Latest news with #GlobalSouth
Russia Today
15 hours ago
- Business
- Russia Today
BRICS offers global alternative to Western monopoly
BRICS is emerging as a strategic alternative to the unraveling Western-led global order, experts said at the 3rd Russian-African Conference held on Monday in Pretoria, South Africa. Speaking to RT, foreign policy analyst Sanusha Naidu described BRICS as part of a growing 'ecosystem' that countries are turning to amid rising uncertainty. 'When you enter into a very kind of unpredictable global architecture, countries look to see how they hedge their bets,' she said. 'The way the international system was compiled and the BRICS provide that kind of ecosystem for them to think about,' the analyst added. Fyodor Lukyanov, research director of the Valdai Discussion Club, noted that the rise of the Global South is altering the world's power dynamics – regardless of Western preferences. 'The fact that more countries joined BRICS as members or partner states, and all those countries are from the Global South, shows that the new environment emerges in the world, environment which is not anti-Western, but which can give alternative to the Western monopoly,' he said. BRICS was established in 2006 by Brazil, Russia, India, and China, with South Africa joining in 2010. Over the past year, the group has extended full membership to Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, the United Arab Emirates, and Indonesia. The bloc's partner countries include Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Uganda, and Uzbekistan. According to Steven Gruzd, head of the African Governance and Diplomacy Programme at the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA), demand remains strong for even more nations to join BRICS. 'There are apparently up to 40 countries who wanted to join' when South Africa chaired in 2023, he said, adding that the BRICS 'brand is doing well' and offers tangible benefits to new members. 'There certainly is a lot of interest in BRICS,' he noted. The 3rd Russian-African Conference, titled 'Realpolitik in a Divided World: Rethinking Russia-South Africa Ties in a Global and African Context', was held in Pretoria on Monday by the Valdai Discussion Club in partnership with the SAIIA.
Indian Express
a day ago
- Politics
- Indian Express
C Raja Mohan writes: The West vs the Rest, a fiction
Speaking at the 1957 Moscow Conference of Communist and Workers' Parties, Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong declared that the 'East wind will prevail over the West'. The occasion was the 40th anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. For Mao, the 'East wind' meant the 'socialist camp' (led by the Soviet Union and China), and the 'West wind' represented the capitalist countries (led by the US). He declared that the balance of world forces had shifted decisively in favour of the socialist camp in the middle of the 20th century. The idea that the West is in decline and that it will soon be swamped by the rising tide of 'the rest' has been a recurrent theme since the encounter between the West and the rest began several centuries ago. Here is the problem. The West refuses to disappear, and the rest is having a difficult time taking charge. Mao himself embarked on a fight with the Soviet Union barely two years after making the grand declaration on the rise of the East wind. He broke the socialist camp, divided the communist movement all over the world, and paved the way for an alliance between Communist China and the 'evil empire', the US. The marriage between Western capital and the Chinese market produced a breathtaking global economic expansion for nearly five decades. It also made Beijing the second most important power — economic, technological and military – in the world. A risen China now talks again of leading the East, now rebranded as the 'Global South' or the 'Global Majority' to victory against a declining West. Declinism is also in fashion in Western academia and think tanks. Many fear the barbarians from the East are ready to show up at the gates. The fear in the West is matched by the irrational exuberance in the rest about the impending collapse of the US-led world order. Sceptics might say, not so fast. They point to US President Donald Trump's entirely unanticipated initial successes in singlehandedly rewriting the rules of global trade. The rest did not join hands to counter Trump. Most of them have queued up to negotiate bilateral trade agreements with him. The claim that Trump is winning is vigorously contested. Is Trump accelerating the decline of the American empire and the West, or is he heralding its resurgence? While the debate on this question will continue, Amitav Acharya, one of the leading scholars of international relations, puts the debate in a deep historical perspective. Acharya's new book, The Once and Future World Order, seeks to dismantle the conceptions of global order built around the rise of the West. He reminds us that there was a world before the West and another after it. Acharya argues that the pursuit of order — rules, norms, and institutions that enable peace and promote commerce — did not begin with the modern West. He suggests it is rooted in ancient, diverse civilisations across the world. Far from a future dominated by a new hegemon or descending into chaos, he foresees a decentralised, inclusive system drawing on both Western and non-Western traditions. Acharya asserts that ancient Sumer, China, India, Greece, Mesoamerica, and the Islamic world all devised ways to manage interstate relations. While the post-World War II Liberal International Order led by the US shaped the modern age, Acharya sees it as just one chapter in a longer global history. The Western-led order, forged through empire, conquest, exploitation and ruthless Cold War geopolitics, was never as universal or complete as its proponents claimed. Global