Stealth Conflicts: How the World's Worst Violence Is Ignored

(Click here to see the blog)

As the policymakers, media and public focus the bulk of their attention on violence in Israel-Palestine, does it not strike anyone as odd that the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is the focus of so little attention? Massacres over Christmas by the LRA in the DRC have killed 400, including more than 40 massacred in a church. The death toll from conflict in the DRC is literally 1,000 greater than that in Israel-Palestine. And yet we seem to hear so little about the conflict in the DRC.

I have a term for conflicts that are marginalized and ignored - stealth conflicts. Stealth conflicts are those that do not appear on the ‘radars’ of those in a position to respond. That is, they fail to attract the attention of policymakers, the media, the public and academia. Just like the stealth bomber, they remain virtually undetected as they extract their deadly toll. It is indeed because of the stealth with which they are played out that they become so deadly: deprived of attention, starvation and disease associated with the conflict remain unchecked and claim far more victims than do the bullets and bombs.

Such conflicts are often referred to as ‘forgotten conflicts’ (or ‘forgotten crises’), but this term is misleading. For a conflict to be forgotten, it must first be remembered, and this does not apply to many of the world’s conflicts that fail to attract attention. They were not remembered to begin with. Furthermore, the term ‘forgotten’ suggests that the conflict has just accidentally slipped the minds of those in a position to respond, but this is hardly the case. The marginalization of these conflicts is the result of a series of deliberate choices on the part of those in a position to respond. There is nothing accidental about it.

Selectivity in the response to conflict is sadly inevitable, as is the existence of stealth conflicts, but the world’s deadliest conflicts should certainly not be among them. And yet they are, with the deadliest conflict the world has seen since WWII - that in the DRC - being notoriously missing from our consciousness.

My blog aims to shed light on such stealth conflicts and the mechanisms that are behind their marginalization. It is an extension and exploration of ideas contained in a book written by the author of this blog, entitled Stealth Conflicts: How the World’s Worst Violence Is Ignored (published by Ashgate, 2008).

Stealth Conflicts