Some 20 years ago, the Darfur region of Sudan was in the throes of a brutal war against rebel African groups protesting their economic and political marginalisation.

Arab militias known as the Janjaweed joined the central government to quell the rebellion, and the repression soon metastasised into ethnic cleansing — and, some say, genocide.

Outrage abroad over the atrocities spurred a global advocacy campaign that came to be known as the Save Darfur movement. Two decades later, Darfur is burning once again, but the network that once heeded its cries is now dramatically diminished.

At its peak, Save Darfur drew a constellation of celebrities from Hollywood, sports and politics, and from across lobbying and activist groups. Advocates included actors George Clooney, Don Cheadle and Ryan Gosling, Olympic speed-skating champion Joey Cheek, and a charismatic, young US senator Barack Obama.

Addressing a crowd gathered at the National Mall in Washington, DC, in April 2006, Obama said of the conflict in Darfur: “If we care, the world will care. If we act, then the world will follow.”

The movement began in 2004 with the Save Darfur coalition, which sprang from established Jewish anti-genocide networks in the US. In July that year, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the American Jewish World Service organised the Darfur Emergency Summit in New York, featuring the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, to draw attention to events in Darfur and make the case for intervention.

The coalition then grew to include 190 religious and human rights organisations affiliated in cause and purpose. The most high-profile among them was the Enough Project, an advocacy group hoping to end mass atrocities in African conflicts co-founded in 2007 by Gayle Smith, a former journalist and US government official, and John Prendergast, a human rights activist.

The outcome was a powerful, well-funded network that successfully lobbied the US government and international organisations such as the United Nations for attention, and raised private and public donations. Between 2003 and 2005, the United States provided more than $638 million in humanitarian aid for Darfur. In 2007, the UN approved the creation and mobilisation of a peacekeeping mission in the region.

By 2006, Save Darfur had already grown into the sort of campaign that could draw so many influential people to the Mall. The shadow of mass atrocities in Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s loomed large over a guilty global conscience; the UN Security Council had established two ad hoc tribunals to judge those crimes.

The International Criminal Court was established in 2002 — and some years later would hand out Darfur-related indictments. The Responsibility to Protect, which calls on all states to protect all populations from genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity — and to prevent such acts “through appropriate and necessary means” — was adopted in 2005 at the UN World Summit.

According to Rebecca Hamilton’s book Fighting for Darfur: Public Action and the Struggle to Stop Genocide, President George W. Bush declared that the Clinton administration’s failure to halt the massacres in Rwanda would not be repeated on his watch. His own administration had also heavily invested in the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended a decades-long civil war between Sudan’s central government and rebel groups in the south, leading to South Sudan’s eventual independence in 2011. That effort drew on religious solidarity with the largely Christian South Sudanese — or on Bush’s faith.

But the Darfur conflict was more than a chance at redemption: It also coincided with the early years of the US government’s war on terrorism. American troops spread into Afghanistan and Iraq. Washington was unapologetic about projecting power. It was trigger-happy about the application of sanctions.

To some, however, these overlapping agendas suggested that saving Darfur was less about Darfur than about the vanities of foreign policy interventionism. That the movement was not actually engaging with the deeper origins of the issue and the appropriate sources of possible solutions — namely, complicated structural challenges within Sudan and the disempowered local actors best placed to address them.

Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University, wrote in September 2009, “If ‘Save Darfur’ is interested in peace, the best it can do in the cause of peace is to fall silent.”

Earlier that year, in a debate with Prendergast at Columbia University, Mahmoud Mamdani, a professor of government and anthropology, said that Save Darfur “has not created or even tried to create an informed movement, but a feel-good constituency.”

A little under two decades later, it is not only Darfur but all of Sudan that is engulfed in conflict. In April 2023, a military partnership fell apart and took the country with it.

Fracturing swiftly followed. Today, there is looting and rape in the capital Khartoum, ethnic cleansing in the west, and a steady stream of refugees in the east.

The spectre of genocide looms once again over African peoples in Darfur. What there isn’t is the sort of global attention that some 20 years ago achieved the challenging task of capturing attention, advocacy, and funding for a complicated conflict in a remote part of Africa.

