How media symbolically reproduces violence in Sudan

The civil war that erupted in Sudan on April 15 2023 was not merely a military event. It marked a revealing moment for systems of discourse, particularly the media, as a central actor in producing meaning, shaping public consciousness, and determining what becomes visible and what remains obscured. In contemporary armed conflicts, media does not simply transmit facts. Through language, selection, pacing, and the conferral of legitimacy, it actively participates in the symbolic construction of war.

In Sudan’s current crisis, local, regional, and international media played a decisive role in reproducing the dominant narrative, not only through what was reported, but through what was ignored: how priorities were set, who was granted platforms and who was excluded, and how the violent moment was framed as a coherent whole.

Professional journalism often claims neutrality, yet this claim collapses under critical scrutiny. Neutrality is not measured solely by balancing voices, but by how news is constructed, how its elements are ordered, how language is deployed, and by what is recognized in the first place as news, analysis, or opinion.

In this war, the media did not operate as a mirror of events on the ground, it instead functioned as a conditioned lens, amplifying narratives aligned with power and existential control while muting or marginalizing those that challenged them or lacked the capacity to resist. Neutrality thus became a linguistic mask concealing a structural bias toward centers of power, shaped less by individual journalists than by the political economy of media production: funding, speed, advertising pressures, and market logics.

In moments of extreme violence, battles are fought not only with weapons but through narratives of legitimacy, and media is one of their primary factories. Through repetition, naming, and normalization, media reshapes the boundaries of what is acceptable, exceptional, or beyond debate. When the war is framed as a “power struggle,” a “battle to restore democracy” promoted by the Rapid Support Forces, or a “decisive campaign” marketed by the Sudanese army, it is stripped of its social, historical, political, and economic context. Reduced to a contest between two ostensibly equal armed actors, such framings erase power asymmetries, the nature of the violence inflicted, its impact on civilians, and its far-reaching consequences for Sudanese society.

News dominance and the erosion of structural context

Close monitoring of media content during this period shows that dominant coverage, especially local reporting, focused almost exclusively on daily military developments: advances and retreats, clashes, territorial control, and shifting frontlines. Despite its apparent news value, this approach fragmented the war into isolated events, stripped of historical and structural context. The war was reduced to an operations bulletin, measured in kilometers gained or positions reclaimed rather than in lives lost or social structures destroyed. As a result, fundamental questions vanished: why did the war erupt, what kind of state produced it, how violence accumulated within its institutions, who bears the cost, who finances the fighting, why it has endured, and who benefits most.

When the military becomes the primary source, its logic permeates media language. Operations are framed as security imperatives, civilian casualties as collateral damage, and human suffering is erased beneath technical descriptors.

Mainstream media rarely engaged in sustained critical analysis of the conflict’s structural roots, whether related to the formation of the Sudanese state and its systemic imbalances, the political economy of militarization, the politicization of security institutions, or the collapse of the civilian transition. Instead, the war was routinely reduced to a “dispute between generals” or a “struggle for power and influence,” recast as a contingent episode rather than the product of a long trajectory of institutionalized violence and widening political, social, and economic fractures. This evacuation of context is not merely an intellectual failure but a symbolic practice that reproduces the crisis by obscuring its structural origins and presenting the war as an aberration rather than a predictable outcome.

One of the most striking features of the war’s coverage, and one of its most consequential gaps, was the near-total reliance on secondary sources: official statements, spokespersons, unnamed “informed sources” linked to security agencies, and video footage released by the warring parties themselves from inside combat zones. Military propaganda produced by RSF soldiers during or after attacks, including those targeting civilians, became a recurring source, with the fall of El Fasher in late October standing as a stark example.

This reliance was not merely technical; it was a discursive choice that granted weapons the authority to define reality. It stemmed in part from the severe absence of field war correspondents capable of conveying unfiltered truth, despite the acknowledged dangers. When the military becomes the primary source, its logic permeates media language. Operations are framed as security imperatives, civilian casualties as collateral damage, and human suffering is erased beneath technical descriptors.

As military secondary sources dominated coverage, civilians receded as knowledge producers and appeared only as silent victims. Affected communities were rarely given space to interpret what was happening to them, articulate their priorities, or challenge prevailing narratives. Even when attempts were made, they were limited, superficial, and marginal. Civilian victims were typically presented as statistics, fleeting images in humanitarian reports, or manufactured quotations, not as political subjects with memory, interpretation, and positions. This exclusion does more than weaken alternative narratives; it reproduces the same relations of domination that generated the war itself.

The persistent use of seemingly neutral technical language became one of the primary mechanisms through which violence was normalized in media discourse. Headlines such as “violent clashes,” “field advances,” and “recapturing sites” transformed the war into a competitive spectacle resembling a strategic game, obscuring the reality that it is a systematic destruction of social, economic, and political life and a comprehensive violation of human dignity and rights. This language does not merely report violence; it symbolically reshapes it by separating it from pain, death, displacement, and loss, rendering it consumable on a daily basis without moral shock.

