From February 2022, the Russian war in Ukraine dominated global media. Then, two years ago, the war in Gaza began, and almost every day since the news has been dominated by stories from both conflict zones. Endless Australian coverage has reported who has advanced where, how many civilians have died or fled, and how the international community has reacted to what happened on the battlefield.

But many conflicts go on for years where people continue to die and flee that don’t appear in the headlines.

According to Vision of Humanity there are currently 59 ongoing conflicts worldwide, including civil wars, coups and terrorist activity. That’s the biggest number since the second World War. In 17 of these conflicts, more than a thousand people died in 2024 alone.

Dr Mohammed Dan Suleiman is a social scientist whose work focuses on the conflicts in Sahel, a geographical area that runs from Senegal

Sahel region is highlighted in brown. Photo: TL Miles via Wikimedia Commons. 2017

to Eritrea, south of the Sahara, and includes Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger. Here, conflicts have been ongoing since the region gained independence in the 1960s. Islamic State [ISIS] and Al’Qaeda are active in the area. In 2024, 51 percent of terrorism-related deaths in the world occurred in Sahel.

Suleiman tells upstart that global media located in the Global North, a group of wealthy and industrialised countries, like the European Union, the United States of America and Australia, are too far away from Sahel and other regions where most of the wars are happening. So are their audiences. That shifts their focus.

“These things come together to determine whether the conflicts in Sudan or in the Sahel are underreported or overreported,” he says. “In this instance, they are underreported because the actors involved are not as important to the international community…”

Newsroom factors like audience, reach, and estimations of newsworthiness impact how and if global events are reported in Australia. When choosing what to report, editorial staff and journalists consider factors like how close their audience is to the nation where the event took place, both culturally and geographically. And when choosing international stories, we tend to see news from the same nations that Australia has close cultural or political ties with. For example, when there were massive floods in Pakistan earlier this year with at least 900 people died, it received significantly less coverage in Australia than the floods in Texas in June that killed 135 people.