to suggest that the love interests of a musician are somehow equally deserving of our collective attention as life-and-death humanitarian emergencies.

Reflecting on those last two words humanitarian emergencies, it is possible to take a more philosophical approach. Calhoun (2010) does just that in an article titled ‘The idea of Emergency: Humanitarian Action and Global (Dis) Order.’ He describes what he calls ‘the emergency imaginary’ – a way of thinking that construes these as large, unpredictable events emerging out of nowhere, rather than the result of long-term political, economic, environmental and social factors coming to a head – a therefore predictable phenomenon. Coupled with that is the immediacy of news of such events, and how they are portrayed:

“This sense of suddenness and unpredictability is reinforced by the media, especially by television. The continuous stream of reporting on gradually worsening conditions is minimal and usually consigned to the back pages of newspapers and specialist magazines. It doesn’t make the cut for headlines—let alone half-hour broadcast news programs. So when violence or vast numbers of people lining up at feeding stations do break through to garner airtime, they seem to have come almost from nowhere.”

Again, I am reminded of a university lecturer, a different one this time, who predicted with an uncanny degree of accuracy the potential impacts of an earthquake occurring in a particular place. Five years later, the predictions came true – not through the major geological fault line he’d been referring to, but an altogether smaller and lesser known one. The combination of building in a particular area, a range of older, unreinforced buildings, and the human tendency to ignore low-likelihood, high-impact scenarios and fail to plan for them, combined with a natural event outside of anyone’s control. It had all the hallmarks of an emergency: unpredictable, devastating — yet very predictable in what the consequences might be if one had cared to look ahead and listen.

In light of this tendency to focus on emergencies, Calhoun describes who, or what, he believes ‘humanitarian’ has come to signify:

“The term “humanitarian” now is reserved for actions free from longer-term political or economic entanglements, actions deemed right in themselves, the necessary moral response to emergencies. It is something good to do without waiting for progress, even if you have doubts that progress will ever come. The emergency has become definitive because it is understood to pose immediate moral demands that override other considerations”

“It is the focus on immediate response suggested by the emergency imaginary, with its emphasis on apparently sudden, unpredictable, and short-term explosions of suffering. And it is sustained by the experience—or at least the hope—of altruistic work, of work embedded in direct moral purpose.”

Something good to do; the hope of altruistic work…with direct moral purpose. And, crucially, something good to do and by implication to feel good about, while wider circumstances, root causes and contributing factors are not addressed. It is not hard to see parallels, or similar ways of thinking, that take place in other settings. Take criminal offending and the justice system, for example. An offender is brought to trial. The offender is duly convicted and sent to jail. This too, is a reaction to an emergency of sorts: a moral and legal reaction to a criminal act. And while a judge might mention mitigating factors like the offender’s personal circumstances, the wider societal systems, and what might be a wide range of factors that lead to criminal offending, are left unaddressed. The emergency – or the offender – having been dealt with, life goes on until the next case comes along: another urgent response, another prison sentence or intervention, and maybe a sense that justice and morality has been served once again. Yet the long-term problems, the structural inequalities and issues that plague a society may persist, resulting in the same preventable things happening again.  

Calhoun summarises this way of thinking as follows: “Emergency” thus is a way of grasping problematic events, a way of imagining them that emphasizes their apparent unpredictability, abnormality, and brevity and that carries the corollary that response—intervention—is necessary.’

We could look at Calhoun’s article about emergencies and point to the fact that these thoughts were written 15 years ago. Has the world moved on? From looking at the media today, it would seem that it hasn’t. We are still in a state of panning attention from one breaking emergency to the next, with what seems to be an ever-growing demand on our collective attention, and our potential for action. Attention is not necessarily given according to need, meaning that certain countries or regions, such as Sudan, are ignored and effectively left behind. The tendency to think in terms of emergency and urgent response, largely ignores root causes and the predictable, cumulative effects that build-up to create the next breaking ‘emergency’. The last word, too, shall go to Calhoun:  

But transforming the global order—say, by making it more egalitarian as a way of limiting future suffering—is not on the manager’s agenda.

Reference: Calhoun, C. (2010). The idea of emergency: Humanitarian action and global (dis) order. Contemporary states of emergency: The politics of military and humanitarian interventions, 29-58.

Image Credit: AI