Conflict Work After Kony 2012

In a little less than two months, the year 2012 will draw to a close and so will the Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 campaign.  Whether or not Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), is captured or killed is to some extent irrelevant given the success of Invisible Children’s efforts to make him internet-famous and a household name.  While I am in awe of the visibility the Kony 2012 effort captured, I find myself more concerned with what it revealed about the current state of conflict work.  Conflict work in this case is defined as actions taken by parties who intervene in societies experiencing or recovering from violence.  Such work is generally connected to conflict resolution, development, human rights peacebuilding, and other related types of third party intervention.  Although Invisible Children is only one particular NGO and Kony 2012 one intervention attempt, combined they are a particularly telling example of the disunity of what is considered appropriate when it comes to conflict work.  Invisible Children’s ability to organize and market their cause set a bar unmatched in recent memory; nevertheless, as a precedent for future interventions it comes with a steep price.  Kony 2012 might be a very successful piece of propaganda, but it is an equally disastrous piece of conflict practice.

Kony 2012 is a slick package.  It draws you in quick, offers heart-wrenching drama and pounds its message incessantly:  Joseph Kony is a bad man and he must be dealt with.  It even provides some simple actions you can take to help ensure Kony cannot hurt any more children.  For the average viewer it is a brutal reality check about a person, place and conflict they know nothing about.  To the critical eye the viewing experience is quite different.  The narrative of the film clashes with reality and the hero/savior recalls civilizing missions of the past.  I can pinpoint the moment Kony 2012 sent me over the edge; it was hearing Jason Russell speak to his son.  That was unquestionably the tipping point.  It is difficult to watch someone manipulate a child and find yourself complicit in the act as a spectator. For the critic, the film gets worse by the second, and by worse I mean it felt like each passing frame generated more views and further public support.  Each time I cringed I equated it with a thousand more likes on Facebook.  By the end of the film I not only wanted Invisible Children to fail and wanted them to implode.  Like other critics I eagerly began combing the web for dirt on the organization to prove that this whole thing was a load.  In the span of thirty minutes I felt like I had somehow wound up on the wrong side this conflict as a Kony supporter (not really, but that whole enemy of my enemy logic is awfully persuasive).  Justice prevailed a short time later when Jason Russell preformed a very public meltdown and the campaign seemed to fizzle.  However, it would be weeks before I realized that Kony 2012 was not something external to my life.  It was a symptom of a much larger problem very much connected to my work and scholarship.

The following conversation is an attempt to demonstrate these connections using Kony 2012 and Invisible Children as a point of reference.  It should be made clear that this will not be a balanced portrayal of their work as an organization or a full analysis of Kony 2012.  Instead, they serve as useful objects to reflect upon in dealing with a wider set of issues.  I find Invisible Children and other NGOs of their ilk representative a broader series of intersecting conversations about the present state and future of conflict work.  One area of concern is the relationship between civil society and the State.  Another deals with pressures on conflict education in a post-9/11 world and conflict work as a specialized form of labor.  My fear is that much of our work is being undermined by a poor analysis of our current situation, which I locate in the field’s growing resistance to the study of militarism.  In turn, this poor analysis leads to bad conflict practice, which is characterized as the development of ineffective, and in the worst cases, harmful interventions.  Tucked within is a deeper discussion, one that asks us to recognize when our work is being put to ends that further legitimize State violence as the ultimate method for resolving difficult situations.  Finally, at its most practical, this is also a conversation about how we might respond when confronted by students and colleagues who want to be the next Invisible Children or are determined to find employment doing conflict work abroad.

For those caught unaware of the Kony 2012 phenomenon, the project might be summed up as the most visible internet activism effort our time. [1]  Its mission: to see Joesph Kony dead or in jail when the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s Eve. January 1, 2013 will be too late.  Success will be determined by meeting this deadline though no one from the organization has clearly spelled out what failure to meet this goal means.  What we can be assured of is that Invisible Children will continue on as an organization working in Uganda and other locations regardless of the outcome.  The capturing/killing of Kony does not really change anything for those whose lives he destroyed, the mission of Invisible Children as an NGO, or the foreign policy objectives of the United States.  It might not even end the LRA should one of Kony’s followers assume the leadership role in his absence.  Nevertheless, Invisible Children’s effort to make Kony a celebrity is symptomatic of how the NGOification of civil society continues to blur the distinction between the desires of the State and the desires of supposedly autonomous non-governmental groups.  This reaches its apex in film when President Obama signs an order offering military support to capture/kill Kony thanks to legislative pressure from Invisible Children and its supporters.  It certainly feels like you are watching democracy in action.  Yet the critical eye recognizes this blurring for what it really is, the inherent contradiction between conflict work and militarism.

