KONY 2012 and the Prospects for Change
Examining the Viral Campaign
Article Summary and Author Biography
With more than 70 million views, KONY 2012 has achieved its aim of reaching a mass audience. But the film is a quintessentially American fable printed on an African canvas, one that will turn out to be a brief diversion, just a bit of Internet chatter.
MAREIKE SCHOMERUS is Research Consortium Director of the Justice and Security Research Programme at the London School of Economics. TIM ALLEN is a professor in Development Anthropology at the LSE and Research Director of the JSRP. KOEN VLASSENROOT is a professor in the Conflict Research Group at the University of Ghent, a consortium partner of the JSRP.
Snapshot
The success of the "KONY 2012" video shows the vast reserves of idealism and concern out there. Here is how to turn that concern into useful action.
Snapshot
Americans should not have been surprised by Obama's recent announcement that he would send a small number of troops to Uganda. This is only the latest chapter in a feeble, decades-long U.S. attempt to take out Joseph Kony and his militia.
Snapshot
It has been over a year since U.S. military advisers arrived in Central Africa to look for the Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony, and he is still nowhere to be found. But it's too soon to give up. If U.S. and African forces refine their efforts to get locals to share intelligence, they could well bring Kony and his henchmen to justice.
From the Internet to a street corner in Austin, the KONY 2012 campaign has gone viral in an unprecedented way. (Robert Raines / flickr)
Earlier this month, more than 30 civilians were killed during armed attacks in South Kivu, in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Those killings were committed not by the Lord's Resistance Army but by one of the many Congolese militias operating in the area. In recent months, those groups have been responsible for a marked increase in violence, but in most cases, such attacks go unnoticed by international media. So it was in this case: as usual, it is only thanks to local sources that we know about such events at all.
The lack of attention is ironic at the moment because of the sudden popularity of the KONY 2012 video campaign. Invisible Children, a nonprofit, has focused the world on Joseph Kony, who heads the Lord's Resistance Army, a rebel group established in the mid-1980s to fight the government of Uganda that has gained a reputation for its extreme acts, including the mutilation of victims and the forced enlistment of children. Six years ago, the Lord's Resistance Army left Uganda during a peace process; it is now operating in the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and South Sudan.
With more than 70 million views so far, Invisible Children's documentary on YouTube, coupled with a stupendously successful viral media campaign, has achieved its aim of reaching a mass audience. In addition to the attention it has attracted on social networks in the United States and Europe, it has garnered mainstream media attention: nearly every major Western news outlet ran some kind of story last week on Kony or on Invisible Children's campaign...
