Christopher Tounsel: Sudan and the Politics of Solidarity

There are genocides that are neglected and underreported, and Sudan is often sidelined while other conflicts dominate global attention. In this episode, we speak with Christopher Tounsel, historian of modern Sudan and author of “Bounds of Blackness: African Americans, Sudan, and the Politics of Solidarity”. We examine how African Americans have engaged with Sudan across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, focusing on race, religion, media, and foreign policy, and how these have shaped responses to conflict in Sudan and South Sudan. The conversation also addresses current dynamics, including the war in Sudan, the role of external actors, and how solidarity is formed, limited, and applied across different contexts of violence. Find Tounsel's book, "Bounds of Blackness African Americans, Sudan, and the Politics of Solidarity" below:
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501775628/bounds-of-blackness/

00:00 — Introduction and Overview

02:22 — Obama, Darfur, and the Limits of Global Solidarity

05:23 — What Would a “Black” Foreign Policy Look Like?

08:29 — South Sudan and the Meaning of Independence

11:42 — Misconceptions About African Politics and Lived Frustrations

16:09 — Black Solidarity, Zionism, and Divided Alignments

21:36 — Identity, Race, and the Boundaries of Solidarity

25:54 — Black Lives Matter and the Contradictions of Solidarity

30:40 — Spivak, Othering, and Who Gets to Speak

36:54 — Black Media and the Mobilization of Sudan

42:22 — Media Figures, BLM, and Shaping Conflict Narratives

46:59 — Media Framing and the Inequality of Attention

53:25 — Why Some Genocides Receive More Attention Than Others

01:03:17 — Media, Academia, and the Political Economy of Genocide Attention

01:11:05 — Social Media, Power, and U.S.–UAE Influence in Sudan

01:11:05 — Book Recommendations

Transcript

0:00

But I think that, white supremacy is real. It has obviously done a number on members of the African diaspora around the world. And in terms of African Americans, because of the history of enslavement, Jim Crow. And the way in which kind of, capitalism and neoliberalism still seeks to weaponize whiteness. And to disenfranchise blackness. My argument is that for many African Americans, that what the history of black American engagements with Sudan shows is that white supremacy and a black population's experience with white supremacy is the most important factor for determining solidarity. In this episode, we speak with Christopher Tounsel, a historian of modern Sudan and Associate Professor at the University of Washington, whose work examines race, religion, and the politics of solidarity. Drawing on his book, Bounds of Blackness. Our conversation explores how African-Americans have engaged with Sudan from Cold War diplomacy to contemporary conflict, and how identity, media, and global politics shape who is seen, ignored, or mobilized in moments of mass violence. In 2006, then-Senator Barack Obama, speaking at a rally for Darfur,

