blog

I was born and raised on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. My stomping group consisted of a seven-block walk to Zabar’s, that Jewish cultural mecca of smoked whitefish spread, cherry strudel, and Eastern Gaspe lox (a consistent winner at my family’s casual, multi-year lox-tasting get-together). I attended Hunter College High School, a public high school on the Upper East Side, which, as NYT was gracious enough to observe on its front page, suffers from a systemic diversity disorder. Students of color were woefully underrepresented in my high school, consistent with broader trends amongst New York’s specialized high schools–as a recent NYT feature observed, black students comprise one percent of Stuyvesant High School’s population, compared to a citywide proportion of twenty-five percent. In spite of–or, more likely, because of–my high school’s demographic disparity, race was rarely a topic of conversation, debate, or introspection. Brief, extracurricular exposures to “cultural diversity” served to reinforce reductive, stereotypical conversations about race, religion, and ethnicity; between the Jewish Cultural Awareness Club, the African-American Students Association, and the Asian Students Association, displays of cultural awareness more accurately resembled a Mel Brooks film, rather than a diverse, engaged “melting pot.”

My engagement in human rights activism began through my synagogue youth group, as is the case with a broad community of young, progressive, and secular Jewish New Yorkers. Consistent with general trends in postwar representations of the Holocaust, Reform Judaism has universalized the moral lessons of Nazi Germany’s atrocities, using the consequent framework of moral responsibility to mobilize Jewish communities around civil rights activism, the anti-apartheid movement, and, where my involvement was concerned, the movement for human rights in Darfur. Human rights activism was an essential component of the progressive, Jewish humanitarian ethos, which my Hebrew school teachers, youth group leadership, and clergy framed as the present-day manifestation of tikkun olam, the clichéd, Kabbalistic notion of “repairing the world.” Progressive Judaism’s wishful humanitarianism provided a meaningful framework for this young person’s mobilization, giving equal purpose to $120 of lemonade sale revenues, direct action opportunities, and, more rarely, Congressional advocacy.

In Kabbalistic fashion, tikkun olam is a transhistorical concept–that is, the collective, moral responsibility of community mobilization operates without concern for the contextual uniqueness of historical events. As I’ve discussed before, moral discussions of history underlined the intellectual paucity of historical analysis, allowing young humanitarians to draw indistinct, universalized conclusions from past human failures in 1940s Germany, 1970s Cambodia, and 1990s Rwanda. Discussions of the Darfur conflict approximated a Mamdani nightmare, with little concern for the varied typologies of political violence, identity, and ethnic conflict in Sudan’s western region. (Alright, we were thirteen, but the rosy-eyed, decontextualized idealism of my adult mentors didn’t do nuance any favors.) More importantly, reflection on the immense irony of our humanitarian engagement was infrequent, if it occurred. In spite of traditional Jewish emphases on healthy introspection and self-criticism, I encountered few conversations on the personal and communal limits of humanitarianism. Because tikkun olam is transhistorical, the historical baggage of particular circumstances–U.S. policy in sub-Saharan Africa, legacies of neo-colonialism, and the like–offered marginal insights into the moral project of humanitarian work. We perceived our human rights advocacy from the standpoint of black-and-white moralism, with little willingness to engage the ethical burdens of race. Fundraising for Darfuri cookstoves was commonplace; conversations about the funds’ origins, what they represented, and why it matters were not.

At first glance, maybe they shouldn’t have been. A false selflessness pervaded our small-scale, community-based humanitarian work; we applauded fellow students for apparent altruism, and decried those who were “just in it for college.” For young high school students, advocacy was an educational project, intended to initiate students into an inclusive, global thought-community, one which prioritized cosmopolitanism over provincialism. Students perceived the performative act of “doing something” as a sufficient vessel for moral passion, while educators understood students’ humanitarian convictions as an extension of critical classroom discussions on global affairs. Ultimately, the results of uninformed, non-introspective advocacy appear net-positive: for engaged students, the fundraisers, moral debates, and “Darfur Danceathons” are entry points for further, deeper, and broader engagement; students who, at the end of it all, disengage, come away able to identify Sudan on a map, even if the map’s origins, political constructs, and international consequences are not discussed.

Of course, “net-positive” is an abysmal standard of achievement, particularly for a crowd which places a high premium on normative value. As I discussed in the context of #KONY2012, the process of human rights organizing acknowledges the primacy of the advocate, their story, and the power of the voice they provide. In the context of addressing global issues, with the unavoidable burdens of transnational, transcultural history, the advocate’s primacy becomes more complicated, more morally challenging, and less relevant than, say, an AFSCME rally for collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin. Where advocacy is, in part, the practice of political problem-solving, the advocate necessarily plays a larger role in addressing their own politics, rather than the local, regional, national, and international politics of geographically detached communities. However, if we perceive advocates as political problem-solvers, we possess an ethical responsibility to move past the net-positive standard, placing a higher priority on the “informed” character of “informed constituencies.” Part of this challenge is recognizing that, as Teju Cole observed in a recent piece on the “White Savior Industrial Complex,” political problem-solving necessarily plays a smaller role than our moral passions suggest:

[T]here is an internal ethical urge that demands that each of us serve justice as much as he or she can. But beyond the immediate attention that he rightly pays hungry mouths, child soldiers, or raped civilians, there are more complex and more widespread problems. There are serious problems of governance, of infrastructure, of democracy, and of law and order. These problems are neither simple in themselves nor are they reducible to slogans. Such problems are both intricate and intensely local.

