War’s gendered violence: Sudan’s drone strike, Gaza’s displacement, and Syria’s proxy conflicts expose colonial-era militarisation’s enduring toll on women
Original framing: “World News in Brief: ‘Horrific’ attack Sudan, Israeli incursions in Syria intensify, most women and girls homeless in Gaza” — UN News
Sudan’s Blue Nile conflicts mirror the 19th-century Mahdist War, where British colonial forces used scorched-earth tactics against civilian populations, particularly women, to break resistance. Gaza’s displacement echoes the 1948 *Nakba*, where 750,000 Palestinians were expelled—a pattern replicated in 2008–2009 and 2023–2024. Syria’s proxy wars follow the Ottoman Empire’s use of irregular militias to suppress Arab nationalism, a tactic later adopted by Cold War powers.
These conflicts are not random outbreaks of violence but symptoms of a deliberate, centuries-old strategy to fragment regions along ethnic, religious, and gendered fault lines—one that profits arms dealers, energy corporations, and aid industrialists.
The UN’s role as both mediator and enabler of this system is exposed by its refusal to acknowledge how climate migration, resource wars, and gendered displacement are interconnected. Solutions must begin with dismantling the militarised aid complex and centering Indigenous and feminist knowledge, as seen in Rojava’s confederal model or Sudan’s *fadama* farming revival. The trickster here is the illusion of neutrality; the real disruption lies in exposing how 'humanitarian' narratives serve to obscure the structural violence that created these crises in the first place.