A fraction of that attention, whatever one thinks of its motivations, now seems impossible, miraculous even. When the news covers Sudan at all, it broadcasts events in snatches of atrocity. At best it presents a potted history of the conflict, followed by an appeal from a frustrated analyst or a humanitarian organisation’s representative summarising all the ways in which things are bad.

Since October 7, 2023 and Israel’s war in Gaza, Sudan has been reduced to something even smaller: A “what about” talking point, to be raised among the flurry of another discourse. It is a tragedy often mentioned not in its own right, but to suggest that it does not receive enough attention because so much has been unreasonably diverted toward other conflicts.

For this essay, I recently approached the media spokesman of the Enough Project — now shuttered and its work incorporated into The Sentry, a group co-founded by Clooney and Prendergast that investigates links between corruption and conflict — asking for clarification about the Enough Project’s position on current events in Sudan.

He told me the organisation's work has pivoted to being “fully focused on investigations and policy engagement.”

In an op-ed in April, Prendergast and Cheadle lamented that Darfur is engulfed in war again and declared that Save Darfur, and so their own previous efforts, had failed.

“What was missing 20 years ago,” they wrote, “was any biting consequences for those committing genocide,” and, “This time, the United States in partnership with its allies should utilise the vast array of policy tools of financial pressure such as targeted network sanctions and anti-money laundering measures.”

In January 2019, when the uprising that eventually ousted President Omar Hassan al-Bashir was being violently suppressed to little global outcry, I had asked in a column in The Guardian why Clooney and company were keeping silent about the Sudanese revolution or why, as they put the issue, “the human rights caravan moved on.” Clooney and Prendergast promptly answered, in an opinion piece of their own: “over time, we realised that naming and shaming the regime and exposing its complicity in mass atrocities were not having sufficient impact on the policies of governments in Europe, America and Africa, so we decided on a new approach.”

This new approach involved working to prevent Sudan from being removed from the US government’s list of state sponsors of terrorism — even though that designation, in place for years, had not meaningfully weakened the regime and the regime’s business networks were able to bypass sanctions. (The blacklisting did, however, make it hard for Sudanese citizens to travel, bank or participate in the global economy.)

Clooney and Prendergast explained that their efforts to prevent normalisation with the Bashir regime were combined with a campaign to go after the funds it had looted and the international financial system that had enabled that theft. Much of their advocacy, they added, was not “done in public.”

It is not entirely clear how this approach could yield better results than the previous in the new absence of the will needed to implement the punitive measures recommended. And it seemed to elide the fact that previously, when that will did exist, sanctions and blacklists had been heavily deployed to little effect.

The spotlight on Darfur two decades ago did result in direct sanctions against several individuals associated with the regime’s actions in the region, and in 2009, it did earn al Bashir himself an indictment from the International Criminal Court for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. And yet Clooney and Prendergast were dissatisfied with the yield of their public advocacy.

A generous reading of their assessment is that over time they developed a deeper understanding of the conflict in Sudan: An awareness that anything short of regime change was not a sufficiently ambitious goal and that freeing Darfur from the risk of subjugation was impossible so long as the same cohort of elite military and commercial interests remained in power in Khartoum. 

Another possible reading is that the limitations of external advocacy in solving complex issues on the ground will always thwart even its most well-meaning representatives. So far, the vital movements for change have happened within Sudan, brought about by Sudanese, with little outside support or funding. It was a colossal popular revolution that toppled al Bashir in 2019 — offering a momentary glimpse into another possible Sudan, one in which ethnic and class solidarities could be forged, civilians brought into government, and a corrosive, extractive military and security establishment sent back to the barracks once and for all. 

One reason the former dedicated international effort to draw eyes on Sudan has melted away undoubtedly is just time and fatigue. It has been more than 20 years since the war in Darfur started in earnest, and caring about Sudan’s succumbing to conflict again draws on resources that already have been depleted. It is difficult to maintain the same level of attention, commitment and fundraising efforts over decades, as a conflict waxes and wanes. People move on, new wars flare up — notably in Ukraine and Gaza — and the governments at the heart of advocacy movements change. 

This moment is profoundly different. The country that was the locus of the Save Darfur movement was on the cusp of an Obama presidency; today, that country is bracing itself for the possibility of another Trump administration. 