norms evolved through continuous cross-civilisational borrowing. The West never monopolised the ideals of peace, law, or cooperation. In confronting anxieties about Western decline, Acharya offers a different narrative. Rather than a harbinger of disorder, the erosion of Western primacy creates space for a more equitable global structure. He introduces the concept of a 'multiplex' order — where no single state dominates, and multiple actors, from states to international institutions and non-state players, share responsibility for shaping norms. Rejecting both the 'clash of civilisations' thesis and the idea of an inevitable Chinese hegemony, Acharya advocates a cooperative system grounded in civilisational pluralism. He envisions a world not of imposed norms but of negotiated consensus — a 'confluence of civilisations'. This future demands learning from each other, not dominance. The Once and Future World Order is a timely corrective to the dominant narratives in the West and the East. Acharya's central message is that the rise of non-Western actors is not a crisis but a chance to build a fairer, more representative system. Acharya's hopeful vision of a multiplex order is persuasive but incomplete. It downplays serious constraints in the East that hinder its capacity to shape a just and effective global order. These include authoritarianism, the rise of a state that is free to curb individual freedoms in the name of claimed collective interests, violent politics based on exclusive religious, caste, and linguistic identities, and the empowerment of violent vigilante groups that destroy social peace. There is no question that China has been the most successful non-Western world state in bringing economic prosperity and in rooting out the feudal vestiges. But it is yet to redeem the Chinese national movement's promise to deliver democracy to its people. Externally, China is unable to overcome the temptations of national chauvinism and the urge to dominate its neighbourhood. That, in turn, shatters ideas of Asian unity and the Chinese ability to lead a compact of the rest against the West. If the Western oppression is real, the Eastern ones are worse. Meanwhile, students, scientists, technologists, entrepreneurs, the rich and political dissidents from the East continue to migrate to the West, if they can. The soft power of the West remains a powerful magnet to those who see themselves as suffocating under the Eastern regimes. Acharya's critique of Western dominance is compelling, but not all aspects of the Western legacy can or should be discarded. The Enlightenment ideals of the 17th and 18th centuries — reason, scepticism, science, individual liberty, and secularisation of society away from religious dominance — are at the very foundation of Western primacy in the last three centuries. If the East wishes to lead in shaping the world order, it must engage these ideals critically and constructively. Any notion that the East can rise by short-circuiting these values is an illusion. It only delays and derails the effort to rise. The battles against political, religious, and other absolutisms remain to be fought and won in the East. Until then, a rising East will not present an alternative model — only a different and less attractive one. The profound internal contradictions within and across the East will continue to keep it well behind the West. The writer is distinguished fellow at the Council for Defence and Strategic Research and contributing editor on international affairs for The Indian Express
Russia Today
2 days ago
- Business
- Russia Today
Africa is West's dumping ground for toxic fuel
Western energy producers treat Africa as a place to offload dirty fuel they cannot sell at home, Nigerian investigative journalist David Hundeyin has told RT. According to Hundeyin, the long-running pattern reveals a deeper geopolitical design that prevents African nations from developing industrial independence. 'They [Western powers] see Africa as the place that can absorb the sort of toxic byproducts of the production process,' Hundeyin said. He explained that fuel refined for African markets is often processed to the cheapest possible standards, frequently containing sulfur levels 'sometimes up to 200 times the limit in the EU.' Rather than incurring the cost of refining to meet European environmental standards, producers export the substandard fuel to Africa 'because it's cheaper and easier to refine,' Hundeyin said. The practice is not accidental, the journalist argues, but political. 'There is a structure to the global economy,' he said, pointing to a system maintained by the US and European countries that prevents Global South nations from utilizing their own resources. 'Countries in the Global South… shouldn't be allowed to make use of their own resources or at least to beneficiate them,' Hundeyin added. He believes reversing this trend will require 'an expressly political decision to break away from the existing geopolitical alliances with Western.' His comments come after Aliko Dangote, president and chief executive of Dangote Industries Limited in Nigeria, stated that despite Africa's abundant crude oil production, the continent still imports over 120 million tons of refined petroleum products annually, 'effectively exporting jobs and importing poverty into our continent.' He highlighted this as a $90 billion market opportunity lost to regions with excess refining capacity. According to a 2024 investigation by the Mail & Guardian, major commodity traders Trafigura and Vitol have continued to export so-called 'African-quality' fuel to Africa, with levels of sulfur, benzene, and manganese far exceeding European standards. A 2016 report by Swiss NGO Public Eye also exposed how traders like Trafigura, Vitol, and BP were flooding African markets with toxic diesel. The consequences include spikes in air pollution and respiratory illnesses.
