Not all suffering holds the same value; this is a maxim that ISIS propagandists understand just as well as cable news editors. In her essay on war, Judith Butler writes: “War sustains its practices through acting on the senses, crafting them to apprehend the world selectively … disposing us to feel shock and outrage in the face of one expression of violence and righteous coldness in the face of another.”

This is certainly the case for the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Two snapshots illustrate this. First: on April 27 this year, Jules Alingete, a celebrated financial inspector, stepped up to a podium in Houston, Texas. He was addressing a small conference room of businesspeople to convince them to come and invest in the Congo. What he said, recorded for thousands to see on social media, shocked Congolese: “Be assured, we do not have war in Congo. We see the war on television, we are in Kinshasa, Mbandaka, Lubumbashi, the big cities … it is a situation more than 2000km from our institutions.”

The second snapshot: the pageantry and fanfare of heads of state arriving to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, on June 20. Thirty-five heads of state were supposed to attend. However, at the same time as Prince Charles was shaking President Paul Kagame’s hand, the M23 rebellion was making inroads in the neighboring Congo, most likely with Rwandan backing. None of the diplomats attending, including Justin Trudeau, Boris Johnson, and Muhammadu Buhari, expressed concern.

Both cases represented a firm looking-away from suffering. There are more people displaced in the Congo today than ever before: 5.9 million, more than anywhere in the world except for Syria. In the first three months of the year, around one thousand civilians were killed by various armed groups in the eastern Congo.