In the intervening years, the United States stepped back, practically and ideologically, from interventionism. The withdrawal of its troops from Afghanistan after the Taliban returned to power in 2021, an embarrassing and humbling episode, called time on the US’s claim to moral, military and strategic supremacy.

More broadly: The genocides of the 1990s are now a distant memory, and the idealistic “never again” pose of those years has been replaced by steely realpolitik. US legislators bicker over aid to Ukraine.

Even as Israel is being investigated on credible charges that it is committing genocide in Gaza and the International Court of Justice rules that its occupation of the West Bank is unlawful, the US government’s commitment to preventing mass crimes is faltering.

Another factor in the difference between then and now is that the situation in Sudan today tests activists’ reliance on a simple story — the kind of story that pits a singularly powerful bad perpetrator against a weak, helpless victim.

Binaries sharpen narratives. A religious or ethnic angle, in which one dominant group discriminates against another, is helpful in defining the contours of a foreign conflict and making it salient.

The plight of women under the Taliban was pressed into service to garner support for the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 by both Cherie Blair, the British prime minister’s wife at the time, and Laura Bush, then the US first lady. 

Ethnic cleansing in Darfur was not just a tribal conflict; it was a conflict between Arabs and Africans, much like before it the war between Sudan and what became South Sudan had been cast as opposing Muslims and Christians.

Various nuances underlay both conflicts, mostly related to the monopolisation of political and economic power by a small Arab elite in Khartoum, but they also played along ethnic lines and that feature became the entire story.

If the crime scene is in Africa, framing the events in binaries is even more important — so hard is it to draw in outsiders accustomed to narratives of disaster and inured by years of various civil wars and famine.

Some of that is about human nature. But some of it is about the sadly high hurdle that conflicts in the non-Western world have to scale in order to be deemed worthy of attention.

It is not enough that there is suffering. That suffering must also pass the narrative test —ideally by playing into tropes about ethnic supremacism or religiously fundamentalist warlords. 

The Sudanese are now failing that test, badly. This story is so complicated that outsiders can gain no purchase on it in a way that evocatively pricks saviours’ impulses or sparks outrage against a Biblical Goliath.

The war opposes two Arab parties, the army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which the army created from the remnants of the brutal Janjaweed groups it unleashed in Darfur two decades ago.

The Goliath has split into two and is now fighting itself. The people who have been killed, raped and driven from their homes are disparate in class and ethnicity. The horror is being visited not just on small villages in a stricken remote hinterland, but in the cities.

Khartoum, the country’s large, stable and prosperous capital on the Nile, was in a few months reduced to a battleground where dogs eat the corpses of the dead on the streets and the airport is a charred graveyard of bombed international passenger planes.

The city’s tragedy is inconvenient: Its inhabitants, its infrastructure, its rich history, its precious heritage are at the country’s centre, not its margins. And then the involvement of outsiders, such as the United Arab Emirates, whose support for the RSF is feeding the war, add yet another layer of complexity.

All of that is the awkward truth, and a reason for the bewildering silence on events in Sudan at a time when outside help is crucial. The prospect of the largest famine in the world is fast approaching.

More than half the population is now facing crisis levels of hunger, according to the World Food Program. More than 10 million people have been displaced inside Sudan since the beginning of the conflict—the largest number anywhere in the world.

And yet the United Nations said in June that only 16 percent of the humanitarian funds required to help the Sudanese have been raised. What is needed today is the sort of loud protest and media-catching events, all that public noise, from two decades ago.

Humanising suffering should not demand a good backstory; international legal censure is a blunt tool that should not be the default solution. It may be difficult to confront the fact that sometimes little can be done other than to support the victims of war and apply pressure on the perpetrators.

Yet that is not nothing. If activists are frustrated with the limitations of their own efforts, it is because historically they have relied on too narrow and too prescriptive a definition of what deserves sympathy and on too simplistic and too activist-centric a reading of the solutions.

Unless the role of outside actors is rethought and redefined, advocacy will always be more an expression of the cultural and political forces around it rather than an adequate response to the calamities it denounces.

Now, as the world reneges on its grand promises and Sudan collapses, is the moment to learn this lesson. Otherwise, what little remains of Save Darfur and the human rights infrastructure that birthed it will hurtle, along with Sudan, into the void.