said: 2:27

“Today, we know what is right and what is wrong. The slaughter of innocents is wrong. Two million people driven from their homes is wrong. Women gang raped while gathering firewood is wrong. Silence, acquiescence, paralysis in the face of genocide is wrong… If we care, the world will care. If we act, then the world will follow”—how did Obama’s presidency change the solidarity between people across the United States, Sudan and South Sudan? Sure, absolutely. Thank you so much for that question. Yes, I think that starting with Barack Obama in 2006 is such a great starting point because, of course, as a native Chicagoan, the kind of Barack Obama rise from senator of Illinois to the presidency. Was such a galvanizing social moment. And I think that a part of the excitement that he generated was in creating or encouraging these types of solidarities. So when Barack Obama is still a U.S. senator, he travels to Chad where he meets with the Sudanese refugees. And so throughout his first presidential campaign, he is trying to raise Sudan as this example of kind of the U.S. being responsible not for the genocide, but in trying to run as the leader of the free world, saying, look, when atrocities are going on in Sudan, it's our responsibility to help. And throughout his presidency, he continues to kind of keep Sudan as a primary point of his foreign policy. He mentioned Sudan in his first State of the Union address. He also mentioned Sudan when he famously marches across the Edmund Pettus Bridge to commemorate the 1965 march on Selma. And in that particular speech, he directly tries to encourage this type of solidarity between the freedom struggle in Sudan with the civil rights movement in the U.S. by saying that, in essence, the move for civil rights in this country, as typified by moments like the Edmund Pettus Bridge, march on Selma, was kith and kin, if you will, with the fight of Sudanese people for self-determination. So, Sudan really kind of figured prominently in his foreign policy, not from a kind of state security aspect, but from a sense of the US soft power. And building on that, if, as you write,“foreign policy conducted by Black people did not, by default, mean a Black foreign policy,” what would a genuinely “Black” foreign policy look like in a case like Sudan, if that concept is coherent here? Absolutely. So I think that, what a black foreign policy would look like would be a lot of what we saw in terms of the kind of global anti-apartheid movement. But also even going further to the roots of African decolonization where you had figures like Dr. King going to Ghana to celebrate the first independence of that country. So there's a way in which I think a black foreign policy would look like really centering the oppression of black peoples on account of race. South Africa, obviously, for decades represented this very clear example. Of a white minority government disenfranchizing black peoples in its own country. Sudan was a bit more complicated. Right? Because you've got, a government in Omar al-Bashir that was really trying to encourage kind of an Arab-ization project. And it was this project that caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, not just to the west in Darfur, but also south in southern Sudan as well. And so, in my opinion, what a kind of black foreign policy would have looked like would be to really kind of magnify the fact that people are suffering in Sudan and that this is a part of the same genealogy of kind of 20th and 21st century anti-blackness. But of course, politicians have to navigate a minefield. Of not trying to offend all parties. And Barack Obama being the first African-American president, he particularly had to tread quite lightly because, while his blackness is undeniable, he couldn't appear to all of his constituents, black or non-black, as having a, hyper focus on blackness. And so in being the president of all races and peoples in this country, he had to tread very lightly. So I think that there's a difference And I talk about this in the book between having black people in very powerful, influential foreign policy positions, but then kind of operating with an explicitly kind of ethos of black solidarity in those positions. And can you speak about South Sudan as a case example here? Because I believe in your book you referenced Barack Obama invoking Martin Luther King Jr. Speaking about Ghanaian independence. Can you speak about what South Sudan represented in this case? Absolutely. So South Sudan really represented what I argue is a sense of black emancipation, black liberation, but a black liberation that was different from other types of African liberation that are much more well known. I mentioned South Africa. You mentioned Ghana. Because of the history of African colonialism for centuries, the quote unquote, oppressors. Have been Europeans. The Portuguese, English, French, the Belgians. South Sudan in some ways represented. The final example of black liberation against a racial other. But the racial other in this case represented for many, northern Sudanese Arabs. And so you've got this kind of complicated dynamic where the people who are kind of recognized as the, quote unquote, bad guys. Are not white and they're not European. Well, how do people kind of understand that? Well, a lot of African Americans in this country going back to the 1960s. Recognized that South Sudan was participating in a type of global black freedom struggle. And so you had black folks like, Whitney Young, for example, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, right. T. D. Jakes, big pastor out of Texas, really trying to draw attention to the plight and the suffering of Black South Sudanese. And so by the time July 2011 comes around and South Sudan becomes independent, I think that Barack Obama, was pretty tactile. And on one hand, invoking Dr. King, who is obviously connected with kind of black freedom more than most other figures in history, but also, even in invoking Dr. King, Dr. King, in some ways in his afterlife, has become such a kind of global worldwide symbol that for some, a reference like that could seem a bit hollow. It seem a bit safe. It's different if someone is referencing, Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, Patrice Lumumba, Dr. King is like at this point, he's reached like Gandhi level, right. Where, to reference him is not very controversial or provocative, but it can still be, too. I sense that there is and even as an African myself, I sense this frustration and I wonder whether