Zawya
2 days ago
- Politics
- Zawya
Zimbabwe: Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) launches two new projects on sustainable soil management and water governance in the Global South
Two transformative initiatives were officially launched in Zimbabwe, aimed at empowering the country to sustainably manage its soil and water resources. The two projects are entitled: 'Capacity Development on Sustainable Soil Management in the Global South' and 'National Water Roadmap towards 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.' These two projects focusing on sustainable soil management and water governance are designed to accelerate progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through enhanced technical capacity, inclusive governance, and South-South cooperation. "Water is at the centre of Rural Development 8.0. We are committed to delivering reliable water supply to 35,000 rural communities and 10,000 institutions, empowering development. The National Water Roadmap to 2030 is our guiding framework, aligning with Vision 2030 and the SDGs. Today, we launch not just projects, but a collective pledge to food security, access to safe, clean and portable water for all Zimbabweans," said Honourable Dr. Anxious Masuka, Minister of Lands, Agriculture, Fisheries, Water and Rural Development in a keynote address read on his behalf by Professor Obert Jiri, the Ministry's Permanent Secretary. The sustainable soil management project aims to build national capacities in developing countries for soil mapping and laboratory analysis, while promoting international technical collaboration through South-South Cooperation. It also fosters regional coordination to enhance soil health and biodiversity. The National Water Roadmaps project will support Zimbabwe in strengthening water governance through raising awareness of water's value across social, economic, and environmental dimensions. It promotes inclusive governance and cross-sectoral collaboration through country-led multi-stakeholder national water dialogues, prioritizes sustainable water allocation to agriculture, and guides sustainable water resources management to achieve all Sustainable Development Goals. 'These twin initiatives mark a turning point for Zimbabwe. By investing in sustainable soil management and water governance, we are not only improving natural resources management, but also empowering farmers, strengthening food systems, and building resilience against climate shocks,' said Patrice Talla, FAO Subregional Coordinator for Southern Africa and Representative to Zimbabwe. 'Through these projects, and with the strength of South-South Cooperation, we are equipping countries with the capacity to manage their resources wisely,' added Talla. FAO technical support in Zimbabwe and the region In Zimbabwe, FAO has provided technical support to the Ministry of Lands, Agriculture, Fisheries, Water and Rural Development to map priority watersheds, rehabilitate degraded catchments, and introduce water-saving irrigation techniques that boosted cereal yields by up to 25 per cent in pilot districts. Parallel to our water efforts, FAO has championed soil health under the Global Soil Partnership. In Zimbabwe, this partnership delivered soil fertility maps for more than 200,000 hectares, guided farmers in balanced fertilizer application, and introduced conservation agriculture practices that reduced topsoil loss by 40 per cent. FAO has also worked on upgrading the soil management laboratory and legume inoculant factory to bolster production and uptake of using rhizobium inoculants in production of legumes. Regionally, FAO collaborated with the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to harmonize soil testing standards and mobilized resources under the GEF-funded SOIL Care project to demonstrate climate-smart land management across six member states. A unified vision for sustainability Together, these initiatives represent a holistic approach to natural resource governance in Zimbabwe. They are grounded in the principles of efficiency, equity, resilience, and sustainability, and are driven by strong partnerships between developing countries and technical partners, supported by China's South-South Cooperation. These two projects are parts of two global programmes on soil and water, and Zimbabwe is the first country to kick off the implementation. Through technical cooperation, knowledge exchange, institutional collaboration, we build a long-term partnership that safeguard the precious soil and water resources for now and the future,' said LiFeng Li, Director, FAO Land and Water Division. Following the launch event, the sustainable soil management project will convene an inception workshop among key project stakeholders to develop project implementation modalities, decide project sites for field trials, develop project workplan and detailed budget, among others; while the National Water Roadmaps project will establish a country taskforce to conduct national implementation activities, guided by technical guidelines and frameworks to be developed by a Global Advisory Group. Distributed by APO Group on behalf of Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO): Regional Office for Africa.