I just finished reading Rory Stewart and Gerald Knaus’ excellent Can Intervention Work?, which adopts a pragmatic, case-based perspective on the interaction between local political solutions and international humanitarian policy interventions. Stewart and Knaus begin their essay with a reflection on the linguistic origins of “intervention,” as distinct from interference, interlocution, and interdiction. Intervention has its origins in the Latin intervenire, translating to the infinitive, “to come between.” As Stewart and Knaus observe, intervention is an inherently decontextualized, euphemistic term, which “does not reveal where you are, who or what is around or beside you, or the nature of your relationship with these people and things.” Instead, our humanitarian ethos demands that “we…cloak our action in a Latin word, which, even if translated, admits to nothing more than coming into a new relationship.” I find this compelling: the notion of policy intervention as a new relationship between principal actors and their agents, encapsulating new narratives, new contexts, and new normative exchanges.

A “new relationship” framework for policy intervention restores a challenging burden to the process and character of human rights advocacy. Relational interventions rely on dynamic interaction, rather than static policy prescriptions. Political problem-solving emerges as a multi-actor process, forged from the voices of domestic advocates, indigenous problem solvers (that is, local civil society in conflict-affected areas), and their interlocutors, the diaspora communities. At a narrative level, where advocacy encapsulates the act of telling individual stories, we place a larger emphasis on empathetic morality, which provides conflict survivors with the space, platform, and credibility to convey their “stories of self.” At a communal and policy level, we identify humility, rather than action, as the framing basis of problem-solving discourse: rather than asking immediately, “how can we help?,” we need to establish policy frameworks that acknowledge the boundaries of our power, and the extent of others’.

More comprehensively, a “new relationship” framework for intervention implies a deep-seated, foundational reliance on self-criticism and introspection. If we recognize a role for Western human rights advocacy, we need to clarify why that role exists, how it pertains to the persistent, structural burdens of racial difference and socioeconomic privilege, and how to allow those differences to become more equal and constructive. In other words, our “story of us” needs to change, incorporating the resilience narratives of survivor communities and diaspora actors. This doesn’t mean that we acknowledge a greater plurality of alternative voices as persistently “right,” but rather that mainstream discourses can be equally wrong. If we start from that basis, we can start creating organizational, policy-oriented, and political cultures of problem-solving that encourage, facilitate, and adapt to criticism, broadening often-closed, ideological biases.

———————————————————————

I would be remiss if I didn’t offer a blog shout-out to Jenn Polish and Sean Langberg, whose constant badgering, internal advocacy, and insight have been extraordinarily helpful in crafting a more responsible concept of human rights advocacy. If you’re not following them, you’re losing out.

Late last week, in the midst of the media-stifling #KONY2012 hubbub, Alex de Waal published an op-ed in the International Herald Tribune, outlining a pragmatic approach to mass atrocities termination. In the piece, de Waal critiques the “idealist” approach towards conflict resolution, demonstrated by the moral foreign policy advocacy of Samantha Power and Gareth Evans, two of the “responsibility to protect” doctrine’s earliest advocates. As Roland Paris observes, de Waal’s “caricature” of foreign policy idealism did not help his case, in which he argued for an “evidence-based” approach to atrocities response policy. Judging from de Waal’s previously nuanced case for empirical atrocities prevention, part of the problem may have been the format: his Fletcher Forum essay on the same subject was much more coherent, structured, and insightful than his IHT piece. Regardless, here’s an excerpt from the latter, which underlines pragmatism’s policy strength:

Responding to mass atrocities, whether ongoing or imminent, is difficult enough, but the idealism of Evans and Power makes it that much more so. They have composed a story, based on ethics rather than evidence, that incorrectly assumes all perpetrators of mass political violence are insatiable killers and that dictates who should respond (Western nations), how (with military intervention) and why (for justice and democracy). It is a morality tale that undermines the best ways to deal with the worst crimes.

In a post last week, Adam Elkus presented a similar argument, noting the context for civilian protection, as well as the policy tools responsible for ensuring its prioritization within a dynamic political order. Without crediting the concept’s popularization, Elkus critiques the depoliticization of Anne-Marie Slaughter’s concept of “credible influence,” a non-coercive form of political statecraft:

[I]f the peacekeeping paradigm was not a challenge to an order but a production of it, effective protection of civilians is eminently possible. Depoliticizing intervention could produce human security with a minimum of “mission creep” and without substantial risk to peacekeepers. This would understandably reduce the opportunities for the use of force abroad. However, it would undoubtedly save many lives, and would be rooted in a sound understanding of the limits of idealism to change the political.

