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There is something dangerously soothing about moral distance. It allows scholars, commentators, and policymakers to pass judgment without ever risking involvement; to treat global violence as a thought experiment rather than a structure they inhabit. It also produces the now-familiar, misleading, and frankly infuriating question: Why do protesters flood the streets for Gaza but not for Sudan? A question that does not illuminate injustice, but disciplines how solidarity is allowed to appear.
What is framed as “moral inconsistency” reveals far more about those posing the question than about the movements it targets. The comparison rests on a gaze shaped by Europe’s colonial histories and racial hierarchies; a gaze that fragments struggles, isolates suffering, and demands that solidarity be rendered legible, proportional, and politically harmless. This gaze is not a neutral act of observation or a simple act of seeing, but an active ordering of the world: the racial production of the visible that determines in advance what can register as injustice and what is rendered invisible. From within this logic, empathy appears as a scarce resource to be evenly distributed, as if protest were an accounting exercise rather than a political practice.
But solidarity is not a mood, nor a form of moral self-expression. It is forged through long histories of struggle: through shared analyses, material connections, and repeated acts of collective alignment across time and place. These histories are precisely what the white, colonial gaze erases. Adopting a distant, God’s-eye view from which struggles are weighed and judged rather than understood, it makes solidarities appear fragmented and incoherent. What this gaze ultimately polices is not inconsistency, but connection: the capacity of struggles to recognise each other, overlap, and refuse the boundaries imposed by colonial ways of seeing.
The coloniality of responsibility – Gaza, Sudan, and Europe’s entanglement
Europe’s relationship to both Gaza and Sudan is not incidental, nor morally neutral. It is structural, though not symmetrical.
In Gaza, European states supply weapons, political cover, and dense networks of economic and academic cooperation, sustaining a system the UN has described as apartheid and alleged genocide. The visibility of this entanglement did not emerge through institutional transparency, but through decades of organising by Palestinian and transnational grassroots movements that forced these structures into public view.
Sudan’s entanglement with Europe is less easily contained within dominant narratives, but no less colonial. From British imperial rule to Cold War geopolitics, from extractive development schemes to decades of technocratic aid and peacebuilding interventions, Europe has remained deeply embedded in Sudan’s political economy of violence. Arms routed through Gulf allies, outsourced migration control, and strategic silence around the United Arab Emirates’ arming of the Rapid Support Forces all point to Europe’s ongoing role in Sudan’s devastation.
Protests framed as “about Gaza” are in fact embedded in wider infrastructures of solidarity linking Palestine, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, migrant justice struggles, and climate justice movements.
That mass mobilisation in Europe has been more visible for Gaza than for Sudan does not reflect indifference among grassroots movements. Many of the same activists mobilising for Gaza have long stood in solidarity with Sudan, drawing on transnational anti-colonial networks and shared analyses of militarism, racial capitalism, and impunity. Solidarity here is not a tally of attention, but of tracing and acting upon these overlapping structures of violence.
From outside these movements, such connections are often missed or misrecognised. Protests framed as “about Gaza” are in fact embedded in wider infrastructures of solidarity linking Palestine, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, migrant justice struggles, and climate justice movements. These relationships are made tangible through banners, chants, coordinated campaigns, and the active carrying of historical memory into present action. Student encampments exemplify this convergence, not as an additive list of causes, but as spaces where solidarities are enacted rather than itemised.
That these connections remain marginal in mainstream discourse does not indicate their absence. It signals how responsibility is routinely displaced, and how Europe’s own implication in multiple sites of violence is kept analytically and politically out of focus.
Whataboutism as a technology of inaction
It is at this point that whataboutism enters; not as a misunderstanding, but as a political manoeuvre. By insisting that solidarity must be proportional – “more for Gaza means less for Sudan” – political responsibility is transformed into a zero-sum moral calculation. The logic is deceptively simple: “If we can’t fix everything, we shouldn’t fix anything.” This is the colonial politics of inaction masquerading as moral universality.
