Misattributed in February 2026 print edition to Macey Pirak and Jonathan Vasseur
We are living in a historic amnesia. Throughout the deserts, river basins, and cities, armed groups, weaker governments, and civil wars have become an omnipresent part of our lives. Although the wars in Sudan, Myanmar, Syria, Yemen, and Palestine vary in terms of causes and natures, they do build a picture of what is to be expected: no peace. We prefer to assume that war is an exception, a mere interruption of our routine lives. However, history seems to tell us a different story.
Sudan, a country that has been in civil war since April 2023, has a history of conflict and political coups that goes back several decades. However, today the two warring sides in Sudan are led by de facto leader of the nation, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as “Hemedti,” who leads the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
However, while the two warring sides are fighting to gain power with the alleged backing of foreign nations such as Egypt and the UAE, everyday civilians are the ones who pay the price. Over 150,000 have been killed, and 12 million have fled, combined with famine and rampant violence. Allegations of ethnic cleansing and genocide fly out from Darfur, along with drone strikes in the capital of Port Sudan.
Move east to Myanmar, where decades of military oppression have made a similar show of violence. Since 1962, the nation has been controlled primarily by military juntas, tolerating democratic elections occasionally, only to ultimately suppress them with violence. The National League for Democracy (NLD), led by Aung San Suu Kyi, managed to bring forth a short period of civilian leadership (while cooperating with the military junta), but the military reasserted control by 2021, claiming election fraud.
However, the violence isn’t just confined to the frequent shifts in regime. The Rohingya people, a Muslim minority not recognized as citizens, have been systemically targeted by the military in what the UN Human Rights Commissioner has called “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.” Just within a month in 2017, 6,700 Rohingya have been killed, with 700,000 fleeing across the borders to Bangladesh.
Armed resistance forces have sprung up in retaliation, including the National Unity Government (NUG) and People’s Defense Force (PDF) which now command over 85,000 soldiers, in addition to other NUG-aligned ethnic armies that continue to resist oppression. And yet, since 2011, more than 53,000 have been killed in the conflict.
Yemen, where 80% live below the poverty line and 21 million are in need of humanitarian aid, has also been engulfed in its own civil war for a dozen years now, between Houthi rebels and a Saudi-led coalition of Gulf nations, the latter has launched a campaign of air strikes, in addition to economically isolating them. Between 2015 and 2022, 377,000 people lost their lives, and a cholera outbreak have affected a million more. Peace talks, which began in 2023, have been met with little progress.
History is riddled with such examples of our inability to learn. In each modern case, lessons of the past are ignored until disaster strikes again, as human desire often trumps these lessons learned. The world is on fire, and despite centuries of examples, we continue to fumble. And unless we are willing to truly learn from the past, these stories will continue to repeat.
It doesn’t help that the media is reluctant to report on these conflicts and their consequences. According to the 2025 Global Peace Index, the volume of coverage per conflict-related civilian death is nearly 100 times higher for high-income countries than for less economically developed nations. In addition, civil wars often garner less attention, despite making up most conflicts around the world. Thus, media coverage is often a narrow lens into the crises of the world today, molded more by global political implications than by humanitarian weight, creating a vacuum of attention for places that need it.
