In the wake of Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, Ukrainian president Volodymir Zelensky offered his sympathies to the Israeli people and asked to pay a visit in solidarity. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rebuffed him, saying that ‘the time is not right’. His reply confirmed the fears of many Ukrainians that global interest had shifted away from the Russian invasion of Ukraine and toward Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. The rapid shift in global attention from one horrific conflict to another—not to mention those that never capture the global spotlight—puts into stark relief that we are living in an era of time-starved, attention-driven international politics.
‘Governmental attention, like individual attention, shifts erratically, rarely smoothly. Issues surge onto . . . agendas just as they often rise suddenly to individual consciousness’, write scholars Bryan Jones and Frank Baumgartner in The Politics of Attention. Attention is fickle, and in a world of attention-based politics, it becomes a scarce resource, much like oil or gold, in that leaders, countries, and businesses all compete for it.
Why is this? ‘Possession’ of our attention plays an increasingly vital role in maintaining political and military support in conflicts. For instance, the new UK foreign secretary, David Cameron said on a recent visit to Ukraine that ‘Russia thinks . . . that the West will eventually turn its attention elsewhere. This could not be further from the truth’. Yet, the flow of artillery from Western allies has decreased since the start of the Israel-Hamas conflict. In this case, arms seems to follow attention.
As a result, world leaders are forced to view international politics as a zero-sum attention game, in which they are engaged in a Sisyphean struggle to keep their country’s plights relevant. For Ukraine this means fighting on two fronts: a battle of attrition against Russia and a battle for international coverage.
The casualties of the global-attention battle are further aggravated by digital-communication technologies, especially social media. Politics is increasingly performed as though it is a social-media platform, in which leaders push content that will get the most clicks, views, or reshares. This is more often than not the content that provokes the strongest emotional reactions. In politics, this means increased media coverage of attention-grabbing stunts, which plays into the hands of radicals and populists—such as the recently elected Javier Milei of Argentina. Attention-based politics undermines democracy and pushes us closer to a post-truth world.
There is only so much people can be outraged about at once, resulting in rising fatigue, and ever-shifting priorities. The Russian invasion of Ukraine once engendered widespread outrage; today it is increasingly met with apathy across the West. A November 2023 poll indicates that 41% of Americans say the US is doing too much to help Ukraine, up from 29% in June 2023 and 24% in August 2022. In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said that there was a lot of ‘tiredness’ over the war in Ukraine. Decline in international media coverage of Ukraine has probably depressed desires to support the country.
Now, the terror attack on Israel and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza is grabbing international headlines, as emotions have flared from supporters of Israel and supporters of Palestine. The fickle nature of global attention toward international crises should worry us deeply.
Attention-based politics, combined with a 24-hour news cycle, accelerates the pace of global affairs. As a result, decisionmakers have even less capacity to formulate good policy when it is needed more quickly than ever. Moreover, as the survey from King’s College London Centre for Attention Studies has shown, the continual use of social media is worsening attention spans and memory. So, there is not only a ‘goldfish generation’ but a ‘goldfish politics’ to match. Unsurprisingly, policymakers become overwhelmed and may lose the ability to make good judgments.
For time-starved politicians inundated by other domestic and international items to attend to, any kind of resolution to the Russo-Ukrainian war becomes more and more appealing, even if it means concessions to Vladimir Putin. However, giving in would be detrimental not only to Ukraine but to the international rules-based order. It would legitimize Putin’s revanchist actions, signal weakness from the West, and embolden other authoritarian powers, specifically China. Yet, such ill-convinced policies are likely to proliferate as ever-shorter attention spans drive policy.
A politics accelerated by transient emotions makes understanding the hard truths of global conflict even harder. Wars are often bloody and drawn out. In Ukraine, as offensives and counteroffensives give way to protracted stalemates, conflict is not moving at the frenetic speed of the global media cycle. If Western policymakers fail to grasp this reality, the consequences could be dire – including allowing Putin’s Russia to gain the upper hand. As Ukraine’s armed-forces commander, Valery Zaluzhny underscored, future military successes now depend on further technological advances in weaponry—for which persistence and ‘strategic patience’ are required from political and military leaders around the world.
Fickle global attention spans are warping international politics in disturbing ways, as world leaders compete with one another for the spotlight. For those in conflict zones the implications are life-threatening. And the attention wars, mixed with the 24-hour news cycle, post-truth politics, and political polarisation, are damaging, if not destroying, democracy. The global politics of attention, in other words, is something nobody can afford to miss.
This article was originally published in OPR’s Issue 11: Time.
Sarah Kuszynski is a research assistant at a London-based think tank and a graduate of Durham University. She holds a BA in geography and economics, an MA in geography and a Masters in data science, and she has previously worked as the deputy executive director of a think-tank focused on middle eastern geopolitics and as a pro-bono political risk analyst.