Russia Today
2 days ago
- Politics
- Russia Today
Prof. Schlevogt's Compass No. 21: Pity picks sides – Ukraine mourned, Gaza shadowed, Russia blamed
George Orwell famously remarked, 'If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.' In the brutal realities of war and suffering, where borrowed beliefs replace independent thought, Orwell's warning cuts to the core: liberty is a hollow promise if it shields us from truths we resist. True compassion demands stories that challenge our biases and stretch our empathy beyond neat binary tales of 'good' and 'evil.' Yet political forces and media gatekeepers often silence inconvenient truths, trapping us in cycles of selective pity and moral stagnation. Breaking free requires a clear-eyed understanding of how the masters of political technology – the craft of shaping public perception, emotional response, and mass engagement – operate. Aristotle knew, and Attic tragedy showed, that pity follows a predictable pattern. With a precise grasp of the intricate mechanics of this multifaceted emotion, today's information warriors expertly calibrate its five interlocked enablers to achieve strategic ends: intensifying pity for Ukrainians while simultaneously dulling the emotional resonance of Gazan and Russian suffering. A point of interest: In much of the Global South and other regions outside the gravitational pull of the collective West, media narratives often diverge sharply from these Manichaean – black and white – portrayals, offering more complex and nuanced alternative perspectives that challenge this simplistic moral dichotomy. Because pity is a fragmented and inherently fragile emotion, Western political communicators repeatedly hammer binary messages with such relentless force that they become bludgeons, flattening nuance, crushing dissent, and echoing the same moral cues until they calcify into dogma. Yet this strategy carries sharp tradeoffs and reveals a critical vulnerability: the moment the narrative wavers – whether because information warriors shift priorities, or because reality refuses to comply and breaks through – the emotional scaffolding begins to buckle. Pity, once forcefully orchestrated, can swiftly curdle into skepticism, fatigue, or even backlash. What began as a unifying moral impulse risks collapsing into disillusionment. Pity is less a human reflex than a programmed response, and it works wonders. Let us use the 'Political Pity Equation' to lift the veil and expose how today's information magicians in the collective West conjure and banish public sympathy across three theaters of public perception – leveraging selective pity to sculpt a world that serves their interests: Ukraine, Gaza, and Russia. The magic formula is as simple as it is powerful: Pity (P) = Undeservedness (U) + Surprise (S) + Gravity (G) + Resemblance (R) + Closeness (C). The first enabler of pity, harm deemed undeserved, is selectively amplified or muted at will across the three discursive battlegrounds to serve the aims of information warriors. From the moment Russia launched its Special Military Operation (SMO) in 2022, Ukraine has been consistently framed in political discourse and the global media as the innocent victim of an unprovoked, unjust invasion – a lone David bravely defying the overwhelming, ruthless force of Goliath. The widely circulated account of an alleged Russian massacre in the small Ukrainian city of Bucha – its name aptly meaning 'trouble' and grimly echoing 'butcher' – detonated the moral center of the narrative and set off a seismic narrative shift. Dismissed by Moscow as a hoax, it nonetheless crystallized into a decisive turning point, reshaping the normative landscape of the war. The chilling chronicle of reported events intensified global outrage, sharpened ethical clarity, and heightened moral urgency, thereby galvanizing massive political and public support for Ukraine's cause. Information leaders also deployed their most potent weapon: children – the master key to the human heart. They wielded child-centered imagery with precision, intertwining it with the universally protective figure of the mother. Headlines flared with claims of Russian forces abducting thousands of Ukrainian minors, wrenching them from their families under the smoke of war. The stories struck like thunderclaps: maternity wards in Mariupol, Kherson, and beyond, allegedly reduced to rubble, tiny cries silenced beneath collapsing ceilings. Each narrative was calibrated not to inform, but to ignite – grief, outrage, and unwavering allegiance. In an unexpected