Recognizing the incompatible aims of conflict work and militarization is not much of a revelation in the academy.  Most contemporary readers of Karl Liebknecht’s (1917) pamphlet Militarism would be shocked to find how relevant and applicable his critique is to today’s situation.[2] Yet for those working in the field post-9/11, the presence of the military has become synonymous with intervention, especially development, in pre-/post-conflict contexts.  Working with the State and the military are prerequisites for access to thehost populations.  To question this relationship is to find one excluded from the operating environmentand/or at odds with funders and partner organizations, which are often subsidiaries of large corporations like Halliburton and Northrup Gumman.  The critique of militarism is one of the dominant concepts underpinning the field of peace and conflict studies, and yet the critique’s presence has fallen from view over the past decade.  While this no doubt is related to the events of September 2001, its roots are deeper and correlated with post-Cold War peacebuilding efforts. [3]  Presenting students with a critique of militarism as a core component of their conflict studies begins to address the problem, but unfortunately does not always go far enough.

With more and more students entering the field and hoping to obtain jobs doing conflict work post-graduation, government agencies, particularly from the United States, tend to represent a significant majority of the employers and funding agencies.  This is in part due to the shift in the funding climate.  Previously, NGOs could look to both private foundations and the State as potential sources of funding for their work.  The economic crisis of 2008 lay to waste much of the private capital available for such initiatives making the State the dominant game in town. NGOs are faced with choice of scraping by and hoping the economy eventually recovers, or playing ball with the State and modeling their programs to fit the needs of calls for programming.  This is certainly an unsatisfactory position for those advocates of civil society that believe in a clear divide between State-led interventions and private-led interventions in conflict contexts.

Nonetheless, this divide between civil society and the State appears as a rather artificial one.  The relationship between the State and civil society is always presented as close, but never taken beyond that.  Yet within liberalism the coupling is inseparable, each relies on the other to fulfill a specific task.  The rise and growth of civil society is often presented as the bourgeois answer to the infringement of government.  Civil society, led by NGOs and other private initiatives, will eventually replace all functions of the State, leaving it a militarized shell whose key function is to protect private investment. We might be better served if we began to discuss this form of civil society for what it really is.  Following Althusser we might describe it as a specific type of apparatus, generally playing the role of an ideological appendage to the interests of the State, which in turn serves the interests of the market economy.[4]  The mutually reinforcing bonds of this relationship are only made clear to us in the present because of the dire economic situation.  Funding development and intervention are specific ways of achieving U.S. policy objectives.  NGOs reproduce this relationship through their work by bringing projects in line with policy objectives.  The use of local actors to manage these projects creates additional layers of reinforcement tying the locals to the NGOs and through the NGOs to the policy objectives of the United States.  Such truths are not concealed.  One only need examine USAID’s Policy Framework for 2011-2015.  The Executive Summary begins by stating:

“International development cooperation is a key component of American power, along with diplomacy and defense. It represents a potent and cost-effective tool that enables the United States to safeguard our security and prosperity while promoting our fundamental values of freedom and opportunity. Though we spend less than one percent of the federal budget on development assistance, it is a critical instrument for ensuring a better future, as it helps us advance key national interests (p. 1).[5]”

The relationship between the State and NGOs has a direct impact on conflict education; both desire graduates trained with a particular set of conflict skills.  What those skills are is a matter of debate between the State, NGOs, and university programs.  A Special Report released by the United States Institute of Peace detailed the contradictory demands of employers (NGOs and State) for working in international conflict.  On one hand, students exiting graduate programs are encouraged to be highly specialized in one country considered their area of expertise.  On the other, conflict skills and critical thinking ranked low in the desired attributes list, with clerical work and office management being far more desirable to potential employers. [6]  The lesson could be rather brutally interpreted as we will use you for your knowledge, but you will keep your opinions to yourself unless requested.