you encountered it as an academic researching these other African matters, including obviously, your research on South Sudan. What is inherently, if at all, frustrating about the perception of the politics in that region from people over here? And of course, this is a very open ended question. And obviously when we speak about people over here, there are different levels of society, people who are academics, who are not academics, people who are who know about Sudan, who actually know where it is, etc.. So tell us more about this, more practical, hands on experience you've had when dealing with this subject. Sure. Absolutely. Thank you. So I love it because there are so many directions where I can take that question, and so I'll kind of isolate two. One is the fact that unfortunately, I think that within this country and in lots of Western contexts, Sudan really represents all of the most pejorative stereotypes of the African continent, this place of endless chaos, warlords, poverty, corruption and just really intractable. A place that for most Westerners is very hard to understand. A very kind of honest, nuanced place of trauma. And so as someone examining Sudan and having traveled to South Sudan, I think in some ways and I'm going to kind of tread lightly here, but even among academics, I think that one is more likely to find professors, researchers and scholars of just, for lack of a better word, safer countries or countries that are perceived to be safer and less complicated. Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania. All countries, African or non-African, have problems, issues, traumas. But in some sense, I have found that within African studies as a discipline, Sudan and South Sudan have been marginalized. And that there are other countries that seem to get the proverbial lion's share of attention, and that if and when Sudan or South Sudan become relevant, it's for really bad reasons. Like for what? Like what's been going on since April 2023. So that's what I would say about that. That there's on one hand this sense that Sudan is this easy stand in for lots of people. Of all of the problem facing post-colonial Africa. But on the other hand, even within African studies, I think that Sudan and South Sudan are very much at the margins. And so part of the reason why I do my work is to, not say that Sudan or South Sudan is more important than any of the other 52 countries in Africa. But to really bring the Sudan more towards the kind of center and to make sure that, if we are to believe in kind of pan Africanism, not just as a symbolic kind of romantic emotional idea, but as something like real and genuine, like a real ideal that should be pursued. No country on the continent should be on the margins, and that includes the island countries as well. That, Mauritius being an African country and considering it just as African as the Central African Republic. That takes a lot of work. Work that should not have to be done. But practically speaking, work that does need to be done. I want to zoom in to a small case that I think stands out within your book, and that is what is the history between black solidarity and Zionism and the state of Israel, and how does that background help us or help explain why, as you note, African American support for Arabs or Israel has never been unified. It's not a monolith, especially in the case of Sudan. So this is kind of, I think, one of the most compelling parts of the book that I was not expecting to emerge when I embarked on the project. But yes, so it really goes all the way back to the 1960s. Obviously, the the state of Israel becomes independent. In 1948, the Arab League famously, declares no recognition of Israel, no peace with Israel. No negotiation. And the Arab League actually makes this proclamation at the 1967 Arab League conference in Khartoum, which Khartoum was desperate to host in order to show the Arab League members, ‘hey, we are a truly, Arab country’. And so how this kind of translates into African American views of Sudan becomes really tricky because on one hand, you had some African Americans who identified the state of Israel as a, white minority government basically participating in apartheid like, genocidal behaviors. And so some African Americans basically side with the Sudanese government in its opposition to Israel, because they see Sudan's opposition to Israel as a kind of anti-colonial move. However, Sudan in the 1960s was in its own state of civil war against South Sudanese rebels who identified as black. And so it gets really tricky because African Americans, some are supporting an Arab-led Sudanese government in its fight against Israel. But what do we do about the Sudanese government's fight against black South Sudanese? And so you've got other African Americans and very, prominent black newspapers like The Chicago Defender arguing for support for South Sudan. It gets even thornier because because the South Sudanese rebels were fighting against the Sudanese government. You had Israeli spies and Israeli proxies in East Africa supporting these black South Sudanese. Because from the Israeli, they wanted to destabilize the Sudan, because Sudan was obviously, supporting countries like Egypt against Israel. So you have these kind of competing solidarities. You've got some African American supporting black South Sudanese against the Arab Sudanese government, but then you've got other African Americans supporting Sudan out of a kind of anti Israeli, anti-colonial approach. And so that division is really prominent in the 1960s. It does kind of taper off once we get to kind of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. But that's just to say that once South Sudan becomes independent, and I talk about that in my first book, South Sudanese start to kind of read these Old Testament scriptures, which were essentially Jewish prophecies about this ancient African kingdom of Kush. Well, some South Sudanese begin to read these Jewish scriptures as prophesying South Sudanese independence. And so you've got this kind of South Sudanese affinity if you will, with the modern state of Israel, Riek Machar, who was the vice president of South Sudan, famously travels to Jerusalem, South Sudan. South Sudan decides to open up its national embassy in Israel and Jerusalem rather than in the capital of Tel Aviv. So, again, these kind of, symbolic, moves to identify with kind of the ancient Jewish past. So it's very kind of it's very asymmetrical at times, very kind of counterintuitive, but very real all