twist, the first driver of pity – the perception that suffering is undeserved – offers a raw glimpse into this emotion's fragility and the tradeoffs woven into the texture of emotional manipulation. The moment Ukrainians are cast as reckless in their demands, ungrateful to benefactors – including refugee-hosting nations – and their government framed as authoritarian and belligerent, the edifice of pity begins to crack. In this scenario, initial sympathy dissolves into irritation, then hardens into outright contempt, as Ukrainians are subtly recoded as morally flawed: no longer blameless victims, but architects of their own undoing. In that shift, their plight ceases to be tragic and starts to seem deserved. Yet the tide has not turned decisively on this front, at least not yet. If Ukrainian pain still reliably commands Western pity, why do so many Gazans and Russians suffer offstage – and worse, without global compassion? Part of the answer lies in downplaying Aristotle's first enabler of pity: undeservedness. As a result, pain is met not with empathy, but with silence, suspicion – or even blame. The human toll is heavy, yet it goes without equal attention, recognition, and moral acknowledgment. In the Gaza Strip, civilians face a relentless Israeli blockade, mass displacement, and daily bombardment: hospitals, food centers, and schools all targeted. The UN reports nearly 88% of the territory falls under Israeli evacuation orders or militarized control, cramming over 2 million people into just 46 sq km – barely a third the size of Walt Disney World – as critical infrastructure lies in ruins and essential services have broken down. Strikingly, over 100 aid groups accuse Israel of orchestrating a deliberate, systematic campaign of forced mass starvation in Gaza – a crime, critics may argue, that brief pauses cannot undo. As if the cruel ordeal was not already beyond measure, Israel aims to corral Gaza's entire population into a so-called 'humanitarian city' – a narrow, sealed, permanent enclosure from which no one will ever be allowed to exit, branded by critics as a modern concentration camp. Western leaders, on the rare occasions they dare to voice even the mildest reproaches of Israeli force, invariably hasten to hedge them with the obligatory mantra affirming Israel's right to exist and defend itself – as if Hamas ever threatened the Jewish state's very survival – excusing, whitewashing, and offering cover for relentless, disproportionate shock and awe. Tellingly, Palestinian agony is still rationalized as the foreseeable and righteous payback for Hamas's 2023 attacks on Israel – a narrative fulcrum that undercuts the first enabler of pity: blameless suffering. The killing of some 60,000 Palestinians – mostly women and children, with the toll still climbing – is spun not just as justified retaliation for the reported death of about 1,200 people (about 400 of which were security forces), but as a necessary price for the rescue of some 250 hostages, soldiers among them. Even scenes of utter ruin are filtered through unproven claims of proximity to militant targets. To preserve the narrative's absolutes and sharp moral lines, disruptive context is quietly erased, such as the inconvenient history of what critics describe as prolonged Israeli aggression. Notably, Hamas viewed its incursion as a desperate bid to break free from a decades-long cycle of Israeli oppression. To protect the hostage story from complicating nuance, Western media seldom mention that Israel has nearly doubled its Palestinian prisoners since the incident – now around 10,000, including minors and many held without charge – whom Hamas, for its part, regards as Palestinian hostages for future swaps. The pain of Palestinian civilians, when noted at all, is often refracted through narratives that question their innocence instead of recognizing it as collective punishment: killing and uprooting an entire population to pave the way for the so-called 'Gaza Riviera.' This framing draws on long-cultivated, nested stereotypes. At the macro-level, Western political and media elites have long equated the Palestinian people wholesale with extremism and militancy, dulling empathy and easing indifference. At the meso-level, the Gaza Strip is persistently cast as inseparable from Hamas, fueling endless cycles of violence. At the micro level, civilians are often falsely branded Hamas sympathizers, guilty by association. Together, these overlapping layers blur the line between civilian and combatant, victim and perpetrator, veiling the true