Such economic demands come with real consequences for university programs, especially for those that pride themselves on developing a well-educated citizenry inclined to critical thought.  Peace and conflict programs now serve as the primary training centers for producing a specialized type of knowledge worker suited to these specific types of environments.  As such, there is a rising tension between those scholars and educators that consider an understanding of militarism an essential component of producing skilled conflict workers and students, employers, and the State whose work is implicated by such a critique.  While such debate is healthy for an academic environment, it has not filtered much outside the halls of certain classrooms.  With universities also searching for funding to maintain their programs in this harsh climate of austerity, criticism of the State and its Global War on Terror prerogatives may not be shot down, but they are rarely given equal platform with those supportive of the past decade of U.S. foreign policy. Instead, a rather pervasive tyranny of silence intrudes whenever such concerns are raised among students and/or faculty either for or against such work.  For a field that prides itself in difficult conversations, we are unable to sustain this one.  It seems that our tools are failing us and our inability to move the conversation about the paradoxes of conflict work in State controlled settings is leading us down a path, one that becomes more difficult to extricate ourselves from the longer we continue to follow it.

My comrades and I encounter students, practitioners, and other colleagues on a regular basis inspired to do conflict work abroad.  Contained within this group of future humanitarians are many who look at the success of Kony 2012 and Invisible Children as a model for future activity.  These individuals usually interpret conflict work as activity that takes place external to the United States and Western Europe; specifically it is work that only takes place in Africa and the rest of the Global South since these are the regions that participate in programs focused on development, democracy promotion and post-conflict reconciliation.  The problem is not with their sincere intentions to help their fellow humans, but there is often an assumption that the populations in these locations could not manage without outside assistance.  And this may indeed be the case for a host of reasons:  destruction of infrastructure, failed crops, natural disaster, and so forth.  Yet it has been my experience, especially among those undergraduates and Masters students new to the conflict field, that the desire to participate in such activity is coated with heavy dose of ideology and internalized to the point where “doing good” abroad is almost a divine calling.  One hears echoes of Jason Russell in what are without question sincere aspirations to right the injustices in the World.  Still, it is more than the simple determination to find a rewarding career.  Getting a job in country x is the goal and nothing is going to stand in their way.  To this day it remains difficult for me to watch people (not just students) try and answer the very straightforward question of, “What happens if the people of country x don’t want or need you?”

This is not to say that all Westerners doing conflict work suffer from the White Man’s Burden. Nor do I want to deny that some of this utopian entitlement is tempered in many of these individuals when they arrive in country x and realize the situation on the ground is not what they thought it was going to be.  Nevertheless, it is when we encounter such blatant manifestations of racist/imperial attitudes, a meta-narrative permeating much of Kony 2012, that the contradictory tendencies captured in development/intervention paradigm are brought to the fore and present us with opportunities to reassess what the aims of conflict work.  The challenge for those of us interested in critical conflict education is that when issues of imperialism and racism are finally raised, especially in venues where they can be critiqued and investigated, a chasm develops between those that defend development/intervention partnerships with the State (framed as “we can’t just do nothing”) and those who want to critically examine how we as outside parties might be perpetuating the problem in ways we do not intend.

For those of us coming from a critical background and attempting to create a critical conflict resolution, we understand that much of our work is focused on getting people to recognize what hides in the shadows – and even sometimes in plain sight.  This means that we focus on issues of structure, power, and meaning. Our key insight being that to develop proper practice we must start from a good analysis, yet analysis is intrinsically linked to an active orientation toward practice and engagement with the situation demanding our attention.  Challenging structural and systemic violence requires us to undertake a holistic analysis.  This includes an assessment of the risks related to both intervention and abstention.  While our starting point is on the elements that compose the system, we quickly turn to ask how the system attempts to reproduce itself through those elements and relationships.  At its foundation, a critical conflict resolution aims at liberation from oppressive systems and relationships; it is this normative thrust that underlies the analysis and unearths contradictions that if ignored can lead to a debacle like Kony 2012.  That reflective moment never occurs in the entirety of the film, only the mantra of capture/kill.    These are contradictions that cannot be undone or resolved by telling a better narrative about Kony or the work of Invisible Children.  Power relations do not change just because we can articulate them, which is unfortunately where many efforts to transcend structural problems stop.  Taking Kony out does not fix Uganda.  Recognizing our role in the system is a critical step in this process and it is a step the makers of Kony 2012 never bothered demonstrate.  Instead, we witnessed privileged young white men running around Uganda with expensive camera equipment and making promises to protect children from a bad guy they had no means of dealing with.  No doubt they were driven by their passions and a sense of duty to right a wrong, but such are imprecise guides when they lead us to identify an individual as the single source of a complex problem.

