Gabriele Steinhauser, Andrew Barnett, and Emma Brown of the WSJ write that Africa Has Entered a New Era of War.. Excerpts:
This corridor of conflict stretches across approximately 4,000 miles and encompasses about 10% of the total land mass of sub-Saharan Africa, an area that has doubled in just three years and today is about 10 times the size of the U.K., according to an analysis by political risk consulting firm Verisk Maplecroft. In its wake lies incalculable human suffering—mass displacement, atrocities against civilians and extreme hunger—on a continent that is already by far the poorest on the planet.
Yet, these extraordinary geopolitical shifts in sub-Saharan Africa have been overshadowed by higher-profile conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. That has led to less attention from global policymakers—especially in the West—grossly underfunded humanitarian-aid programs and fundamental questions over the futures of hundreds of millions of people....
Africa is now experiencing more conflicts than at any point since at least 1946, according to data collected by Uppsala University in Sweden and analyzed by Norway’s Peace Research Institute Oslo. This year alone, experts at the two institutes have identified 28 state-based conflicts across 16 of the continent’s 54 countries, more than in any other region in the world and double the count just a decade and a half ago.
We hear plenty of news about conflicts around other parts of the world. But do we hear enough about the African continent?
Perhaps the conflicts in Africa are too complex, historical in nature, and the nature of conflicts changes so dynamically that our existing media infrastructure may not know how to produce news we’d consume?
Perhaps there are other narratives that we are adapted to trust more? See yesterday’s post. Maybe those are narratives are more efficient ROI-wise for news producers?
Perhaps we’re too used to knowing that there are problems? We’ve become fatigue, or numb.
I’m not a media expert, and I imagine this is a complicated topic to report on. At the same time, I wonder about the tradeoffs — by not giving light to Africa’s narrative, what do we end up giving light to instead?
