Kony 2012

Social media and social networking sites (SNS) in particular have become popular in current humanitarian campaigns. This article assesses the optimism surrounding the opportunities that SNS communication offers for humanitarian action and for the cultivation of cosmopolitan sensibilities. In order to evaluate the mediation of suffering and humanitarian causes through social media, I argue that we need to understand the architectures of social media and SNS in addition to analysing the content of the campaigns drawing on the literature on humanitarian communication. Focusing on the analysis of two humanitarian campaigns through social media, the phenomenally popular and controversial Kony 2012 campaign and WaterForward, the article observes that the architectures of SNS orientate action at a communitarian level which heightens their post-humanitarian style. However, an emerging new genre of reporting and commenting which is termed “polymedia events” can potentially extend beyond the limitations of SNS communication by opening up the space for reflexivity and dialogical imagination.

This dissertation questions the effectiveness of online activism. By utilising a discourse analysis of Piotr Czerski's 2012 manifesto 'We, the web kids', the main arguments are compared to actual events in social media, such as the Arab Spring, the London Riots and #Kony.

The record-breaking viral video KONY 2012 made mistakes—and some of them ugly—but it also achieved something that is both difficult and important; by turning suburban teens into slacktivists, KONY 2012 made human rights “cool.” This chapter examines how the campaign used inspiration, aspiration, a glimpse of the future, and the lure of friendship to make it the type of cause that so many wanted to spread. It also defends the much-maligned practice of slacktivism as an online reboot of the more cherished protest march tradition.

In the frame of the narratological theory of structural and generative semiotics, the article defines narrations as “civilizing machines”, indispensable in order for a social group and its members to perpetuate through time and transmit through space their hierarchy of values. After tackling the problem of the representation of evil in narrations, and above all in the iconic transposition of verbal tales, the essay reflects on what is left of the efficaciousness of the narrative device when it is subject not only to inter-semiotic translations, but also to trans-mediatic operations. Having defined trans-mediality as trans-textuality, the article manifests a series of doubts on the effectiveness of a tale that, as a product of the digitalization of expressive substances and the consequent being scattered through a globalized, Protean, and fragmentary communication, continuously challenges the textual frame and requires, from those who receive it, a meta-narrative competence. The essay concludes with the analysis of a case study, the social activism short movie Kony2012.

https://rebellives.fomu.be/

The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) is a rebel group, notorious for its use of extreme violence and its large-scale abductions of children, who were used as child soldiers or forced ‘wives’. The LRA is led by the infamous Joseph Kony and became active in northern Uganda during the second half of the 1980s. Rebel Lives is built on an archive of photographs taken by LRA commanders themselves between 1994 and 2003.


The photographs show life within the group and depict the rebels as they want to be seen, both among themselves and by the outside world. The images bear witness to how the abductees tried to live within extremely violent circumstances, but also portray a surprising normality. Rebel Lives tells the story of a conflict where the line between victim and perpetrator is blurred, where people struggle to survive, and where children in particular bear the brunt of this tension.

Rebel Lives is a book, and an exhibition. The methodology chapter from the book can be found below; the exhibition here: https://rebellives.fomu.be/

Using Sayer’s ideas about the moral economy, this article generates a new theoretical model for interrogating complex relations between journalists and their sources, especially nongovernmental organizations. It tests this framework using a case study about the production of a TV report about a Congolese rebel commander wanted for war crimes. This news story involved exchanges between Human Rights Watch, the United Kingdom’s Channel 4 News, and several freelancers and was indirectly shaped by Amnesty International and Invisible Children Inc., the creators of Kony2012. In analyzing these exchanges and their mixed effects, this article refines notions of trust, news cloning, and information subsidies