injustice, muting ethical alarm, and stifling ethical reckoning. Thanks to this persistent, multi-tiered formatting, Israel – unlike the so-called 'pariah states' Russia, Iran, and North Korea – remains insulated from serious Western sanctions, including lasting arms embargoes, despite allegations of grave war crimes. Germany's rationale for inaction is particularly revealing: holding Israel accountable might jeopardize diplomatic leverage over its government – leverage that, in truth, is vanishingly small, if not entirely imagined. Contrast this with Russia – an ostracized nation whose grief has been morally exiled. For many people there, the conflict with Ukraine is a harsh reality – relentless shelling, surreptitious drone strikes, and crippling economic sanctions tearing through daily life. Yet the Western political and media machine suppresses pity primarily by blanking out the Russian suffering or, in the rare cases that it is mentioned, casting the pain as deserved, blaming civilians for their government's actions. What should move the audience instead becomes a ledger of guilt. Conflating Russian identity with military aggression and geopolitical culpability, Russians are portrayed as the authors of their own misery – not victims, but complicit enablers functioning as extensions of state power. Their pain is portrayed not as a human tragedy, but as policy consequence – a purportedly imperial and irredentist nation framed as reaping what it sowed. When civilians die in drone strikes or conscripts return in coffins, the world looks away. Not because the pain is not real, but because it has been labeled deserved. Western discourse has scrubbed Russian suffering of innocence, casting every civilian as an accomplice, every wound as retribution. To entrench this skewed perspective, political technologists twist facts and erase the stark reality of innocent Russians killed by Ukrainians. Take the sunbathers – including children – torn apart on a crowded Uchkuyevka beach in 2024, as Ukrainian cluster bomblets rained down. Though captured on video and confirmed by eyewitnesses, the ruthless attack was swiftly dismissed as stray debris. By contrast, Ukrainian deaths are routinely portrayed as premeditated, merciless acts of terror by Russia against defenseless civilians. Conspicuous, too, is the silence around the 2014 Odessa Trade Union building fire, where 42 pro-Russian protesters burned to death. And this, even as the UN and Council of Europe censured Ukraine for failing to prevent the tragedy and for serious lapses in policing and justice. Also buried from view is the 'Gorlovka Madonna' – a mother claimed by Ukrainian shelling in 2014, arms wrapped around her slain child amid the rubble, a raw symbol of shattered innocence. Heretical suggestions that Ukraine bears any responsibility for the conflict – through nationalist provocations or entanglement in Western ambitions – are sidelined, replaced by a clear-cut, simplified narrative of pure victimhood. By dehumanizing afflicted Russians and sanctifying Ukrainian losses, Western discourse effaces any sense of injustice that would evoke true pity, instead breeding moral detachment and deadening compassion. Inconvenient analogies that contextualize and relativize Russia's war – from the Cuban Missile Crisis to Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq – or provocative thought experiments – like Russia using Mexico as a launchpad against the US – are airbrushed from the conversation. Such disruptive comparisons, which fracture moral lines, are drowned out by a binary narrative demanding one villain, one victim. An element of shocking surprise, such as calamity striking unexpectedly and suddenly, is often interwoven with perceived injustice and acts as a powerful additional catalyst for pity. Western media framed Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, literally, as a bombshell, sparking global compassion for the embattled underdog. Yet the reality is starkly different, as the following will reveal. Admittedly, historians in retrospect often fall prey to hindsight bias: the illusion that outcomes were obvious all along. But viewed from just before the invasion, with no foresight of what lay ahead, clear and urgent warnings of looming catastrophe were already sounding, as proven by key agencies flagging the threat at the time. In December 2021, Russia issued a high-stakes ultimatum to NATO and the US, demanding sweeping security guarantees, and in the weeks before the invasion massed an estimated 150,000 to 190,000 troops along Ukraine's