at the same time. And that brings me to a theme that has come across in several of our other interviews on this channel where we speak about how populations in the United States and European countries to experience and interact with a genocide or a conflict from afar and I felt in your book, much of the analysis focuses on how others determine who is or is not included within a particular racial or social category worthy of protection and solidarity with. I'm interested in the inverse here. However, under what conditions do individuals themselves foreground one identity over another? And what does that shift mean for the formation of or limits of solidarity? And as a smaller, aside, you have people go ahead and sometimes suppress a national identity and foreground a racial identity or, in reverse. And these things are a reflective interplay between what's going on in the environment around them, sometimes driven by conflict or politics. But again, going back to the question here, what does that shift mean for the formation of solidarity? Absolutely. I think that towards the tail end of my book, what becomes very apparent, particularly when I begin talking about the Nation of Islam and its approach to the Sudanese government, there's a way in which, those who are kind of following events from afar tend to, as you've just said, really begin to create solidarities based off of what we might call abstract identities. So if you're a member of the Nation of Islam in the mid-1990s and you've never been to Sudan, you don't know Sudanese Arabic, perhaps you've never even been to the continent, maybe you've never spoken to a Sudanese person who can provide a firsthand testimony of, having to leave their home because the Janjaweed came through and, burned the whole town to the ground. There's a way in which one might say, well,‘I'm not Sudanese, I'm not African, but I am Muslim. And by virtue of the fact that this nonwhite Muslim country is being raped through the coals in The Boston Globe, The New York Times, CNN, the State Department is saying they're a state sponsor of of terror. I'm actually going to stand by Sudan. They are a world pariah, but I’m with them, if no one else is going to stand with them, I will’. These are the kinds of things that we began to see in the 1990s, where for a person like a minister Louis Farrakhan in the Nation of Islam, he decides to kind of go against the grain by saying this is a muslim country and Islamophobia is real. Well, what does it mean then, for a black Muslim like Louis Farrakhan to, in essence, decide to really play up the religious solidarity, but to downplay the racial solidarity of black South Sudanese who are being oppressed? And so this is really where, I think, the politics of solidarity come into play. And by politics, I mean at the micro-scale, how do we as not just, citizens and nations, but how do we on a very granular individual level, decide what matters more? What kind of defining driving factors do we use when we do decide to maybe read a newspaper piece about, something? I would like to go ahead and pose that question to you from how you presented in the book where you say when African Americans proclaim Black Lives Matter, which lives are we invoking? And connected to that, what are the consequences of a form of racial solidarity that allows one to be a racial kin in one moment and then an antagonist in another? So this is my one of my main conclusions. And, I'm going to say it with my chest because I feel strongly about this, even though I feel uncomfortable because I know how some people might interpret it. But I think that, white supremacy is real. It has obviously done a number on members of the African diaspora around the world. And in terms of African Americans, because of the history of enslavement, Jim Crow. And the way in which kind of, capitalism and neoliberalism still seeks to weaponize whiteness. And to disenfranchise blackness. My argument is that for many African Americans, that what the history of black American engagements with Sudan shows is that white supremacy and a black population's experience with white supremacy is the most important factor for determining solidarity. It was easier for a lot of African Americans to identify with black South Africans because the apartheid government was a white European state. It was easy for African Americans to really rally behind Ghana in 1957 because Ghana, being a West African country was one of the countries that millions of black Africans were taken from in shipped across the Atlantic. But with Sudan. There's this kind of like, well, we know that they're black because they're an African, but they're not black like us. They don't share the same history of plantation enslavement. They don't share the same history of apartheid/Jim Crow in the way that, folks in South Africa and the Rhodesians did. And so I think that in 2026. It is more difficult for African Americans to build a sense of racial solidarity with other members of the African diaspora. If there is not that very kind of accessible comparative framework of similar experiences under white supremacy. And so that's why, to me, I think that places like Sudan, the Horn of Africa, and I would even say the whole of North Africa. So, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, Egypt, I think within the African American purview, those countries and regions do not receive the same type of attention in the black press, black media. You know, church spaces, black politics, the Congressional Black Caucus, the NAACP. Issues in those countries don't get the same attention as they do in places like the Congo, the home of Patrice Lumumba. Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa. Because it's more easy to say, ‘oh yeah, Congo. That was the country of Patrice Lumumba, the Belgian Congo, Leopold’.‘Nigeria, this place, this was a white British colony, a lot of slaves taken from there. Ghana, same thing, South Africa, but Sudan, Tunisia. Are those really black? Yes, they're African, but like, how African are they, quote unquote. Really?’ So that's my argument. When you're saying this, I'm thinking of Gayatri Spivak’s essay, “Can the subaltern speak?” She she speaks about and she raises this point, which I think all of us who are involved in the humanities should be aware of. She speaks about those forces that are the forces that are in power, that are in control of the master narrative. Ultimately govern whether the subaltern gets to speak. And very often, she says that these powerful forces speak on behalf of the others of the marginalized, which of course doesn't help the marginalized at all, because those in power don't really understand what's going on with the others. So right now, what I see in what you're seeing is while the African Americans say in America feel that they are the other as compared to the white population here. They also, at another level define, another level of alterity that is going on. So we're not speaking about a binary form of alterity between those in power and those who are marginalized, but those who are marginalized when their voices are heard as well. They are also involved in the process othering other nations. Exactly. I think that that's exactly it. There's a scholar, Eve Troutt Powell, who is a Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and she referenced kind of early 20th century Egypt as, quote, “the colonized colonizer”. This idea that Egypt, on one hand, was subjected under the Union Jack. But at the same time, Egypt has a predatory relationship with Sudan. So on one hand, they're colonized, but on the other hand, they have not historically treated Sudan as an equal I think that there's a similar dynamic. While I wouldn't call African. Well, you know what? Some actually have argued that when it comes to global blackness. That African Americans have had an outsized hegemonic influence. You know, the first five Pan-African conferences in the 20th century were all in the West. But it's not until, the 1945 Manchester conference that there were more Africans from the continent at the conference than those in the or those from the African diaspora. So I absolutely do think that you are right in that on one hand, African Americans can claim the historical experience of being othered within the context of, kind of white power structures in this country. But when kind of speaking across the globe. African Americans have an outsized influence on basically telling members of the African diaspora well what causes should we be all paying attention to. And so that can be really problematic, because, yes, when the kind of clarion calls of Black Lives Matter or, global black solidarity comes out oftentimes those that are kind of those peoples, those countries, those issues that are, most quickly kind of brought up and most quickly broadcast are those that African Americans are identifying right. You know, as an African American. I see the tension there. Because on one hand, I'm all for, this idea of global blackness and, not allowing kind of Western boundaries, to keep two different groups of the African diaspora separate, distinct. But at the same time, it kind of perpetuates the marginalization of certain African countries, right. From others. And I think and I'm also, to kind of say this out loud, but I think that's what makes, I think, African American engagement with Gaza very compelling when compared to places like Sudan. Because again, I think Gaza represents for many African Americans the type of kind of historic white colonial white supremacist oppression of nonwhite peoples. And so a lot of African Americans kind of engage Gaza through that lens. But what happens when, Rwanda in 1994 takes place right, where the people perpetuating that genocide are themselves black? What happens in Nigeria during the Biafran War? When you've got Nigerians slaughtering other Nigerians. What happens in Sudan when you've got, Black/Arab people killing each other? So all very kind of big questions. But they all go back to this kind of politics of solidarity. I think that we can’t go without saying on this note, especially within the context of African American communication with, the globe about black media. You speak a lot about black media in your book. And initially, I would want to ask, what role did black media play in mobilizing and organizing and legitimizing indignation around the crisis in Sudan? And what does it look like today in your view? I say this proudly because my wife is a communications prof. And, she's known about the power of the black press, far longer than I have. But it was really in, crafting book that I saw how powerful and how influential black newspapers. For much of, basically the first six decades, of the 20th century were in terms of really introducing African Americans to Sudan. Black newspapers played a huge role. I mean, you had, black newspaper correspondents in Sudan and Ethiopia in the 1930s. When the Italians invaded Ethiopia. and so there's a way in which black newspapers were so ubiquitous. That I think that the stat is that, one edition of a black newspaper would have been seen by eight different sets of eyeballs. And so there's a way in which, in the kind of pre-TV age, the black newspaper was really a pedagogical tool for millions of African Americans, not only about what was going on in Sudan, but what was going on in, Ghana, South Africa, Cuba, the UK. So black newspapers play a huge role, but also black magazines, Jet magazine, Ebony magazine. I would say, in addition to the black press, HBCU's, Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Today, Northwestern University is known as kind of, a school with a particularly long engagement with African studies. But it was, in fact, Howard University in Washington, D.C., that had the first Department of African Studies, and that was really created by this professor William Leo Hansberry, who was an enthusiast of ancient Sudanese history. And so if you were at Howard University as early as the 1920s, you could take college courses on ancient Egypt and ancient Sudan. All this going on within a broader context of people in Jim Crow, not being able to share restaurants, and being lynched So there's this way in which both the black press, but also HBCUs, have had a really huge impact. In more recent history this has continued. So at a school like Howard, Howard in the 1990s and 2000, when the second Sudanese civil war was going on, and once the Darfur Genocide, really launches in 2003, Howard hosts symposiums on what's going on. Their school newspaper, The Hilltop publishes editorials about what's going on in Sudan. And then 2005, Howard University becomes the first HBCU to divest from Sudan. And so there's this way in which kind of institutions of higher learning that are, created by and for African Americans start to kind of marshal their institutional might for very political and humanitarian purposes. But kind of in fast forwarding to the present day, we know that black media has continued to direct attention to the Sudan, particularly