Accusations of “selective outrage” are rarely made in good faith. They operate as a disingenuous rhetorical move, depoliticising protest by reducing solidarity to personal virtue and evacuating responsibility from institutions. Collective anger is recoded as emotional excess; political struggle becomes a moral performance. The demand for “perfect consistency” – which mirrors the demand for perfect victimhood – is not a call for justice but for paralysis. It is a familiar colonial move: replacing responsibility with introspection, and structural violence with philosophical debate.
In practice, this accusation functions instrumentally. It reframes solidarity with Palestine as morally suspect while leaving intact and invisible the common racialised structures that render Sudanese and Palestinian suffering selectively legible. Sudan’s suffering is invoked not to mobilise action, but to delegitimise mass protest for Gaza – particularly when that protest threatens to expose and disrupt European and Israeli complicity. In doing so, it reproduces the racial logics that determine whose suffering is grievable, whose resistance is dangerous, and which struggles must remain disconnected.
Policing protest, domesticating dissent
The same gaze that moralises protest also works to domesticate it. Having condemned movements for their supposed inconsistency, it then seeks to confine dissent within sanitised forms of acceptability: symbolic marches, polite petitions, rituals that disrupt nothing and demand nothing. The moment protest interrupts supply chains, institutions, or the smooth functioning of power, it is reclassified as “extreme,” “irrational,” or “dangerous” – and, increasingly, treated as a matter for criminal law rather than democratic contestation.
This logic mirrors the structure of international law itself. The past two years have laid bare, with unprecedented clarity, how a supposedly universal legal order reliably mobilises to defend white life while retreating into procedural ambiguity when confronted with racialised state violence. As legal scholar Noura Erakat has shown, this is not a malfunction but a design feature: International law has long served entrenched power, determining whose rights are urgent and whose rights can be indefinitely deferred.
As generations of anti-colonial struggles have shown, no major expansion of justice has ever been granted through institutional goodwill; it has always been forced through collective struggle.
None of this is new. Students occupying universities, dockworkers blocking weapons shipments, climate activists disrupting extractive infrastructure – and protesters now framed as security threats or terrorist actors for directly intervening in arms supply chains – are not breaking with democratic norms, but returning to what protest has always been: the interruption of systems that refuse to change themselves. As generations of anti-colonial struggles have shown, no major expansion of justice has ever been granted through institutional goodwill; it has always been forced through collective struggle.
People are not rejecting law or process. They are responding to the collapse of institutions – from universities to international courts – that have repeatedly failed to confront racialised violence. Expecting protest to remain morally pure, perfectly consistent, and politely delivered under these conditions is not moderation; it is abdication.
Gaza, Sudan, and the indivisibility of justice
Against the white gaze’s obsession with comparison, movements for Gaza and Sudan emerge from shared analyses and infrastructures of struggle. These are not competing tragedies but linked sites of racial capitalism, militarism, and abandonment. From London to El Fasher, from Brussels to Goma, from Berlin to Gaza, the same supply chains of weapons, financing, and extraction shape the violence people are resisting.
Sudan is not eclipsed by Gaza. Sudan and Gaza illuminate each other.
What critics dismiss as selective outrage is, in fact, a refusal of fragmented politics. Solidarity is system-focused: It connects struggles and targets the structures that bind them. Movements grasp what institutions continue to deny: Justice cannot be compartmentalised. Anti-racism that ignores anti-Arab racism is incomplete; feminism unmoved by occupation and militarised borders is hollow; climate politics without anti-colonial struggle is empty. No democracy can coexist with apartheid – anywhere.
People took to the streets for Gaza not because they cared “more”, but because Gaza exposed the architecture of global injustice with brutal clarity – and the urgency of dismantling it.
Solidarity is not only a feeling; it is a refusal: a refusal of hierarchies of humanity, a refusal to let institutions outsource responsibility to those they fail to protect.
Refusing the white gaze, then, is not a matter of better perception, but of political rupture: a refusal of the colonial device that fragments struggles, polices solidarity, and shields empire from accountability. It is, above all, a decision to act – together, across borders, and against the grain of the system that demands our moral quiet.