Language here does not simply describe reality; it sets the limits of how reality can be thought about, foreclosing the imagination of political or civilian alternatives

The continuous repetition of certain terms turns them from provisional descriptions into unquestionable facts. When words such as “control,” “attack,” and “strategic drone strike” circulate without scrutiny, they reproduce the logic of force as the only imaginable solution. Language here does not simply describe reality; it sets the limits of how reality can be thought about, foreclosing the imagination of political or civilian alternatives.

Despite the gradual expansion of regional and international coverage, alongside statements from UN agencies and human rights networks, Sudan was often framed as a perpetual space of crisis, violence, and failure. This framing, however sympathetic it may appear, strips events of their political and economic specificity and subsumes them into a generic narrative of “fragile states.” The result is humanitarian sympathy emptied of politics, society, and economics, focused on aid and relief rather than questioning the international and regional structures that helped produce and sustain the conflict.

Coverage intensity was frequently tied to the war’s intersection with the interests of major powers, regional stability, or migration concerns, rather than to civilian suffering itself. External priorities thus remained central in defining the significance of events, while internal realities were marginalized, reducing Sudanese society to an object of care rather than a political, social, and economic actor.

Local media operated under conditions of extreme repression and danger: communication blackouts, security threats, institutional collapse, and acute polarization. These conditions constrained independent reporting and pushed many outlets toward recycling ready-made or even imagined narratives. However, understanding these constraints does not absolve local media of its symbolic and social responsibility, particularly when it reproduces militarized discourse under the guise of professional norms or engages in polarizations that reinforces the logic of war and justifies ongoing violence.

From the first day of fighting, local media became a symbolic battleground between political, military, and ideological camps, producing news as tools of mobilization rather than understanding. This polarization eroded public trust, deepened social divisions, and weakened any space for a unifying narrative that centers civilians and contributes, even partially, to imagining an end to the crisis.

Symbolic reproduction of violence

The danger of prevailing media discourse extends beyond poor description or professional shortcomings to a deeper level: the symbolic reproduction of violence itself. Violence is transformed from an exceptional shock into a normalized condition, repeatable and livable. This symbolic violence operates slowly but deeply, reshaping collective consciousness, moral sensibilities, and definitions of what is acceptable and unacceptable.

Normalization does not necessarily mean moral acceptance of war, but it produces forced adaptation. Violence becomes part of the everyday order, not a malfunction within it. As the war drags on, loss dulls, anger fades, and ethical questions give way to technical calculations of force and territory.

Media does not merely describe power balances; it participates in redefining legitimacy itself. What is deemed “realistic” becomes what weapons impose

When the war is consistently presented as a contest of “decisiveness” and “imposing control,” media discourse reproduces force as the only viable solution. Politics disappears as a space of negotiation and social struggle, replaced by the language of dominance and victory. Media does not merely describe power balances; it participates in redefining legitimacy itself. What is deemed “realistic” becomes what weapons impose, while civilian, democratic, or rights-based discourse is cast as naïve or irrelevant. This process eliminates alternatives before they can emerge and weakens society’s political imagination.

Symbolic violence is also evident in the portrayal of victims as silent masses of suffering rather than political subjects. Painful images, large numbers, and decontextualized humanitarian reports, despite their importance, can strip victims of voice when detached from context. Civilians become objects of pity rather than bearers of rights, recipients of aid rather than actors demanding justice. This framing enables sympathy without accountability and grief without responsibility. Through its sources, language, and framing, media discourse has reproduced the same relations of domination that produced the war: military centrality, marginalization of the periphery, and the subordination of knowledge to power. In doing so, local media has become part of the crisis structure itself, not merely its messenger.

Towards an alternative discourse

If dominant media discourse has contributed to reproducing violence, then, thinking about alternatives is not a moral or professional luxury but a political and epistemic necessity. An alternative discourse does not mean propaganda alignment, but reclaiming media’s role as a tool of understanding and accountability rather than normalization.

The first step for the production of an alternative discourse is restoring civilians to the center of the narrative, not only as victims but as actors with interpretations, demands, and collective memory. This requires expanding the definition of credible sources to include local communities, emergency committees, displaced populations, human rights defenders, and those sustaining daily life. Giving civilians voice means recognizing that knowledge is not produced only in military command rooms or official statements, but in destroyed homes, markets, displacement camps, refugee settlements, and diaspora streets.

An alternative discourse must interrogate language itself. Why say “clashes” instead of “killing”? Why “advance” instead of “occupation of residential neighborhoods”? Why “control of area X” instead of “mass forced displacement”? Deconstructing terminology is not a linguistic exercise; it is the restoration of violence’s human and political dimensions. Linking military events to their social consequences, displacement, service collapse, social fragmentation, and political decay, returns the war to its true scale as a societal crisis and a collapse of the state, not a contest of strength.

Such a discourse requires reducing uncritical dependence on military sources, expanding verification, and asking questions weapons never ask: who benefits, who loses, what is destroyed in the long term? This does not mean ignoring battlefield facts, but liberating them from official narratives and subjecting them to scrutiny. Wars are sustained not by weapons alone, but by discourse that renders them reasonable and justifiable. The struggle to reclaim a critical, human-centered, and deeply political media is inseparable from the struggle to end the war itself. When language is reclaimed from the grip of weapons and civilians are restored to the center of the story, imagining peace, even theoretically, becomes possible rather than an empty slogan.