since April of 2023. You know, bet.com, blavity, Black Twitter, all of these spaces have, shined a light in terms of what is going on in the Sudan. You've also had conferences at, several institutions, the University of Michigan, and Stanford, and Duke, it's become a moment in U.S.. Higher Ed. in terms of kind of events that are geared towards the Sudan. How do you see the current landscape of media given this? Ranging from movements like BLM to reactionary figures such as Candace Owens, who are reaching large audiences with anti-Zionist perspectives, shaping responses to the ongoing conflict? So I'll be completely real with you. I think while you have had black media attention on Sudan, I think that and I'm positive that, the kind of objective metrics will also bear this out. I think that African Americans are engaging more with what's going on in Palestine than what's going on in Sudan. And I think that's just an objective reality. I think the noble reality is that African Americans continue to engage with the suffering of black and brown people, around the world. But this goes back to, my kind of larger point about the politics of solidarity and how that bears out in terms of engagement. And I think that today, if you kind of look on, the most popular accounts on Black Twitter and Instagram, if you go to kind of, Black news sites like theroot.com, you'll see a tension, in a lot of pieces on Gaza. That's important. That's huge. Like, I applaud that. But Sudan really is like on the literal back burner. And so as an African American who would like to believe in, the equality of suffering everywhere, That no, populations, pain is worth more than another population to pain. What am I supposed to do with that? You know, and so within a broader media landscape in which we know that Sudan is being far under-reported compared with Ukraine and Gaza, and now we've got Iran. So that's going to also kind of, take a slice of the proverbial pie. what do we do with the fact that Sudan, which is the largest, demographically speaking, the largest crisis of them all? I find myself not only speaking into kind of a media ecosystem that is privileging, non-black pain. But I'm also speaking into a media ecosystem that's like Sudan matters just as much as Gaza. And I think that that's kind of an unpopular, thing to say. And I think there's a lot of historically rooted reasons. Again, why African American solidarity with Gaza is big. And like, I get it, I completely do. As an historian of Sudan and as a black American historian of Sudan, I then have to contend with, well, you know what makes a black person from Chicago, Atlanta, Detroit, what makes them more likely to read, the news piece on what happened in Gaza last week and not the piece on what happened in Khartoum? I think that we really need to interrogate that because I think that, the possible answers to that question speaks to how blackness itself and what it means to know the experience of black pain and black dispossession and disenfranchisement. But, yes, what blackness means and how it's defined right now, I think is at the heart of the answers to those questions. I think Gayatri Spivak says the same thing when she includes an addendum to that essay. And she goes on to say that therefore, as a scholar of postcolonial studies, our job is not to necessarily put the marginalized voice forward, but is to study the powers and forces and structures that make that voice be subjugated compared to others. So I have a few questions, but just to begin with, something very practical. We know about the concept of framing theory, which basically means that it's the media also that's a culprit in making the war in Gaza, the genocide in Gaza, known to the world compared to what's going on in Sudan. It's very often about how you present it. What do you wish would be done at a practical level by the media, by scholars to make up for this inequality? Yeah, that's a great question. Practically speaking, I will identify kind of the most kind of glaring sites that are currently not in balance and call for more balance. So one area is literally in the kind of practical, like the number of media articles that have been posted on Gaza. I mean, it dwarfs Sudan. It's like 80 or 90 times as those in Sudan. So at a very kind of mundane level, literally just produce more articles on Sudan. Both places in the world are very difficult to access and very difficult to navigate if you are a journalist. But here's the thing. And all three of us on this call know this. In addition to the framing piece, which is, very important. We know that news is a commercial industry. And that advertisers, have a very, outsized influence with networks. And so these networks know, that there are certain topics, certain stories, certain buzzwords that are going to get clicks. We live in a grotesque world where pain is clickbait. And so there's a way in which I think the commercialization of news is kind of like an existential problem when it comes to imagining a world where the suffering and pain of relatively unknown peoples or populations is going to kind of stay unknown. Unless networks decide to basically publish things and don't care about, how many people click or how many people engage with that. So one is, I think, just putting more out there. But two, I think this is where podcasts come in. And I'm not just saying that because I'm on one right now. I'm saying that, we know that podcasts are not beholden to the megaphone forces that a lot of these, global news networks and stuff have to basically contend with. And so having podcasts, talking about Sudan. as a professor, I'm always going to say, we as scholars engage with, the next generation on a daily basis. And so when we're teaching our next class on genocide in the 21st century. Or, when we have a budget of, a couple thousand dollars and we're like, should we invite, this person or this person or this person or this person? We need to be having more events about Sudan. We need to be having more conversations about Sudan. And I think last but not least, we already have the roadmap. We have the blueprint. I think that one of the most successful kind of protest movements in recent history was the anti-apartheid movement. I was born in 1987, so I can't say that I can like, remember what that was like through a primary lens. But, the amount of protests on college campuses. The fact that the US Congress, overrode President Reagan's veto to divest from South Africa. But that it actually happened. South Africa