On Wednesday, March 21, thirty-three senators introduced a resolution "Condemning Joseph
Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army for committing crimes against humanity and
mass atrocities, and supporting ongoing efforts by the United States Government
and governments in central Africa to remove Joseph Kony and Lord’s Resistance
Army commanders from the battlefield." The resolution calls
for increased efforts of the US government to cooperate with the local national
forces to fight the L.R.A. A few days later, CNN also reported the African Union plans to deploy an additional mission of 5,000
troops to track down Joseph Kony and stop the criminal activities of the L.R.A.
This is only the latest outcome of the immense success of the California-based
advocacy group Invisible Children and
the launch of their video Kony 2012,
which has had more than 85 million views on YouTube alone.
The 30-minute video tells the story of Invisible Children's
successful advocacy campaign, which brought great attention to the Lord's Resistance Army (L.R.A.) and especially
its leader Joseph Kony. The campaign resulted in mass mobilization throughout
the United States, and translated in such political pressure that Congress
passed the Lord's Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery
Act of 2009, mandating President Obama to deploy 100 U.S. military advisors to central Africa, who are to assist
national forces to fight the L.R.A., and to remove Joseph Kony from the
battlefield. However, Invisible Children
insists that American support could be removed anytime. Thus, public
pressure must sustain by making Kony famous and by targeting politicians and
celebrities to support the cause. The most recent resolution is an obvious
evidence of the accomplishment of this aim.
In this sense, Kony 2012
has been a breakthrough in U.S. foreign policymaking. Following movements such
as the Arab Spring, the Kony phenomenon
once again demonstrates how social movements, through the use of social media,
shape politics. But it also evidenced the extent to which foreign policymaking
and internal forces can be entangled, thus challenging the idea of a “two-level
game”. Does this mean that Americans, in deed, do care about foreign politics?
They certainly do sometimes, but when? It seems like it takes a highly
expensive, “trendy” advocacy campaign, which implies action kits to buy, and an
entertaining video featuring Joseph Kony as evil personified.
As pleased as supporters of participatory democracy may be about
such public interest in foreign policy, the Kony
phenomenon also represents a risk of shortsighted, shallow policies, whose
ultimate aim is to accommodate the public pressure. In a New York Times editorial,
Angelo Izama, criticized the simplification of the problem by the advocacy
campaign, as well as the US’s short-sighted solutions to counteract it:
"If America backed an ambitious regional political solution instead of a
military one, it is quite possible that the L.R.A. and other militant groups
would cease to exist. But without such a bargain, the violence won’t end,"
and he adds, "Killing Mr. Kony may remove him from the battlefield but it
will not cure the conditions that have allowed him to thrive for so long."
Nevertheless,
it has to be acknowledged that defeating the L.R.A. finally made it onto the
legislative agenda of American foreign policymaking, which in itself is already
an enormous breakthrough, given that NGOs and human rights groups have been
lobbying Congress for political action against the L.R.A. for years with hardly
any outcome.
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