While instilling a critical perspective in students of conflict work is certainly a pedagogical aim, it faces the very real challenge that such skills take years to develop. In the short run that means many students who encounter critical theory(-ies) are subject to find it empowering at first and then become disillusioned when it is revealed just how penetrating systems of oppression are and how difficult these systems can be to change.  This is especially tricky when it happens to be your employer or funder that is engaged in activities you disagree with.  There is a natural tendency to run away from insights that make it harder to return to life before the moment of insight or that might put years of previous hard work in jeopardy. The veil of false consciousness falls, but it does not mean our behavior will change.[7]  As much as we advocates of critical work wish it were the only step, we realize that students must be encouraged to act once they recognize situation for what it is.  Not only must they act once, they must reflect on their process and sustain their action while adjusting to new developments and insights.  And therein lies the problem.  If the path only goes analysis to direct action (child soldiers to Kony) the intervention stops with Kony.  One can tell a simple narrative about getting the bad guy and everybody living happily ever after.  It is easy to sell and in no way represents reality or the complexity of what comes after Kony is captured/killed.  When critical approach is adopted the path expands from analysis to action to self-reflection back to analysis and so on, until it becomes clear what the best course of direct action is.  The narrative is infinitely more complex and not reducible to such simplistic moralizing.  As a result, the practice/intervention is more sensitive to systemic factors and aware of other potential influences that might impact its implementation.  It is by no means perfect, but it should allow any student of critical work to recognize when the intervention has shifted from helping those in need to a full on crusade.

So what does conflict work look like after Kony 2012?  Or for that matter, what do I say to students and peers who look to Invisible Children as the model for the future of such interventions? Abandon development and intervention?  Maybe. My conviction remains that if students are given the tools to develop what C. Wright Mills refers to as the sociological imagination – that is the quality of mind to reason and process information produced in the neoliberal moment – such conversations become irrelevant.[8]  Militarism and better analysis are a tough sell in the face of rising bills and much needed paychecks.  Nor do they appear anywhere near as powerful as an executive order signed by the President.  And yet, aside from visibility through making and marketing better propaganda, I cannot identify a positive takeaway from Kony 2012 that makes the world a less violent place.  Even leaving the United States out of it, a simple conflict analysis of the situation should have been enough to reveal the fallacy that capturing/killing Kony would stabilize the economic and political sectors in Uganda and the region.  The key for us as educators of future conflict workers might be in imparting a skill set that may be deployed in assisting those organizations and individuals to recognize when they are unqualified to make or when they have produced a poor analysis. More importantly we should instill in them the courage to speak when they recognize interventions based on flawed work.  This is why I cannot help but see Kony 2012 as a problem of education. Proper analysis will only take us so far, and then it becomes a moral judgment whether or not to act, but at least students should have a foundation to act from should they choose to engage.

Notes:

[*] This work benefited greatly from the insightful comments of Jay Filipi, Carolina Reynoso, Caitlin Turner, and Derek Sweetman.  The flaws and poor writing that remain are most certainly the author’s fault.

[1] Kony 2012 can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4MnpzG5Sqc.  More information about the campagein can be found at on The Invisible Children’s site:  http://invisiblechildren.com/kony/

[2] Karl Liebnecht’s Militarism can be accessed in full through Marxists.org:http://www.marxists.org/archive/liebknecht-k/works/1907/militarism-antimilitarism/index.htm

[3] See the many works of Oliver Richmond and Roland Paris including: Newman, Edward, Roland Paris, and Oliver P Richmond, eds. 2009. New Perspectives on Liberal Peacebuilding. Tokyo: United Nations University Press.

[4] See Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” In “Lenin and Philosphy” and Other Essays. http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm.

[5] United States Agency for International Development. USAID Policy Framework – 2011-2015. United States: USAID, 2011. http://quest.usaid.gov/node/2242

[6] See the United States Institute of Peace Special Report on “Graduate Education and Professional Practice in International Peace and Conflict.” http://www.usip.org/publications/graduate-education-and-professional-practice-in-international-peace-and-conflict.  In another piece for Unrest Magazine I dealt with issues raised and contained in this particular document.  See “Global Ambitions: A critical reading of the report on “Graduate Education and Professional Practice in International Peace and Conflict.””http://www.unrestmag.com/global-ambitions-a-critical-reading-of-the-report-on-graduate-education-and-professional-practice-in-international-peace-and-conflict/

[7] See Derek Sweetman’s piece on the notion of Revolutionary Insight in Unrest #5.

[8] See Mills, C. Wright. 2000. The Sociological Imagination. 40th anniversary. Oxford University Press, USA.