In de Waal’s case, the author uses his concept of pragmatic atrocities termination policy to argue against the intervention/non-intervention dichotomy, outlining the utility of negotiated peace settlements in securing an end to atrocities. Conflict termination literature has yielded mixed conclusions on the functional value of negotiated peace settlements, which appear to rely on a credible, transparent peacekeeping operation for successful implementation. Mass atrocities literature, in its nascent form, has yielded no such conclusions; as with military intervention, the atrocity-specific dataset remains limited, given the difficulty of disaggregating conflict termination, broadly defined, and atrocity-related policy interventions. (I’d imagine de Waal’s World Peace Foundation is developing a dataset, but the Political Instability Task Force’s 2008 atrocities data (ungated) are relatively young.) Indeed, despite de Waal’s defense of negotiated settlements, his more nuanced treatment of the political mediation is a bit more skeptical. Drawing from his wealth of Sudan-related diplomatic encounters, de Waal dismisses our contemporary paradigms for non-coercive diplomacy (read: localized, negotiated peace settlements):

I argue that our mediation paradigms are still framed by the “old” war ideal type, in that mediators seek to achieve compromise between two adversaries with political objectives, each of which has decided it cannot fully defeat the other. In both “joint enterprise” wars and “political marketplace” conflicts, a third party mediation process is liable to become subsumed within that system of governance itself. Noting that rentier political markets are globally integrated, this has the consequence that mediation is conducted less among the contending parties themselves, and more in the form of them individually and competitively, petitioning external patrons and powerbrokers.

At first glance, de Waal’s treatment of both military interventions and diplomatic negotiation appears contradictory: in the IHT piece, he condemns the foreign policy idealists’ normative support for third-party intervention, while simultaneously citing the role of Indian and Vietnamese intervention in atrocities termination in Bangladesh and Cambodia, respectively; on negotiations, de Waal condemns our contemporary framework for peace settlement, while defending the empirical value of political negotiations. Further reflection, however, indicates otherwise. De Waal’s distaste for contemporary peacemaking trends evolves from a deeper, more integral characteristic of contemporary perspectives on conflict: the role of violence. In arguing for a new atrocities termination paradigm, de Waal presents a broader approach to understanding violence, its role in political contestation, and how to prevent its occurrence. De Waal’s model, which he refers to as the “political marketplace,” places violence against civilians, state authorities, and organizational actors within the context of dynamic rent-seeking processes, which define political, economic, and social incentives for violent mobilization. For de Waal, the static approach to conflict mediation–characterized, one imagines, by the stagnant, decontextualized Doha negotiations on Darfur–is insufficient:

Approaches to mediation have not kept pace with these changes. We still adopt a model that treats civil war as akin to a football game or boxing match, with two sides contesting in pursuit of victory. However, in some cases, it can be a collaborative venture in which the two “sides” benefit from continued conflict. Or, in the case of a rentier political marketplace, a political insurgency is embedded within systemic political-societal-criminal violence. Levels of violence fluctuate in such a system, escalating and reducing in response to shifting political conditions. Additionally, this form of governance is hierarchical, so that political actors use a mediation forum to petition patrons, including global actors such as western governments.

I’ll leave the qualitative, case-study-based assessment of the political marketplace’s broader applicability to de Waal and the World Peace Foundation team. I will say, however, that civilian protection advocates’ understanding of violence, generally speaking, does not reflect the dynamic, evolving nature of political violence and its consequences for civilian populations. In our attempts to condemn violence–to dismiss its moral value–we undermine violence’s rational and, often, irrational application to a variety of political, social, and economic circumstances. The Kony controversy is only the most recent demonstration of our lack of cognitive imagination: while recognizing the LRA’s shift towards criminal mobilization, advocates’ policy approaches remain consistent, predicated on the decapitation of the insurgency’s political leadership.

It’s likely too soon to tell, but Kenya may well serve as a case study of a conflict resolution approach which analyzed political violence correctly (as consistent with, rather than divergent from, the state’s divide between elite exploitation and popular, democratic participation), and sought to correct it (through constitutional devolution and, hopefully, greater support for local mediation processes). With that said, our atrocity-oriented case studies on violence remain woefully under-assessed, ensuring the perpetuation of non-generalizable, myopic approaches to stopping it.

First of all, I’d like to thank the Academy: three days of engaging, critical, and invigorating discourse on #KONY2012 have produced unprecedented levels of traffic, exposure, and discussion for Securing Rights–much of it stressful, but all of it important. This post is neither a round-up, nor a “response to critics”; I stand by my initial comments, my analysis of Invisible Children’s compelling, problematic public narrative, my discussion of its political and moral implications, and my (snarky) call for more educated, responsible, and policy-informed advocates. Unbeknownst to many selective readers, I recognize Invisible Children’s remarkable, important role in crafting compelling narratives, mobilizing young constituencies for social change, and beginning an important conversation on advocacy, conflict resolution in sub-Saharan Africa, and the moral hazards, opportunities, and quandaries of effective advocacy. As with all mass movements, #KONY2012 is a teachable moment, one which should spark continued discussions about improving public policy, considering and reconsidering global leadership, and conceptualizing the role of human rights in a responsible foreign policy.