This dissertation investigates the moral issues related to the circulation of humanitarian campaign KONY 2012 on the Internet, which was created by the organization Invisible Children (IC) in 2012. This campaign has asked people to request international authorities for military support to the Uganda’s government so it can extinguish the actions of Joseph Kony, a leader of a movement responsible for the committal of many heinous crimes. This research is justified by the need to understand the cyber mediated communication and cultural phenomena, which put to the test modes of socialization and political organization, ethical standards and moral positions. Thus, this study is developed with observations and historical and sociological confrontations, seeking to understand the ambiguities and paradoxes of contemporary socialities. Based on methodological perspective indicated by Rüdiger (2011), this phenomenon is studied in two axes: movement and countermovement. The KONY 2012 movement consists in audiovisual productions and text comments that were important to the popularization of the cause. In its turn, the countermovement KONY 2012, in addition of severous audiovisual productions and text comments, also consists of actions that denied the campaign. To conduct the reflections about this subject, this study was guided by theoretical discussions about morals and morality in the postmodern world, based in Giddens (1991), Lipovestky (1994), Vattimo (1994) and Bauman (1997) perspectives. In this investigation, we realized that the movement and countermovement KONY 2012 showed that, despite the
apparent unquestionability of the cause, the moral responsibility in the postmodern context remains complex and problematic. On the one hand, it records the possibility of free encounter with other worlds and ways; of the enjoyment of the free will, as an oscillatory experience
between belonging and rootlessness in the society of generalized communication. On the other hand, the situation of morality in this context reveals the irresponsibility of subjects: the experimentation and the everyday spontaneous fruition, of the being and of the living on the
basis of aesthetic sense, seem to be the best interests. Thus, we discuss that the said emancipatory technologies are not favorable when there is lack of awareness and moral responsibility.

A viral video produced by the non-profit group Invisible Children has had remarkable success in astonishingly quick fashion, and offers lessons on how to execute a viral publicity campaign. Yet the story it tells and the solutions it seeks are simplifications that may lead to bad policy decisions.

2012 - There is another critical issue surrounding the whole Kony2012 saga that has yet to be properly addressed: children born into LRA captivity. These are kids whose mothers (and often fathers) were abducted by the LRA as children and forced into sexual relationships. There are beloved brothers and sisters and parents in the bush – they are the LRA and the ones who bear the brunt of this 'hunt' for Joseph Kony. Invisible Children claims to speak on behalf of the war-affected children in northern Uganda, but if they had ever really listened, they could not conscientiously dictate a military policy that targets these children and their loved ones.

These are children that were born into the violence of war to courageous mothers who were not yet ready to have them. Many have experienced tremendous loss and suffering, and those still in the bush continue to do so. But, when they are 'rescued' they face often violent struggles to exist; many return unaccompanied with neither parent and/or as orphans. These kids are bright and full of laughter and big ideas. They want to be lawyers, judges, social workers, doctors, journalists, and teachers. More than anything, though, they want to be treated equally, as Acholi children. But the divisions inherent in the simplistic policy prescription of the Kony2012 campaign make this impossible.

If Invisible Children took the time to listen to the children in northern Uganda, they would hear a wealth of alternative ideas about peace building. Invisible Children's Kony2012 is not only misguided but its violent message is quite likely a death sentence for many such children and their beloved brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers. If you want to truly help the war-affected children in northern Uganda, then do something that will make a difference: support the countless local organizations that have been listening to war-affected children and working for decades with them to improve their lives.

2012
By: Beth W. Stewart
PhD Candidate UBC, Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice
Liu Scholar, Liu Institute for Global Issues

A global discourse on cosmopolitan humanism can become tragically disconnected from how it plays out locally. By analysing Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 campaign, this paper examines how and why the “new war” discourse presented in Kony 2012 does not correspond to how an array of local actors frame the violence that took place in Uganda. It also highlights how the Kony 2012 narrative, and the interventions it advocates, are translating into “perverse consequences”--namely a militarisation of the central African region, and a decline in awareness and in funding for more complex security issues on the ground. Finally, insight is provided into why the development of cosmopolitan norms and laws favours strong states and institutions, while civilians on the receiving end of “humanitarian interventions” lack the power to define what rights should be protected, by whom and how, and have no way of holding the intervening “humanitarian” actors accountable for their actions.