Politics & Power Quote by Tom Allen

“World attention” is the gentlest possible phrase for the modern ritual Allen is skewering: the global news cycle flares, diplomats convene, statements harden into hashtags, and the machinery of killing keeps running. The line’s bite comes from its contrast between visibility and consequence. Attention is framed as an input everyone can claim credit for; protection is framed as the job no one can outsource.

Allen’s intent is prosecutorial. By naming Darfur as “genocide,” he rejects euphemisms like “tribal conflict” that often serve as moral exit ramps. That word forces a legal and ethical category with obligations attached, and it pressures audiences who might prefer to treat Sudan as a distant tragedy rather than an urgent failure of governance.

The subtext is sharper than the surface indignation. “Without any serious attempt” doesn’t just accuse Khartoum of incompetence; it implies choice, calculation, and impunity. It also quietly indicts the international community’s performative concern: if attention rises while atrocities continue, then attention is being converted into optics, not leverage. Allen’s reminder of what governments “primarily exist to do” is a civics lesson wielded as a weapon. He’s stripping the Sudanese state of its most basic claim to legitimacy: the monopoly on force is only defensible when it’s used to secure life, not erase it.

Context matters: mid-2000s Darfur was a crucible for debates about humanitarian intervention, sovereignty, and the post-Rwanda promise of “Never again.” Allen’s sentence is built to make neutrality feel like complicity, and to make delay sound like policy.