Let’s start with our first teachable moment, an existential question: What is advocacy? For many, this question is deceptively straightforward: advocacy is the process of pressuring decision-makers, in both the private and public sectors, to shift, continue, or adopt certain policies. In the case of Invisible Children, advocacy operated on two planes: first, the popular plane, which called for the devotion of U.S. government resources to capturing Joseph Kony, transporting him to the Hague, and bringing him to justice for the LRA’s heart-wrenching acts of political violence; second, the policy plane, which called for a more nuanced approach, including the expansion of regional military cooperation in LRA-affected areas, the mobilization of pervasive early warning technology throughout the region, and the rehabilitation of survivor communities in northern Uganda, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Given advocacy’s dual nature, the #KONY2012 debate focused on two narratives, often meshing Invisible Children’s public narrative with critiques of the U.S.-supported military operation in Central Africa, the absence of local participation in Western conflict resolution initiatives, and #KONY2012’s depiction of the LRA’s political dynamics.

In general, I don’t differ much from Invisible Children’s policy plane: while I recognize that there are unavoidable moral, political, and operational quandaries associated with a forceful solution to the LRA conflict, the human rights advocacy community, including the Enough Project, Resolve, Human Rights Watch, and the International Crisis Group, has crafted a valuable framework for post-operation conflict resolution. The organizational policy initiatives do not mesh easily with local mediation, peacebuilding, and transitional justice processes, but nor are the international and localized efforts fundamentally anathema to one another. While public discourse on military intervention should always be controversial, heavily debated, and carefully reasoned, the cost/benefit analysis on U.S. advisory support to the anti-LRA operation appears to hold up. With that said, Ethan Zuckerman is spot-on, describing the ways in which #KONY2012 “plays into existing narratives about the ungovernability of Africa, the power of US military, and the need to bring hidden conflict to light.”

The popular plane, by contrast, has sparked much of the blogosphere’s ire, with members of the African diaspora, as well as Central African civil society leaders, critiquing the #KONY2012 campaign’s immediate marginalization of African voices, policy experts dismissing Invisible Children’s simplified, moralized conflict narrative, and field researchers taking the organization to task for minimizing geographic shifts. Invisible Children has responded in kind, although most of its commentary has adopted a different plane, seeking to counter the popular narrative’s simplified shortcomings with discussions of policy recommendations, programmatic initiatives, and organizational leadership in northern Uganda. As the organization notes, however, Invisible Children has developed alternative resources to engage participating activists in the history and political complexities of the LRA’s mobilization in Central Africa.

The popular debate, which, over the past three days, has largely occurred throughout the blogosphere, Twitter community, and online Facebook constituencies, has underlined a core characteristic of advocacy’s existential problematic. With rhetoric reminiscent of, most recently, the SOPA/PIPA discussion, cyber-evangelists have quickly heralded Invisible Children’s online mobilization as the “future of online activism.” Commentators hint at, but do not expound on the exceptional quality of Invisible Children’s activism: hundreds of NGOs throughout the United States, Europe, and the world attempt to mobilize constituencies around human rights, foreign policy, and conflict resolution issues, but few have been as successful as Invisible Children in marrying activism’s popular plane with its political consequences. At the same time, however, the political context of the U.S. government’s anti-LRA efforts, underlined by its strategic partnership with the Ugandan military, demonstrates the complexity of decision-making determinants. As Adam Elkus noted on Twitter, U.S. policy Invisible Children has mobilized a broad-based constituency, predicated on widespread, almost-instant awareness of Kony’s atrocities, but advocacy’s role in the policymaking “black box” is difficult to determine (to use Bec Hamilton’s Darfur analogy). Advocates tend to use anecdotes (“once, a U.S. senator responded to a swell of phone calls on Darfur”), instead than empirical metrics (“repeatedly, over the course of several years, a bipartisan coalition of U.S. senators, each with varying commercial, political, and personal interests, responded to a swell of phone calls on Darfur”), for impact observation and evaluation.

Advocacy remains important, but we need to begin to view its role in the popular plane through a different lens. Currently, the advocacy conversation focuses on the quantity of conversation, as well as the effectiveness of advocacy actions: Does mobilization work, or not? Our current perception of advocacy relies on the myth of democratic decision-making: in reality, for better or worse, foreign policy is a meritocratic process, reliant on a small, expert community with power, influence, and credibility. Empirically speaking, advocacy’s impact is difficult to assess. According to Michael Kazin, a keen observer of U.S. social movements, immediate policy changes rarely result from the effective mobilization of progressive activists; unintentionally, American progressivism has successfully sustained cultural, media, and social conversation on equality, rights, and global freedom. Our “effectiveness” framework, therefore, does little to understand advocacy’s role, its contribution to social well-being, and its importance to domestic and international political development. Instead, let’s change the conversation: advocacy is a discursive act, with advocates, policymakers, and conflict survivors as discursive actors. In accordance with constructivist theory, transnational advocacy networks play a critical role in strengthening norm diffusion, reconceptualizing political perspectives, and, over the long-term, changing the behavioral preferences of political decision-makers. The diffusive process is straightforward: as seasoned advocates gain access to political decision-makers, institutions, and professional opportunities, foreign policy discourses gradually shift, resulting from a new, collective mix of political preferences, ideological biases, and social interactions.

