Wars and active state-based conflicts reached a historic peak of 65 active conflicts across 35 countries, more than double the 2010 figure and with increased lethality in 2025. Despite Western-centric media framing, there are no better or rationale wars, the human toll of war is the same whether that war is in Africa or Europe; wounds and scars of war are suffered by the soldiers and the public who are in the frontlines. Thanks to the global mainstream media framing, how war in the South and West is perceived is different to the global audience.
Global media framing shapes public perception, policy support, and how responsibility for conflict is understood. Modern conflicts (e.g., the Russo/ Ukraine war, the South Sudan civil war) highlight key patterns in how media organisations construct narratives.
The difference in how global media, political leaders, and observers often perceive wars in Europe versus conflicts in Africa stems from deep-rooted historical biases, media framing, geopolitical alignment, racial empathy bias and economic self-interest. While conflicts in Europe are frequently rationalised as critical geopolitical struggles for democracy or sovereignty, conflicts in Africa are often framed as “senseless” and/ or tribal feuds.
Presentation from mainstream media frequently utilises personalised language to humanise European victims. During the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, many journalists were keen to highlight that the refugees were “civilised,” “middle-class,” and looked “like us,” which implicitly framed conflict in Europe as an anomaly. This explicit language frames conflict in Europe as an unnatural, shocking departure from an otherwise peaceful norm. Public response across Western Europe was overwhelming empathy and the welcome of Ukrainian refugees with UK households even offering to accommodate them.
In contrast, cultural biases rooted in colonial-era racism and stereotypical orientation have conditioned global audiences to view conflict in the Global South as a normalcy. Because violence is viewed as the default setting in Africa, there is little focus on the underlying political rationale. Media coverage defaults to passive, macro-level statistics about famine and displacement rather than investigating the specific economic and political factors involved or colonial roots driving the conflict, thus presenting the violence as nothing more than regional anarchy.
In a global regime built to meet European demand, wars in Europe such as the Russo/ Ukraine war often directly threaten the capitalist machinery – major global nuclear powers and economic blocs like NATO and the European Union. Because these conflicts have immediate, measurable impacts on global energy markets, inflation, and international treaty structures, Western institutions rationalise them as existential struggles that demand strategic calculation.
Conversely, many African conflicts occur in countries that have been systematically stripped of influence and marginalised in global decision-making bodies like the UN Security Council. Naturally, when global powers do not have immediate economic and/ or political stakes in an African nation, its conflicts are frequently treated as localised humanitarian issues rather than critical geopolitical events.
Labelling African wars as “senseless tribalism” conveniently ignores the influence of arbitrary borders curved by European colonial powers in Africa during the 1884 Berlin Conference. These borders intentionally forced disparate ethnic groups into single nations or split unified communities apart to weaken local resistance, creating structural vulnerabilities that persist today.
The reality is that many modern African conflicts are fuelled by the global demand for essential natural resources that drive European economies such as cobalt, gold, and oil. Foreign corporations and governments frequently fund or interact with local armed groups to secure supply chains, meaning these wars are deeply tied to global capitalist rationales rather than being “senseless” internal disputes.
In European conflicts, media and political language articulates agency. There is a recognised aggressor breaking international law and a recognised defender protecting their homeland. This makes the war easy to rationalise as a binary struggle between right and wrong.
Whereas in African conflicts, international commentary routinely strips away the political ideologies, civil society demands, or constitutional crises driving the tension. Combatants are often grouped together as “militias,” “warlords,” or “factions”, thus dismissively framing the conflict into an anarchic power grab entirely devoid of political rationale.
Global media plays a pivotal role in how war is perceived; to change and give conflicts in Africa intellectual accounts of the underlying rationale, Africans must start writing their own story and stop relying on the Western-centric media presentation. The biggest problem is that Western media has not shifted from the racism, stereotypical perception of Africans as being unsophisticated to rationalise actions. When a conflict occurs in Europe, global powers view it through a highly structured lens of international law, state sovereignty, and existential threat. Yet when a conflict occurs in Africa, that structural analysis is frequently replaced by cultural fatalism, reducing complex political struggles to “chaotic tribal violence.”
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