When I arrived at school just days after major developments in Venezuela, no one mentioned it. Instead, conversations focused elsewhere. That contrast stayed with me. Why do some crises dominate our attention while others remain invisible? When we speak of “global” issues, perhaps we should ask: who is actually included in that definition, and who is not?
Author: Alexia De O. Camilo
To truly understand why I wrote this, you must first understand my background, the same one I share with millions of others. Hi, I’m an immigrant. More specifically, a south-of-the-equator immigrant.
For the past couple of months, I have been silently observing my surroundings: the news, how people react to it, the type of news they concern themselves with, and more importantly, the type of news they do not. This piece is not written to undermine the social, political, and economic issues the Western North faces, but rather to bring to light something I have been noticing, patterns in attention, and perhaps even more tellingly, patterns in neglect when it comes to what is often labelled a “third world country.”
The first time I noticed this, I am almost embarrassed to say, was only a handful of months ago. In early January, discussions and reports emerged regarding possible United States action against Nicolás Maduro, including legal accusations related to narco-terrorism and drug trafficking. A situation that, depending on how you look at it, raises serious questions about international law, particularly Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, which prohibits the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.
This was followed by renewed attention to Venezuela’s oil reserves, the largest in the world, to be exact. Call it what you want: decisive or excessive, necessary or unlawful. For many Venezuelans, it represented a moment of cautious relief after years of political and economic hardship.
For the moment, however, that is not what I ask you to focus on. Rather, I ask you to imagine my surprise when I arrived at school not even three days later, and all I heard anyone talking about was the tragedy of the Crans-Montana fire on New Year’s Day. The loss was devastating: young women and men, and children. A tragedy, yes.
But here is where the question begins.
Why is it that some events immediately enter our collective conversations, while others—equally complex, equally impactful—seem to remain distant, almost invisible?
When it comes to issues below the equatorial line, that distance becomes even more noticeable.
Here is some data for you to consider. According to various media analyses conducted in recent years, only an average of 9% of airtime and column space in several European countries is dedicated to the Global South, despite the scale of the crises faced. The war in Tigray in Ethiopia, for instance, often described as one of the deadliest conflicts of the 21st century, received significantly less coverage than the war in Ukraine across major outlets. Yet both regions had 6,8 million people displaced. Furthermore, humanitarian reports suggest that 43 millions of people are affected each year by 10 of the most under-reported crises, events that rarely enter what we tend to call “global” awareness.
So let me ask you this: how can it be that such a large portion of the world’s population remains, in a sense, underrepresented in the very conversations that claim to be global?
Part of the answer may lie in what some describe as “tropicalisation”: the tendency to reduce complex regions to simplified, often exoticised images. Places in the Global South are framed through vibrancy, colour, and natural beauty—idealised, even—but not always taken seriously as political or intellectual equals. In this kind of framing, the Global South is often associated with lived experience and raw data, while the Global North is positioned as the space where interpretation, expertise, and solutions are produced. Whether intentional or not, this creates a quiet imbalance in how authority is distributed. But the issue does not stop there.
Have you ever heard the phrase, “History is written by the victors”? It may sound cliché, but it offers a useful starting point.
Having lived in three different countries, two of them European, I have been taught about colonisation in different ways. And while none of those versions are entirely false, some feel… incomplete.
In many cases, colonisation is presented as a historical process of exploration and expansion: countries travelling, claiming land, establishing systems. Sometimes resistance is mentioned, sometimes not. It is described as a sequence of events, a means to an end. But what tends to receive less attention are the consequences: the long-term trauma, the exploitation, the systemic inequalities, the cultural erasure. The fact that many of these societies were already complex, structured, and fully functional long before colonisation began.
Some narratives highlight the economic or political developments that followed. Others focus on the human cost. Both perspectives exist, but they are not always given equal space.
And maybe that imbalance matters more than we think.
Because even if colonialism, in its original form, has largely ended, parts of its logic seem to persist. Certain assumptions, about development, about importance, about whose stories matter, do not disappear overnight.
Now, I am not here to blame individuals. Empathy follows familiarity, and familiarity is shaped by the stories we are told, the ones we hear, and the ones we don’t. So when we talk about “global” issues, we should at least stop and ask ourselves what we mean by “global.” Who is included in that definition, and who is not?
At times, it can feel as though the globe, as we imagine it, begins somewhere north of the equator.
Because at the end of the day, who gets to decide what is a global issue and what is not?
