Sudan-The Economist Magazine Cover For 08/31/2024

August 31st 2024 How we chose this week’s image SUBSCRIBER ONLY Cover Story How we chose this week’s image The Economist Robert Guest Deputy editor This week’s cover was difficult. It was about the worst humanitarian crisis in the world: the terrible and poorly understood war in Sudan. This is a conflict that erupted out of pure, cynical ambition. Two ruthless military chiefs seized power in a coup, then fell out and started fighting each other. Over the past 500 days or so Sudan has become an inferno. Soldiers and militiamen have killed, burned and raped with impunity. Some 10m people—a fifth of the population—have fled from their homes. Famine is spreading, imperilling millions. As Africa’s third-largest nation collapses, the shockwaves could destabilise swathes of Africa and the Middle East, and send a surge of refugees towards Europe. Sudan is so dangerous that few photographers have been able to cover the war. Our picture researchers looked hard, but struggled to find many high-quality images of the fighting. This portrait of soldiers brandishing their guns captured their swagger and menace, but not the horror of what is going on. These men are clean and rested, and almost look as if they are posing for the camera. This black-and-white photo is better. It shows families who have loaded their possessions onto their heads and set off on a long, hot trek to what they hope will be safety. Though black-and-white creates a suitably grim mood, there is something to be said for showing the exuberant colours that many Sudanese people actually wear. The bright reds, yellows, greens and pinks of a Sudanese crowd are a reminder of the joy they once had, before it was snatched away by men with guns. Another picture shows a smaller group trudging towards a barbed-wire camp, in the hope of succour. It’s a complex story, so our designers tried to illustrate some of its main strands in a collage. A heavily laden refugee glances back towards the place she has left. A column of smoke rises. A map gives a sense of a region at risk. The first version was missing some crucial elements, so we added soldiers with an intimidating red overlay, and changed the map labels from French to English. Some of us thought this image worked well. Others found it a bit confusing. Another idea was to go for brutal simplicity: the word “Sudan”, built of bricks and pocked with bullet holes. This drives home the message that an entire country is being devastated. We worked it up into what many of us thought was a stark, powerful cover. But our Bartleby columnist said it looked to him like pieces of cheese, and suddenly we couldn’t un-see that unfortunate image. So we went back to photos. This one, of a large, mostly female crowd waiting in a refugee camp, gives a hint of the sheer scale of the tragedy. And we tried a headline emphasising how little global attention the war has attracted. However, this photo was slightly too upbeat—it is not obvious, looking at these people, that they are fleeing from killers rather than, say, waiting for buses. So we found a more poignant image, with a central figure looking directly in the viewer’s eye. Some of us worried that desperate images like this look too much like fundraising adverts for a charity. But one should not shy away from depicting suffering when it is real and widespread. Our cover story argues that outsiders can help, and should do so not only for moral reasons but also because it is in everyone’s interest to prevent such a huge country from descending into anarchy. Our cover says it plainly: this catastrophic war is the world’s problem. Cover image • View large image (“Sudan”) Backing stories → Why Sudan’s catastrophic war is the world’s problem (Leader) → Anarchy in Sudan has spawned the world’s worst famine in 40 years (Briefing) → The ripple effects of Sudan’s war are being felt across three continents (Briefing) → “Hell on earth”: satellite images document the siege of a Sudanese city (Briefing)