Sudan-watchers have learned the rhythm by heart. Every few days brings another NGO alert, another UN bulletin that the catastrophe has deepened. The warnings are repetitive only because the suffering is bottomless; the statistics are obscene precisely because they belong to people—families, neighborhoods, cities starved of safety and food. And still, Sudan rarely breaks onto the top of a homepage or the first minutes of a nightly broadcast. Gaza and Ukraine dominate—coverage they merit—but the lesson is unavoidable: attention shapes ambition. Coverage changes outcomes. So why does Sudan remain marooned on the foreign pages, sustained largely by NGOs, a handful of think tanks, and a dogged diaspora that refuses to look away?

If moral urgency were insufficient, the strategic case should jolt editors awake. Sudan borders seven countries and straddles North and East Africa; it is a short flight from the Gulf and set along the Red Sea, a corridor whose stability matters for global trade and maritime security. Inside the country, the Islamist networks that underwrote Omar al-Bashir’s dictatorship remain intertwined with the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF); talk of an Islamic republic is not a relic. Rights groups have accused the SAF of deploying chemical agents against civilians, and, as a UN staffer told The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum earlier this year, starvation is being wielded as a weapon of war. As under Bashir, Sudan risks becoming an incubator for terrorism. None of this argues for forgetting; all of it argues for urgency.

The disparities in attention are stark. In a recent twelve-month stretch, even the New York Times—rightly lauded for its foreign desk—ran almost ten times as many pieces mentioning Gaza as Sudan, and more than thirteen times as many mentioning Ukraine. Gaza has commanded sustained global reporting; flagship outlets led their sites for months, while social platforms amplified each new horror. Ukraine, too, received wall-to-wall attention, especially early on: entire homepages at the BBC and Al Jazeera were effectively liveblogs, with embeds, constant updates, and intimate stories from refugee corridors.

Sudan’s war, by contrast, is filed under the easy shorthand of “forgotten”—a word that telegraphs concern even as it absolves inattention. The language tends to be colossal and abstract: casualty counts and displacement totals so massive they become unfathomable and thus, paradoxically, remote. Narratives like that have consequences. They show up in anemic funding for Sudan’s humanitarian appeals compared with Gaza’s, and in Sudan’s diminished weight in policy conversations next to Ukraine. When a crisis is framed as ambient misery rather than a sequence of choices by identifiable actors, accountability blurs and responses stall.

Images drive empathy, and empathy drives policy. At a recent Conduit Club event co-hosted by English Pen, speakers noted how visual choices shape reactions. Ukraine coverage centers on faces: a teenager bloodied but defiant, a grandmother refusing to flee—photographs that invite identification and immediate solidarity. Sudan is more often pictured through men in fatigues. One set of images sends the message “this could be you.” The other says, “This is a distant war.” The difference is editorial—and it is fixable.

Structural forces inside newsrooms compound the problem. James Copnall of the BBC World Service’s Newsday described the shrinking footprint of foreign coverage; when his Sudan posting ended, he wasn’t replaced. Reporting from Darfur and other hard-to-reach regions can require months-long waits for permits; the risks—abduction, shelling, the collapse of communications and roads—are real. The geopolitics surrounding Gaza and the nuclear shadow over Russia’s war in Ukraine inevitably draw editors and policymakers toward those theaters. Copnall also pointed to prejudice in audiences such as the UK’s, where Ukrainian refugees were welcomed even as Sudanese arrivals drew suspicion. (To its credit, Newsday has continued to give Sudan sustained, careful airtime.)

Press freedom acts as a force multiplier in one conflict and a choke point in another. Ukraine’s media—constrained but operating—can surface documentation of war crimes and keep a steady flow of evidence before the world; international reporters retain broad access to front lines. Sudanese journalists face displacement, targeted violence, shuttered newsrooms, factional repression, and the slow attrition of exile. With infrastructure degraded, rumor and disinformation rush into the vacuum, and independent reporting becomes both more essential and harder to do.

Which is why “forgotten” is not merely lazy; it is wrong—forgotten by whom? Not by the families scavenging for food in a man-made famine, not by civilians trapped between armed factions, not by neighbors already absorbing the spillover. What “forgotten” really describes is a failure of international leadership and of global media priorities—the habits and hierarchies that govern what leads and what languishes. The phrase flatters our own centrality: if it isn’t on the Financial Times’ front page this week, it must have slipped from history. It hasn’t. It can’t.

The remedy is not mystic; it is editorial. Treat Sudan with the same narrative care accorded to Gaza and Ukraine. Center civilians, not only combatants. Match the scale of the crisis with the scale of the reporting: consistent on-the-ground coverage, local voices foregrounded, accountability lines drawn clearly to commanders and patrons. Explain the Red Sea stakes, the regional alliances, and the economic and security spillovers that make the war everyone’s problem. Avoid the anesthetizing abstraction of statistics without context. Tell the story in chapters, not just in spikes.

Every properly resourced investigation, every segment that resists the drift toward euphemism, increases the odds that policymakers will treat peace in Sudan as an urgent, solvable priority rather than a tragedy to be managed. Attention is not charity; it is leverage. The coverage we choose will help determine the futures we permit.