Invisible Conflicts

Why do some conflicts dominate global headlines while others, often deadlier, remain invisible? In 2022, Ethiopia’s civil war caused more fatalities than the Russia–Ukraine war yet received 22 times less media coverage. These disparities are not random but reflect structural biases in the global information ecosystem, with life-or-death consequences for how humanitarian funding, policy attention, and even the duration of a conflict are shaped. This project develops the Invisible Conflicts framework, which draws on modern computational methods to conceptualize conflict invisibility as the gap between a conflict’s share of global severity and its share of global media attention. By linking human-validated conflict databases to media coverage triangulated across 86 languages and 210 countries, we measure invisibility for every recorded conflict event, test the mechanisms that drive it, and trace its downstream consequences for humanitarian response. The framework further delivers an open-source Invisible Conflict Monitor providing real-time invisibility assessments, giving journalists, humanitarian organizations, and policymakers a transparent tool to help ensure that no crisis is forgotten.

Project in progress, reach out to s.khanna@uva.nl for further details.