If we begin to view advocacy as a discursive process, the post-#KONY2012 conversation on “constructive opportunities” begins to take a different shape. The two opportunities are non-exclusive: If Invisible Children-style movements serve as an entry point, discursive advocacy focuses on investing in community leadership, creating opportunities for constructive, dialogic civic engagement, and fostering the normative importance of human rights in international public policy. Advocacy focuses on improving the quality of human rights discourse, raising the profile of responsible, self-critical policy, and broadening the mobilized constituency.

In addition to Covering the Night, advocates for atrocities termination in Central Africa should make intentional, directed attempts to engage Central African diaspora communities, building opportunities for common relationships, policy forums, and constructive dialogue. African diaspora communities are engaged in extraordinary leadership development initiatives, and advocates can participate in those conversations, hear diaspora voices, and consider their role in the popular policy discourse. On the popular plane, the quality and inclusivity of policy discourse matters, not the rightness or wrongness of policy asks. Additionally, advocates should prioritize empathetic rather than sympathetic narratives of violent conflict and mass atrocity. If our personal, public narratives compel us towards moral action, those actions should be based in the empowerment of survivors, not condescension towards conflict victims. For atrocities narratives, simplification is, in a sense, unavoidable; however, if we invest in discursive quality, rather than quantity, the balance between local resilience and international action becomes apparent. As advocates, with uncertain effectiveness, it’s the best we can do.

On Monday, the human rights advocacy organization Invisible Children released “KONY 2012,” its latest documentary on the nine year-old student movement to end mass atrocities by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). In approximately twenty-four hours, the Kony documentary received more than one hundred thousand views on YouTube; when I last checked (2 am EST, 3/7/12), Kony-related hashtags occupied six of Twitter’s ten “global trending” spots (the hashtags, in order: #stopkony, the leading campaign hashtag; Invisible Children; Action Kit, the primary platform for anti-LRA activism; Cover the Night, referring to an upcoming national wave of guerilla flyering events; Uganda, the LRA’s country of origin; and, lastly, LRA). Depending on whose Twitter account you’re watching, whose Facebook friend appears in your live feed, and whose listserv emails you receive, Kony fervor has likely occupied a fair share of your evening’s Internet traffic. Suffice it to say that the Kony documentary has mobilized a remarkable wave of emotional uproar, from the most remarkable constituencies: on any given day, I see a handful of Facebook updates about human rights in sub-Saharan Africa; today, the numbers are in the tens, potentially hundreds–from STAND students, as expected, but also from my younger brother’s high school friends and Facebook acquaintances from esoteric Jewish advocacy retreats.

To add a fifth question to the Passover repertoire, why is this night different from all other nights? Why, on this night of all nights, do we post human rights videos throughout the social media sphere?

From an organizing perspective, the answer is simple: Invisible Children’s messaging, narrative, and network resonate with us. Organizing literature refers to the entry-narrative as the “story of self”–that is, the compelling, values-based narrative that motivates activists, organizers, and otherwise passive citizens to action. The most effective “story of self” I’ve heard comes from Kristen Dore, a curriculum specialist at the Marshall Ganz-inspired New Organizing Institute: Kristen tells the story of her college experiences visiting her father in prison, building a local, engaged constituency for prisoners’ rights in southern California. Kristen’s story evokes values of fairness, justice, and community, values which mobilize concerned activists the world over. Kristen uses her story to underline her participation in something larger than herself–in her case, President Obama’s 2008 campaign. In building a temporary, values-based constituency (her active listeners), Kristen mobilizes a “story of us” and a “story of now”: a way to recognize the broader community’s role in local mobilization, and a way to convey the urgency of political action.

Invisible Children’s Kony documentary is an organizing narrative, to a tee. From a purely quantitative perspective, KONY 2012 is not about the LRA, Joseph Kony, or political violence in northern Uganda. Rather, it’s a story of one man (Jason Russell, Invisible Children’s co-founder and the documentary’s director), scaled up to the story of common humanity (young students, mobilizing their communities in support of justice, human rights, and peace in northern Uganda) and the urgency of active action against LRA atrocities in Central Africa (“This movie expires on December 31, 2012”). Invisible Children’s effectiveness as a grassroots organization stems from this fundamental, narrative pattern: it’s about atrocities, yes, but more than that, it’s about what our mobilization against these atrocities suggests about our common virtues, transnational connections, and moral strength. Invisible Children’s success is predicated upon its ability to convey these stories, to manifest individual challenges within a broader narrative, and to maximize the political, social, and organizational potential of a transnational voice.