border. US intelligence accurately predicted the scale, direction, and time window of the broad offensive. In fact, the forecast was so precise that global media managed to fly in star reporters and position cameras on rooftops, primed for the spectacle that, true to form, graciously obliged – as if on cue for the world's lenses. The repeated framing of Russia's attack as 'unprovoked' not only forged a sense of injustice, but also amplified surprise – a clear example of the first two enablers of pity intertwined. To uphold this dominant, slanted storyline of abrupt and shocking onset, Ukraine's fraught history with Russia – and the fairly predictable eruption it triggered – was erased. Prudent statecraft would have Ukraine, like Belarus, Kazakhstan, and others, pursue harmonious relationships with its far stronger neighbor. Sound judgment would have called for leveraging deep ethnic, economic, and cultural ties instead of courting confrontation and banking on risky Western intervention. Another moment where an unexpected rupture shocked the world: the 2023 Hamas attack. Because it was painted as an unimaginable bolt from the blue – though hardly the first act of horrifying violence in the region – sympathy for Israel surged. By contrast, Palestinian suffering, stretched out over years, faded into background noise. Western media consistently blunt outrage by repeating that Israel had 'warned' Gazans before airstrikes – as if forewarning, especially when escape is impossible, absolves the violence; as if announcing destruction somehow renders it less brutal; as if Israel holds the right to dictate the movements of over 2 million besieged, captive people in Gaza – now reportedly reduced by 10% since the war began. Russians, too, harvest few 'pity points' from the collective West, as their suffering is framed not as surprising but as expected retribution for the invasion. In some ways, Russia fares even worse than Gaza in the global media, with even fewer stories or images of civilians harmed by Ukraine making the rounds. Political technologists dial the volume of suffering up or down, orchestrating pity like a soundcheck. The images of Ukrainian civilians sifting through rubble for survivors after bombings, mothers cradling wounded children in ravaged hospital corridors, and soldiers limping from the frontlines all paint a picture of pain that is serious yet not total and final. Stories of cities shattered but still resisting, families displaced but clinging to hope, show suffering that demands empathy, resolve, and assistance. This raw, visible struggle embodies Aristotle's condition perfectly: harm that is tragic but yet incomplete, stirring deep, enduring pity and – its vital counterpart – inspiring resolute action across the globe. By contrast, Israel has barred independent reporting from Gaza, hiding the human toll from clear view. Without vivid images or personal stories, public empathy and solidarity falter. Western media deepen this detachment by subtly casting doubt on casualty figures, labeling them, even in headlines, as claims from 'Hamas-run' sources with presumed agendas. No such qualifiers appear for Israeli data. Meanwhile, Israel's relentless airstrikes and bulldozing flatten and erase entire neighborhoods in Gaza, while its suffocating blockade of the Strip starves hospitals of fuel and children of food, breeding a sense of endless catastrophe. When whole communities vanish beneath the rubble, devastation feels too vast, too abstract, too overwhelmingly conclusive to move hearts or rouse action. For Russians, grief caused by Ukraine often unfolds quietly: perhaps a mother receives a sealed envelope bearing news of her son's death, a village school shuts down after teachers are lost, or neighborhoods strain under rising prices. With much of this suffering framed as the cost of political choices, and lacking the immediate, agonizing cries for help seen elsewhere, the pain lacks its sting – muting pity despite the real human losses. To conclude, information warriors wield pity like a precision-guided weapon –calibrated, targeted, and devastatingly effective. That makes it all the more urgent to grasp what fuels this emotion. Crucially, pity is stirred not only by perceived undeservedness, shocking surprise, and the sheer scale of suffering, but also by what I call 'protected relatability'. [Part 2 of a trilogy on the politics of selective pity. To be continued. Part 1, published on 26 July 2025: Prof. Schlevogt's Compass No. 20: The Political Pity Equation – Who deserves our tears?]