became an international pariah that most of the world, but in this country, this polarized bipartisan country, even in this country in the 1980s, people on the left and right were like, we can do something. And so to me, I that I'm not saying we should do the exact same things that occurred in the anti-apartheid movement, but it does mean we're not starting from a blank slate. Like, we don't have to think completely outside the box. It's like the models are there. I mean, I do want to say this as someone I mean, Luis and I have both been running and managing this podcast for more than two years now, and we've always noticed that obviously most of the views revolve around the genocide that are more spoken about. Of course, there's an element also the popularity of the speaker. But even if we do try to make sure that we move away from this philosophy or rather this practice of believing that some genocides are more equal than others, we're trying to diversify. We're trying to move away from that by covering as many genocides as possible and speaking to people. We feel that the concentration is always on the main genocides. So here is a thought and this is just to complicate the plot a little bit. And ultimately, as what Slavoj Zizek says, desire is not created from within. It's creating because we are exposed to the media, we're exposed to films, and those create desires in us. So here I would say the main question that has popped up in our minds and sometimes it might sound simplistic, but many of us wonder why Gaza, why Gaza, why Israel and Palestine over all of the other genocides. And we're talking about South Sudan, East Timor, Bangladesh and so on. Why is there this concentration? Is it just the effect of the media, the fact that media concentrates on that and creates these desires in us? That's one point. I'm open to any comments from you. But I also want to say something as a genocide studies scholar, something that frustrates me, I think at the end of the day, unfortunately, as in all matters, it's about where the money is. And I say this because I think of how when I studied the Holocaust or when I go to presentations by Holocaust studies scholars, I see them going into all the intricate details of what happened, the Holocaust, and explore unknown territories. I just attended a presentation by Professor Edward Westermann, who explored the effects of not just famine during the Holocaust, which we've covered quite widely, but also the effects specifically of water, of thirst on the population. And my first reaction was to wonder, why haven't we explored that aspect of it in other genocides? Why do we always wait for Holocaust studies scholars to unveil something? And then we end up borrowing those models and apply to other genocides around the world? I also think of another example being, how the concept of first-generation, second-generation, third-generation survivors are omnipresent in Holocaust studies, and a lot of literature has been written on that. We have books written by survivors, again, third-, fourth-generation survivors of the Holocaust. And yet do we speak about survivors of the Armenian genocide, third-, fourth-generation? Which we do have because the Armenian genocide happened before the Holocaust. Do we have first-, second-generation survivor accounts from, say, Congo or wherever else where there has been a genocide previously? And my answer is, no. So the question is, why is there more complexity, as I said in Holocaust studies compared to other areas? And I can only say going back to my PhD days as a student. I remember friends sitting around at the conference and saying, try to do something on the Holocaust rather than any other genocide, because that's where the money is. That's where you’re going to get scholarships. That's where we're going to easily get into different educational institutions that, by the way, exist only in Europe, mostly in Europe and in America. I do agree that I think money, money, money, I think is the answer, because I don't want to believe that it's based on like philosophical reasons or a type of human callousness to some people's pain over others. But as someone with the a speech impediment I'm familiar with. There was this ancient Greek philosopher and his name was Demosthenes. And Demosthenes said everything that ought to be done can only be done with money. Everything that ought to be done can only be done. All people's pain. Every instance of mass violence in recorded history deserves to be interrogated, researched. Deserves all the resources in the world for people to examine with the obvious ultimate goal of preventing future occurrences. I think that certainly in the West, I think if we follow the money. I'll just speak for my own institution and I'm going to stay on the kind of objective things. As with all institutions there are some departments, there are some areas, studies programs that have a history going back 100 years. And they've got, big pocketed donors. And it's like they can virtually speaking, do what they want. They can have a conference every other month. They can, fly people in. And you've got other units that, are no less passionate and serious about their work. But they just don't have the same access to the financial resources. And of course, there can be, several reasons for that. But it's just to say, Unit A might be able to do a lot more because they have a lot more and Unit B can't do as much because they simply cannot fund the work and the kind of public engagement and the scholarship that they want to do. Sadly, I think that that is the that is one of the reasons why, you can fill libraries with certain acts of mass violence or certain people, presidents, prime ministers. And we still in 2025, when information and access to information is more quick and ubiquitous than any moment in human history. But one can still come up with a provocative new book about, a black or brown population. That is like completely new, completely fresh and offers a completely. So I do agree with you. I think that money is at the root. And I think that in acknowledging that. I think the challenge for, us on this call is to say, okay, what can we do about it? But we can't make money grow on trees. And we can't, reverse the, histories of explanations for why this department has more, why this event is examined more. But what can we do? And I do think more and more that, that has become a larger part of the job. So, when we have to teach courses, we get to decide, look, my students probably know more in