As my angry Twitter timeline suggests, Invisible Children’s public narrative relies on basic, nigh unavoidable failings. Let’s start with the flip-side of the human rights coin: the recognition that, despite their constructed nature, perceived ethnic, cultural, and historical boundaries exist across nations, states, and physical borders. Colonialism’s historical baggage matters, and the competition for voice-representation is, for all intents and purposes, a zero-sum game. Ugandan civil society participants, particularly the ones engaged in the non-Invisible Children-affiliated reconstruction, reconciliation, and post-conflict development work, are noticeably absent from Jason Russell’s narrative. In two and a half years of grassroots advocacy work, I’ve met enough intelligent, morally sensible advocates to know that monolithic accusations of neo-colonialism, Africa-saving, and cultural condescension are, frankly, tripe. At the same time, we’re not doing enough to define the terms of empowerment, to balance our advocacy perspectives with an understanding of civil society mobilization in conflict-affected areas, and to establish meaningful, sustained cross-cultural linkages that prioritize empathy, rather than sympathy. It’s quite simply a matter of changing the conversation, and I’m not sure that Invisible Children’s Kony documentary gets us there.

Next, there’s the morality question. To be “that guy,” I’ll link to two compelling TED videos on the social-scientific and cultural shortcomings of public storytelling: first, from Tyler Cowen, the economics wiz blogger; the second, from Chimamanda Adichie, a Nigerian novelist. The bottom line: stories can inspire. At the same time, inspiration runs the risk of perpetuating problematic, unintended cognitive biases. A “single story,” as Adichie calls it, can obscure a complex, multi-layered web of perceptive analysis, underscoring cultural stereotypes and simplifications. Fundamentally, the question is moral, rather than cognitive: How do we perceive the morality of conflict in northern Uganda and, more recently, Central Africa? Once we answer that question, how do we mitigate the moral consequences of our actions, to ensure that atrocities do, in fact, end? Invisible Children’s activism, added to the political lobbying of Resolve and the Enough Project, resulted in the deployment of approximately one hundred U.S. military advisers to Central Africa. The advisers’ purpose: to assist and, well, advise the Congolese, Central African (from CAR, rather than the region), Ugandan, and South Sudanese military forces in an escalated counterinsurgency campaign against the LRA throughout the region. Frankly speaking, the military advisers’ presence will likely improve, rather than deteriorate, the implementation of human rights norms in the multinational military campaign. The United States has likely learned its lessons, recognizing the counterproductive nature of Operation Lighting Thunder, a U.S.-backed 2008 “campaign of attrition” against the LRA in northern Uganda. That said, the U.S. operational partnership with the Ugandan, Congolese, Central African, and South Sudanese forces remains a political, moral, and social firestorm. The documentary’s purpose is not to delve into the complex, nuanced dynamics of military conflict, but, as it stands, day-to-day advocates for “action” have few platforms for the critical discussion of action’s moral consequences.

Lastly, let’s talk about the limits of policy intervention against the LRA. This isn’t a new conversation: as Bec Hamilton has detailed, the human rights advocacy community encountered the same challenge at the peak of Darfur mobilization. Come 2008, Darfur advocates began to talk about “Darfur fatigue”: the conflict in Sudan’s western provinces had grown more complicated, atrocities continued (albeit at a significantly lower rate), and the day-to-day advocates weren’t quite sure why. Part of the problem, of course, is the notion of the “story of now.” The public narrative’s third pillar works within the context of local organizing–limited labor-union resources demand quicker solutions, contract negotiations have deadlines, and infrastructure projects work on schedule. Foreign policy activists can’t say the same for violent conflict: the LRA has conducted a low-intensity insurgency against the central government in Kampala since the late 1980s, without any tangible reconciliation. So while the video has an expiration date of “December 31, 2012,” the LRA insurgency, the multinational stabilization campaign, and the marginalization of constituencies in Uganda’s Acholi region, northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, and South Sudan certainly don’t. If urgent, military action against the LRA is part of the solution–and, in spite of the potential moral costs, it probably should be–it’s only a part. And, as Mark Kersten’s field research has suggested, the peace/justice dilemma is perhaps more complicated in northern Uganda than in any of the other six situations currently under review by the International Criminal Court.

What does this mean? In order to move past #KONY2012, to promote credible approaches to conflict resolution in Central Africa, anti-Kony advocates need to be prepared to move past the public narrative, past the sexy, and past the action kit. On March 6, hundreds of people told me to take thirty minutes out of my evening to watch Invisible Children’s Kony documentary. If, on March 7, you’re not taking thirty minutes out of your evening to read the International Crisis Group’s November 2011 report on the way forward for stabilization and conflict resolution in LRA-affected areas, you’re not doing your job correctly.

Last month, while critiquing Anne-Marie Slaughter’s rosy perspective on the intersection between international stability and the “responsibility to protect” doctrine, Dan Trombly identified the schism between Western human rights norms and emerging-power intransigence as a challenge to interstate peace, international order, and, of less concern, the credibility of human rights doctrine. Trombly identifies the ideological rejection of R2P as a common thread between nascent Central European democracies and the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), underlining multilateral antagonism towards human rights promotion. Trombly, as well as many fellow (IR-)realist critics of the R2P doctrine, characterize the human rights norm as a dispensable threat to great-power security, perceived as the most secure, reliable characteristic of an evolving international order. If Anne-Marie Slaughter is correct, and R2P is, in fact, a reinterpretation of state sovereignty’s structural foundations, “the United States should drop even lip service to the Responsibility to Protect.”

