Mapping murder

Geography in the service of vested interests

I recently noted that the reactions to the deaths in the Gaza conflict receive enormous press and public protest – while the deaths and atrocities in the Democratic Republic of Congo receive almost none, despite estimates of 1,000 deaths a day, compared with 1,000 deaths total in the latest Gaza violence.

The blogger at Contexts Graphic Sociology noticed that there were plenty of detailed maps of the news coverage of Gaza. On searching for similar maps of the crisis of Dafur, however, he/she only found one, and comments:

“The lack of a decent map-narrative around the problems in Sudan/Darfur indicates an uncomfortable fissure in the epistemology of crisis. I’m willing to conjecture that there may be an inverse relationship between perceived cultural differences and the production of ‘fact’ based information around crises. There isn’t an easy way to measure social/cultural difference, but it seems that the greater the degree of “otherness” of the people undergoing a crisis, the more likely the story is to be covered not with an onslaught of ‘hard facts’ that can be diagrammed, mapped, combed, regressed, permuted, computed, etc. but rather the story will be covered by emotive tools like first person narratives, photographs, and even awareness raising concerts, vigils, and that sort of thing.”