Photo by Miles Pierre/Intern/The Atlanta Voice The war in Sudan has killed tens of thousands, and the violence is accelerating. Civilian killings more than doubled in 2025 compared with the previous year, according to the United Nations’ top human rights official, who warned that thousands mor e remain missing or unidentified. Since April 2023, the conflict between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces has displaced more than 11 million people and triggered what many aid organizations describe as one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. Yet for most Americans, it barely registers. That invisibility was the subject of a pointed lecture Monday at Clark Atlanta University, where Dr. Amani El Jack, an associate professor of Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, told a room of students that what is happening in Sudan is not a tragedy the world has missed, it is one the world has chosen to ignore. “I changed the title of my talk from ‘forgotten zones of conflict’ to ‘forsaken zones of conflict,’” El Jack told the audience in the Exhibition Hall of the AUC Woodruff Library. “Forsaken, because Sudan has been abandoned by the international community.” Dr. Rebecca Yemo, Ph.D. (above), the center’s global policy coordinator, said the program’s goal is to give students deep insight into women’s rights and gender equality issues affecting Africa, the African diaspora, and the broader Global South. Photo by Miles Pierre/Intern/The Atlanta Voice How the War Started The ongoing conflict erupted in April 2023 from a power struggle between two military factions: the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), led by Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group.  Al-Burhan had integrated the RSF into the national military to consolidate power and suppress a growing civilian opposition movement. The arrangement collapsed, and the two factions turned on each other. Sudanese civilians have been caught in the crossfire ever since. El Jack connected the war directly to Sudan’s 2019 popular uprising, which ousted longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir and gave many Sudanese hope for a democratic transition. The current conflict, she argued, is a deliberate continuation of military control. “I see the war that is happening now as a counter-revolution strategy from the government,” El Jack said. “Many of the youth, the trade unions, the activists have been resisting the government, publicly in the streets, organizing protests, organizing demonstrations. But the war has been persistent.” Photo by Miles Pierre/Intern/The Atlanta Voice A Global War, Not a Local One El Jack pushed back against the framing of Sudan’s conflict as an internal dispute between two factions. Foreign powers, she argued, have been fueling it from the start. “Many regional and global actors have been central to the eruption of the war and to its sustainability,” she said. Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia and the UAE, have backed opposing sides with weapons, funding, and land grabs inside Sudanese territory. Egypt has supported the national military to protect its Nile River interests. Russia has financed the RSF in exchange for a Red Sea military base. Transnational corporations extracting Sudan’s gold, oil, and gas have continued operating amid the bloodshed. El Jack was blunt about what that means. “All of these are directly funding, financing, and literally fueling the war in Sudan,” she said. “I really wanted to counter the narrative about Africans killing each other.” Why No One Is Watching Despite the scale of the crisis, Sudan has received a fraction of the media attention and international aid response afforded to conflicts in Ukraine or the Middle East. El Jack argued the disparity is not accidental. She showed the audience a series of on-air quotes from CBS News, Al Jazeera and the BBC during coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022, in which correspondents explicitly described Ukrainian refugees as more civilized, more European and more deserving of sympathy than those fleeing conflicts in Africa and the Middle East. “The way that media coverage is broadcasting this very racist, racialized narrative, ensures that Sudanese people, not like white European, blue-eyed people, their lives do not matter,” El Jack said. That framing, she argued, shapes real policy: how much aid flows, what refugee programs are created and whether war crimes investigations are pursued. She noted that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has also not prioritized Sudan. “We don’t see any sustained or compassionate media coverage throughout Sudan’s history, up to today,” El Jack said. “We don’t see any prompt humanitarian assistance. We don’t see any humane migration or refugee policies.” The situation worsened in October 2023, when Israel launched its offensive in Gaza, and even regional broadcasters shifted coverage almost entirely away from Sudan. A crisis that was already undercovered effectively disappeared from screens. What Students Can Do The lecture drew pointed questions from students, including Selah Margarita Walton, a third-year political science major at Clark Atlanta University, who asked how young people can extend solidarity to Sudan when many are already grappling with inequality at home. El Jack urged students to use social media as an organizing tool, pointing to the Black Lives Matter movement as a model for how digital platforms can shift public consciousness. “It is your responsibility to know,” she said. “Creating that kind of space where people highlight what is happening in Sudan, that is an essential aim.” The event marked the inaugural session of the Global South Dialogue on Women in Africa and the African Diaspora, a new series hosted by the W.E.B. Du Bois Southern Center for Studies in Public Policy at Clark Atlanta University. Rebecca Yemo, Ph.D., global policy coordinator for the center, said the goal of the program is to give students deep insight into women’s rights and gender equality issues affecting Africa, the African diaspora, and the broader Global South. “My hope was that they would gain more awareness and knowledge about what is going on in Sudan,” Yemo said in an interview following the event. Because the conflict has received limited international media attention, she added, many students may have heard about it “but not have a lot of insight.” Beyond awareness, Yemo said she wants students to learn how to analyze global crises through critical frameworks, including feminist theory and critical race theory. “So that was my hope,” she said. “That they would leave with deeper insights about what’s going on.” The post ‘Forsaken, Not Forgotten’: Scholar Brings Sudan’s To War to Atlanta appeared first on The Atlanta Voice. ...read more read less