The West Needs to Show It Values All Human Life
Accusations of double standards sting because they have a point.
Many thousands of civilians have reportedly been killed. The number of people displaced from their homes is well into seven figures. Densely populated urban areas have been reduced to rubble. Supplies of electricity, food, and water have been cut off. Hospitals have come under attack. Many of those fleeing, injured, or dead are children.
Many thousands of civilians have reportedly been killed. The number of people displaced from their homes is well into seven figures. Densely populated urban areas have been reduced to rubble. Supplies of electricity, food, and water have been cut off. Hospitals have come under attack. Many of those fleeing, injured, or dead are children.
I could be describing Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which has raged on for almost two years now, or the terrible human costs of Israel’s military offensive in the Gaza Strip following the horrific Hamas attacks on Oct. 7. But I am referring to a conflict that has received much less international attention: the civil war in Sudan that broke out last April. Even as one lethal war captures the world’s attention, others roil on in the background.
Unsurprisingly, given its geopolitical significance, Ukraine has received considerable attention in the West, where leaders have been quick to condemn Russia’s war crimes. The new conflict in the Middle East has dominated headlines over the past couple of months. But Sudan’s crisis has gone woefully underdiscussed, like many others that for various circumstantial, political, or geographic reasons seem to matter less to the international community.
The West likes to think it has abandoned the racist habit of ascribing different value to human life in different places. We profess our respect for international law, which codifies the principle of equality. But in practice, our behavior does not always reflect this. Accusations of double standards from non-Western counterparts sting precisely because they have a point.
This is not to advocate for a zero-sum redistribution of attention and diplomatic energy from one conflict to another. Nor is it to say that we should care any less about innocent people killed, for example, in Kharkiv than those killed in Khan Yunis or Khartoum. Instead, more than 75 years after the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the international community needs to rediscover the tradition of humanitarian universalism. We must avow in word and deed that all human lives possess the same value and that the killing of civilians is unacceptable wherever it occurs.
Never before in recent memory has this been more urgent. The world has entered what David Miliband, the president and CEO of the International Rescue Committee, has called an “age of impunity.” War crimes often go unpunished. Nations increasingly disregard the laws of war: Torture, sexual violence, acts of collective punishment, and indiscriminate destruction of civilian homes and services are tragically common.
In a fragmenting international order, old mechanisms such as naming and shaming no longer work. Multilateral peacekeeping operations are in decline. These days, when wars do end, it is more often the result of one side vanquishing the other than a negotiated settlement. This new disorder arrived gradually—as the optimism of the immediate post-Cold War era gave way to new wars, power shifts, and then global economic crisis in the 2000s—and then accelerated in the early 2020s.
Wars are now more frequent, they are lasting longer, and they are killing more people. In 2022, more than 200,000 people died in state-based conflicts globally—the highest death toll since 1986 (excluding unilateral acts of violence such as the Rwandan genocide). Mass civilian casualties in recent years include the massacres of Tamils in Sri Lanka; the killing of tens of thousands of civilians in Yemen; and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in Ethiopia’s Tigray region. Such conflicts are forcing more civilians to flee, which is one of several factors that has driven the number of displaced people worldwide to a record 114 million.
Open Society Foundations, the philanthropy I run, provides funding to several of the largest humanitarian organizations to support their work on these overlooked conflicts. We also fund a range of advocacy and policy groups working to bring attention to the roots of these crises and mobilize the political will to address them. But this work can feel like a drop in the ocean. It needs more funding and scaled-up operations, particularly at a time when there is less news coverage of international conflicts, as media outlets have fewer resources to send foreign correspondents to distant war zones. When these conflicts are out of public sight, they too easily become out of mind for officials and politicians.
The time has come, then, for a new universalist global campaign for solidarity with victims of conflict everywhere that reestablishes the norm of equally valuable human life. This may seem like an obvious principle, woven as it is through the constitutions of multilateral institutions such as the U.N. But it is evidently getting lost in today’s world.
Civil society activists capable of crossing national and partisan divides should lead this campaign. They should cooperate with existing multinational institutions, such as the U.N.; nongovernmental organizations, such as ONE Campaign and Amnesty International; and far-sighted cultural and media figures with the reach needed to build momentum.
This global campaign should demand deeper pools of core funding for emergency aid, especially from groups of national governments, ensuring that aid responses do not depend merely on media attention or the largesse of individual governments. It should challenge both media and government to widen their attention spans and scope for empathy. And it should also demand swifter multilateral responses to crises, including by pressuring the U.N. Security Council to speak out immediately for basic humanitarian principles rather than deliberating for weeks.
Perhaps most fundamentally, the campaign should draw in a network of civil society groups, cultural leaders, and new generations of human rights champions to proclaim: no more hierarchies of civilian suffering, no more double standards, no more selective blind spots.
In an age of multiplying and interlocking crises, the international community must find room for solidarity for more than one or two benighted groups at a time. Global civil society should convene, whether in person or online, to launch this new campaign and reassert fundamental but increasingly sidelined principles of equality, solidarity, and shared humanity. As the English poet John Donne put it: “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.”
Mark Malloch-Brown is the president of the Open Society Foundations and a former deputy secretary-general of the United Nations. Twitter: @malloch_brown
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