The cost of war
In a world where the thunder of bombs is streamed in high-definition and the wreckage of lives is compressed into viral clips, war no longer feels distant but disturbingly familiar. The 21st century has transformed the nature of warfare; it is no longer fought only with tanks and missiles, but with economic sanctions, digital propaganda, food insecurity, and weaponized narratives. The result? The most devastating toll is borne not by the generals or politicians who design these conflicts, but by the ordinary citizen those who never chose war, yet pay its highest price.
From the rubble of Gaza to the scorched plains of Sudan, the stories emerging from conflict zones are not just numbers in a UN report they are names, faces, and families whose lives have been upended by decisions made far from their doorsteps. In Gaza, entire neighbourhoods have been flattened in recent months, leaving families to sleep amid broken concrete, with no access to clean water or electricity. Children, many of whom have lived through more than one war before their tenth birthday, now associate the sound of drones with bedtime. In Ukraine, where conflict has entered its third year, students attend school in underground bunkers. One recent report told of a 14-year-old girl who continues to write poetry by candlelight, her verses filled with fear, grief, and a strange kind of hope.
Yet the suffering doesn’t end at the frontline. In Sudan, more than 8 million people have been internally displaced due to the civil war that has engulfed the country. Hospitals have been looted, doctors are working without basic supplies, and entire families have been forced to walk hundreds of kilometres in search of safety many never making it. In Syria, nearly 13 years into the war, millions remain in refugee camps across Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan. These aren’t just tents filled with statistics they are communities stuck in limbo, where children are born into statelessness, and entire generations grow up without schooling, employment, or a sense of home.
The economic aftershocks of war ripple far beyond borders. The war in Ukraine, for instance, disrupted global grain exports, driving up food prices in countries like Egypt, Lebanon, and Tunisia, where bread is a staple of life. In South Asia, surging oil prices due to Middle Eastern instability have led to inflationary pressures that affect even the most basic essentials cooking gas, transport, medicine. In India, small businesses and lower-middle-class families have borne the brunt of these fluctuations, struggling to survive amid rising costs and falling incomes.
Meanwhile, social media has become both battlefield and battlefield observer. Platforms like X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, and TikTok are flooded daily with war footage - some raw, some manipulated, all shaping public opinion. While this digital visibility has made it harder for war crimes to go unnoticed, it has also introduced a dangerous fatigue. The constant stream of trauma risks desensitizing global audiences. We scroll past rubble, blood, and funerals, sometimes caring, sometimes forgetting our compassion caught in an algorithmic loop. Worse still, misinformation and propaganda from deepfakes to AI-generated lies now blur the line between fact and fiction, deepening divides and eroding trust in truth itself.
In this complex landscape, the ordinary citizen is not just a victim they are also a participant. Whether knowingly or not, we contribute to the war economy through what we consume, share, fund, or ignore. The smartphone in our hand may contain cobalt mined from conflict zones. Our taxes fund weapons or aid. Our silence, too, can be complicity. And yet, this same citizen the teacher continuing lessons under threat, the nurse refusing to abandon a hospital, the journalist reporting truth from a war-torn city is also the soul of resistance.
There are stories that must be told. A Syrian refugee woman in Jordan who runs a school out of her tent for children who’ve never seen a classroom. A Palestinian artist who paints murals of olive trees over military checkpoints. A Ukrainian farmer who replants his fields every spring, even when landmines threaten the harvest. These acts of quiet defiance of preserving dignity in the face of devastation are powerful reminders that the human spirit refuses to be extinguished.
But resilience should not be romanticized. People should not have to be “strong” just to survive. They deserve security, opportunity, and peace not as a luxury, but as a right. War should never be inevitable. And yet, as long as profit is prioritized over people, as long as power is hoarded and justice denied, war will continue to be staged not for safety, but for supremacy.
The world must reckon with this truth: peace is not passive. It is not just the absence of war, but the presence of justice. It demands accountability, not just for war crimes but for the systems that allow conflict to fester economic inequality, political manipulation, colonial legacies, and international apathy. It requires that the global community sees the suffering of others not as distant, but as intimately connected to its own well-being.
The price of war is not just paid in bombed buildings or fallen soldiers. It is paid in lost childhoods, in broken dreams, in the quiet sobs of mothers burying their sons, in the empty eyes of refugees who’ve seen too much. It is paid every day by the ordinary citizen in Gaza, in Kyiv, in Khartoum, in Kabul, in Kashmir and increasingly, in every corner of the world touched by violence, directly or indirectly.
Unless the global conscience awakens and acts the ordinary citizen will remain the unpaid invoice of war.
Saba Ashraf Khanyari, Doctoral Researcher, Islamic University of Science and Technology, Awantipora, J&K.