As in international relations theory, writ large, a variety of normative assumptions underscore the realist critique of R2P’s international-systemic impact, the most prominent of which is an unwavering faith in the security, moral rectitude, and preferability of state sovereignty and the status quo of power politics. On the one hand, such conclusions are empirically sound: as Trombly observes in his most recent post, non-transformative, state-level behavior has, by and large, perpetuated a “transient” stability, chipping away at the persistent anarchy of international politics. The international system is a messy, tumultuous beast, and the maintenance of consolidated political authority has rationalized and stabilized a post-Westphalia structure.

Generally speaking, with less nuance than the theory deserves, empirical positivity is the core myth of theoretical realism: under this myth, sovereignty and self-interest are generalizable facts of system-level political behavior. A full spectrum of sub-state, bureaucratic, and historical conclusions, however, undermine this widespread characterization of sovereignty and its relationship to state interests. As Hayes Brown has rightly noted, state institutions are far from monolithic, and bureaucratic behavior–mistakes, individual preferences, and groupthink tendencies–frequently interfere with the uniform, static nature of state governance. In categorizing and criticizing liberal foreign policies, realists tend to condemn human rights ideologies as self-defeating, hypocritical, and, in the worst case scenario, dangerous. To be fair, human rights advocates have a similar tendency, perceiving moral absolutism through a monothic, non-developmental lens.

As is the case with human rights, it’s easy to characterize realists’ perspectives on sovereignty and state behavior as ideological, implying a rigid system, theory, or framework for understanding international interactions. Ideology, however, is a misplaced pejorative, which obscures the dynamic evolution of sovereignty throughout modern history, both in terms of its political application (within institutions, policy processes, and systems of authority) and normative value. If, as Adam Elkus suggests, policy is a learned behavior, determined by power, resources, and control, then policy, its processes, and its formation determine sovereignty’s normative character. The policy process–a tangible, non-abstract institution–frames sovereignty’s implementation, the quality of its control, and the breadth of its power. Ideational, then, may be a better descriptor of the sovereignty regime, reflecting the inherent instability of the state’s administrative bureaucracy, the role of individual and collective ideas in shaping political behavior, and the subsequent uncertainty of institutional actions. Where an ideological regime functions as a Weberian ideal type, an ideational system–applied to both realist sovereignty and liberal rights–reflects its actual application.

If we view R2P as part and parcel of the lexicon of sovereignty’s evolution, as the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty’s report proposed, we see a different role for the doctrine in the maintenance, sustainability, and evolution of international order. R2P’s intellectual origins, as well as its general operationalization, bely the notion of R2P/sovereignty antagonism, both at the policymaking and normative levels. When Francis Deng articulated his path-breaking concept of “sovereignty as responsibility,” he attempted to preserve sovereignty’s normative strength. (Indeed, the first sentence of Sovereignty as Responsibility reads, “[a]s the twentieth century nears its end, sovereignty is increasingly under attack.”) Amidst the flux of post-Cold War intrastate warfare, which created transient borders, displaced populations, and weakened political institutions, “sovereignty as responsibility” buttressed the state’s role in the resolution of international, sovereignty-obscuring crises. For R2P’s intellectual forebears, Rwanda’s lesson was two-fold: first, that in spite of recent multilateral progress on peacekeeping and conflict resolution, international preventive capacity remained insufficient (Dallaire’s February cable, and not the April spark, were the relevant behavioral failures); second, that the normative commitment to post-conflict humanitarian assistance was well-intentioned, but inadequate to the challenge of state-building and institutional capacity.

The narrow discursive focus on “humanitarian interventionism” has challenged R2P’s credibility. As I’ve discussed in previous blog posts, the cognitive feedback loop of military adventurism perpetuates the predominance of humanitarian intervention discourse: rather than outlining the case for preventive action, non-coercive intervention, and aggressive diplomacy, human rights advocates are quick to call for military force; in turn, R2P’s critics perceive humanitarian intervention as the be-all-end-all of R2P doctrine, without due consideration of its non-coercive, institutional, and multilateral implementation. Accordingly, when the R2P debate pops up in the international sphere, the political and moral qualms of military intervention figure prominently, and R2P’s full-spectrum operationalization is marginalized–consider, for example, the summer 2009 General Assembly debate on R2P and the future of humanitarian intervention, or the emerging post-Libya focus on Brazil’s “responsibility while protecting” principle. The debates are worth having, given the underrated importance of discretion and prudence to international human rights discourse. At the same time, however, rather than viewing Libya as Gareth Evans’ “textbook case” for R2P implementation, it may be more useful to reflect on NATO’s mobilization as a cataclysmic failure–successful, yes, in preventing an immediate massacre in Benghazi, but lacking the preventive foresight witnessed during Kenya’s post-2007 election crisis, or during South Sudan’s 2011 independence referendum. Given R2P’s initial, historical respect for sovereignty, the latter case studies reflect a more comprehensive, nuanced understanding of R2P’s role in strengthening the quality of state authority and security.

