Gaza to Sudan: Moral consistency as a colonial alibi

These are not competing tragedies but linked sites of racial capitalism, militarism, and abandonment.

There is something dangerously soothing about moral distance. It allows scholars, commentators, and policymakers to pass judgment without ever risking involvement; to treat global violence as a thought experiment rather than a structure they inhabit. It also produces the now-familiar, misleading, and frankly infuriating question: Why do protesters flood the streets for Gaza but not for Sudan? A question that does not illuminate injustice, but disciplines how solidarity is allowed to appear.

What is framed as “moral inconsistency” reveals far more about those posing the question than about the movements it targets. The comparison rests on a gaze shaped by Europe’s colonial histories and racial hierarchies; a gaze that fragments struggles, isolates suffering, and demands that solidarity be rendered legible, proportional, and politically harmless. This gaze is not a neutral act of observation or a simple act of seeing, but an active ordering of the world: the racial production of the visible that determines in advance what can register as injustice and what is rendered invisible. From within this logic, empathy appears as a scarce resource to be evenly distributed, as if protest were an accounting exercise rather than a political practice.

But solidarity is not a mood, nor a form of moral self-expression. It is forged through long histories of struggle: through shared analyses, material connections, and repeated acts of collective alignment across time and place. These histories are precisely what the white, colonial gaze erases. Adopting a distant, God’s-eye view from which struggles are weighed and judged rather than understood, it makes solidarities appear fragmented and incoherent. What this gaze ultimately polices is not inconsistency, but connection: the capacity of struggles to recognise each other, overlap, and refuse the boundaries imposed by colonial ways of seeing.

The coloniality of responsibility – Gaza, Sudan, and Europe’s entanglement

Europe’s relationship to both Gaza and Sudan is not incidental, nor morally neutral. It is structural, though not symmetrical.

In Gaza, European states supply weapons, political cover, and dense networks of economic and academic cooperation, sustaining a system the UN has described as apartheid and alleged genocide. The visibility of this entanglement did not emerge through institutional transparency, but through decades of organising by Palestinian and transnational grassroots movements that forced these structures into public view.

Sudan’s entanglement with Europe is less easily contained within dominant narratives, but no less colonial. From British imperial rule to Cold War geopolitics, from extractive development schemes to decades of technocratic aid and peacebuilding interventions, Europe has remained deeply embedded in Sudan’s political economy of violence. Arms routed through Gulf allies, outsourced migration control, and strategic silence around the United Arab Emirates’ arming of the Rapid Support Forces all point to Europe’s ongoing role in Sudan’s devastation.

Protests framed as “about Gaza” are in fact embedded in wider infrastructures of solidarity linking Palestine, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, migrant justice struggles, and climate justice movements.

That mass mobilisation in Europe has been more visible for Gaza than for Sudan does not reflect indifference among grassroots movements. Many of the same activists mobilising for Gaza have long stood in solidarity with Sudan, drawing on transnational anti-colonial networks and shared analyses of militarism, racial capitalism, and impunity. Solidarity here is not a tally of attention, but of tracing and acting upon these overlapping structures of violence.

From outside these movements, such connections are often missed or misrecognised. Protests framed as “about Gaza” are in fact embedded in wider infrastructures of solidarity linking Palestine, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, migrant justice struggles, and climate justice movements. These relationships are made tangible through banners, chants, coordinated campaigns, and the active carrying of historical memory into present action. Student encampments exemplify this convergence, not as an additive list of causes, but as spaces where solidarities are enacted rather than itemised.

That these connections remain marginal in mainstream discourse does not indicate their absence. It signals how responsibility is routinely displaced, and how Europe’s own implication in multiple sites of violence is kept analytically and politically out of focus. 

See full text on The New Humanitarian