their pinkie about this subject, that they know about this. But I’m going to be the one to make sure that for this quarter or this semester, they will have to read about Sudan. They will see Gaza on TV. They'll see it on the front page of their newspaper. They'll see it, all of that. And they should also learn about Gaza in college. Like, you know. Yes, yes, yes. But if I know that for every ten things about, Ukraine or Gaza or Iran, there's going to be maybe .2 about Sudan, then I get to determine whether my class is going to talk about Sudan most. I think that that's really the kind of where we're at. I think it's really great. I just want to go back and, re-emphasize on this point that you made about how the duty is on us, whether we have podcasts or, we have Facebooks, we've got social media. And I think one of the early lessons I learned when social media became a thing. Is how we can fight against a gradient of power between main media outlets and us who are also to the knowledge producers who are news producers. We can change, not reverse the balance; I'm not that romantic. But I think we can try to reduce it by making sure that we make up for these this lacuna by the media where the media is creating desire and I mean this metaphorically whereby the media is diverting or focusing all our attention on what's going on with Gaza at the expense of other unknown, forgotten, silenced genocides in the world. I have a question. How do you understand the role of US and UAE involvement in shaping the current conflict in Sudan? Yes directly, I think that, what has been kind of universally recognized by whether it's Human Rights Watch, the UN, Amnesty International, and the United States government itself. Is that Sudan in many ways is increasingly a proxy war. The UAE, which as we know geographically small country, but economically huge country. The UAE has been directly supporting the Rapid Support Forces. And the conflict, of course, being waged between the Rapid Support Forces and the Sudanese Armed Forces. The UAE is very interested in Sudan because of gold. The Sudan shipped out, I think, in 2022 a billion dollars worth of gold to the UAE alone. And the UAE to this day is kind of the world's clearinghouse, if you will, for gold. And so the UAE is very keen having kind of easy access to gold in Sudan. And so because of that, they have sided with the Rapid Support Forces, who is, in essence, in a very transactional way, giving the UAE access to gold in return for drones. And financial resources and kind of, state cover, if you will. And so UAE produced drones have been located at sites of mass violence and genocide in Sudan since the war began right way back in April 2023. The UAE is also very much interested in Sudan for the agricultural sector as well. Sudan, which again this is also not reported much, but Sudan historically because of the Nile, has really been an agricultural breadbasket. The UAE, in terms of thinking long term and thinking about climate change, they want to be really, great partners with the breadbasket countries. And Sudan represents that. So there's that. The U.S. gets involved or is complicit, of course, because the U.S. is allies with the UAE. The UAE being a very, important kind of, friend in that region. And so there absolutely a sense in which the U.S. is well, the United States government is disincentivized from really bringing down the hammer on the UAE for its complicity, because the UAE is itself a very strong partner. And so, yeah, then you mix in countries like, Iran, which has helped the Sudanese Armed Forces with their own drones because Iran would like to kind of apply pressure on Saudi Arabia. And so having, Sudan as a partner right across the Red Sea would help to kind of, apply more pressure not just on Saudi Arabia, but also the state of Israel. You've got Russia, who, like the UAE, is very invested in extracting Sudanese gold in order to insulate itself from the bevy of international sanctions that it has had since it invaded Ukraine in 2022. China is impacted because China is very interested in Sudanese petroleum. South Sudan sits on an ocean of oil. And so the kind of Port Sudan is, a very critical lifeline in terms of the flow of oil, not just to the Middle East, but further east, in Southeast Asia. You've got Egypt just to the north, which is run by its own kind of career autocratic soldier in El-Sisi. And Egypt is very keen on making sure that its access of the Nile River is not threatened, because for the last 5000 years, Egypt has seen the Nile as the existential piece of its geography. So for all of these reasons I argued very early on that what's going on in Sudan is the closest thing to a kind of, worldwide proxy war since the Congo crisis of 1960, where all of the, quote unquote, great powers are very invested in an outcome that ultimately benefits them and that at this point profits are being prioritized over people's lives. And so that's absolutely hindering the peace making process. Which, again, countries like the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the US are all involved, but the very countries involved in trying to broker a peace between those two are at the same time very invested in an outcome that will ultimately benefit themselves. Before we go, we wanted to go ahead and begin a new segment, especially with you, because we've considered so many topics within this discussion. Can you go ahead and present us with two book recommendations you have, either related to genocide studies related to the topics today or not? Let me see. I would recommend for one. Mahmood Mamdani’s book on Darfur, which is really about the Darfur genocide of the early 2000s. But he talks about kind of how, Darfur kind of enters this, Western ecosystem of Islamophobia and kind of anti-Arab sentiments. And I think that that's kind of like a great, entryway into that. And I would be remiss if I didn't say I would recommend“Bounds of Blackness”. And I would recommend it not only as, kind of an accessible text that talks about the United States in relation to Sudan. But also kind of Sudan's place within the global black imaginary. And so thinking about Sudan as, a particularly important location within the black world, and not just Africa specifically. Thank you so much for joining us today. We greatly appreciate talking with you. Alright, thank you so much. This was Not to Forgive, but to Understand with our guest Christopher Tounsel. To our listeners don't forget to like subscribe and stay tuned for more discussions.