With an overdue focus on R2P’s interventionist possibilities, the monolithic, ever-present BRICS opposition to the doctrine’s implementation would be understandable. However, as I discussed, R2P is consistent with emerging, dynamic sovereignty norms; the question, then, is straightforward: for those ideational regimes who find Western human rights frameworks problematic, how can we conceptualize R2P’s cultural application? As an addendum, how can international actors amplify the human-security role of indigenous institutions to facilitate R2P’s effective implementation? My writing on R2P and the global South over the past two months has focused almost exclusively on Brazil’s RwP concept, which I’ve depicted as a proverbial gateway to North/South diplomatic engagement on the doctrine’s operationalization. However, during that period, the academic literature on R2P operationalization and capacity-building in the global South has expanded dramatically. I’ll post a full set of ungated links at the end of this blog post, but here are a couple of common themes, which will continue to underline R2P’s non-Western evolution:

Norm Diffusion: Consistent with general trends in constructivist international relations research, recent R2P studies have centered on the diffusion of “protection” norms within localized political institutions. Looking to expand the international donor community’s understanding of norm diffusion, the Overseas Development Institute sponsored a study of local “protection” approaches, covering conflicts in South Sudan (see below), Zimbabwe, Sudan’s South Kordofan, and Burma. As Benjamin Valentino has proposed, the international policy community’s current restriction of “civilian protection” to “mass atrocities,” rather than its second- and third-order political, human rights, and humanitarian consequences, remains myopic. In reality, on-the-ground protection priorities range widely, often operating outside of ill-defined human security concerns. In Jonglei, where South Sudan’s SPLA is currently conducting a broad, if incomplete civilian disarmament campaign, national conflict resolution efforts have proven hopelessly insufficient. Grazing rights and water access, rather than anti-state insurgencies, are the primary causes of civilian displacement, dislocation, and atrocities. Jonglei civilians, particularly from the Lou Nuer and Murle communities, use a variety of traditional resolution and protection mechanisms to restrict atrocities perpetration, including localized mediation, civilian defense, and “traditional” justice proceedings. The ODI studies have concluded that, in many circumstances, the problem is less “too much state,” but “too little, and too irregular.” “Protection,” generally speaking, exists as a norm of local political interaction, but state governments, focused too urgently on “national security,” have under-prioritized local responsiveness, institutional development, and good governance.

National and Regional Security Cultures: Since the 1990s, a selective trend towards human security has emerged within global-Southern security institutions. Domestic politics, however, have limited the maneuverability of human security norms, as political officials maintain differing perspectives on the intersection of R2P, human security doctrines, and global South priorities. Jun Honna outlines four components to the Japanese national R2P debate: first, Japanese foreign policy conservatives, who view humanitarian intervention as the doctrine’s unavoidable, problematic consequence; second, the “revisionist” faction, which views R2P as an appropriate mechanism for Japanese global leadership on peacebuilding and preventive diplomacy; third, the liberal constituency, which, despite uncertainty surrounding R2P’s international legal status, views mass atrocities prevention as a valuable foreign policy priority; and, lastly, the peacenik community, which echoes the conservative opposition to R2P’s interventionist prospects. These political divisions are widespread throughout the global South, particularly within democratizing regimes. The R2P schisms indicate a more active, evolutionary attempt to improve sovereignty, rather than maintain its static, intransigent character.

In Japan, as well as throughout Southeast Asia and, to a more limited extent, sub-Saharan Africa, R2P-minded political actors have looked to regional institutions as platforms for broader, more humanitarian security cultures, functioning outside the restrictive bureaucracy of domestic politics. Over the next decade, the human security components of regional organizations will likely be the primary vessels for second-pillar operationalization. The AU, for example, has persistently argued for the cultural importance of “African solutions to African problems,” perceiving the challenge of civilian protection from a continental lens. However, interstate divisions underline variations in the effectiveness of regional security institutions–given the ubiquity of repressive regimes within the AU, mobilizing the will, resources, and capacity for second-pillar policy intervention is less surmountable than OAS’ process, for example. In addition to formal institutions, networks, and policymaking structures, regional bodies provide a valuable mechanism for South-South cooperation on conflict resolution and human security. As I discussed in the “norm diffusion” section, a variety of localized political initiatives support national- and international-level “protection” efforts. Regional bodies, emerging-power summits (including the IBSA and BRICS constituencies), and transnational civil society platforms might take valuable lessons-learned from South-South development efforts, applying the knowledge-sharing framework to enhanced interactions between national state-building and local protection.

Related Reading

Pacific Review‘s latest issue features a full spread on R2P’s normative diffusion and institutional operationalization in Asia. In the interest of curating information, I restricted my in-post linkage to the most directly-relevant articles. However, in the interest of information sharing, here’s the full article set: The issue begins with a country case-study analysis of R2P’s normative diffusion, including its application in Japanese, Indonesian, Thai, and Chinese contexts. Additionally, the issue addresses the question of R2P’s regional operationalization, with a particular interest in ASEAN’s human rights bodies, political/security institutions, and human security culture. David Capie, from the University of Queensland, offers a compelling dissent on the “myth of R2P localization,” noting the ideational variation between R2P’s Western and Southeast Asian applications.