As the furor caused by Invisible Children and Kony 2012 settles down, it's difficult to tell how it will be remembered and if the discourse it generated will be sustained. Kony 2012 may just become another interesting anecdote of our social media?driven generation about a video that spread like wildfire and got everyone talking and tweeting, before being relegated to our browser histories. On the other hand, as superficial as it was accused of being, it may actually continue to raise awareness that people like Joseph Kony still operate in places we know nothing about, to spawn criticism after criticism and positively deconstruct our privileged generation's views of politics, social justice and attitudes towards the Other.
Thanks to the campaign, most people now know that a vicious warlord named Joseph Kony stalks the African jungle with a band of child soldiers and believe that he needs to be brought to justice. Thanks to the immense criticism the campaign has generated, a smaller but still significant number of people then learned that Joseph Kony has been out of Uganda for over five years, understand that an American intervention to apprehend him needs to be thought over twice and recognize Uganda's complex political situation and difficult quest to recover from the devastation of the LRA conflict. However, this more nuanced information comes packaged with the fair criticism that Invisible Children is an extremely flawed organization that misrepresented facts in order to generate a greater fundraising appeal, with a very low percentage of said funds ever reaching Africa. The combination of relative enlightenment about Uganda and the LRA with Invisible Children's flaws offers a self?satisfying excuse to those no longer inspired: to proclaim themselves as "right" while removing themselves from the Kony discourse.
To settle for this intellectually legitimate dissociation from efforts to apprehend Kony and facilitate the recovery of Northern Uganda is to remain ignorant and self?congratulatory in the face of tragedy and trauma. Without further action and discourse, the critics of Kony 2012 will remain right. The campaign will just have been a self?serving misappropriation of facts and feelings and will have generated no good on the ground. It will become solely a cultural relic for the privileged, social media?literate West to look back upon and will have reinforced the divide between privileged Westerner and African victim.
There is an alternative. Kony 2012 can be a valuable tool for bringing justice and recovery if it remains in the public discourse and is examined rigorously, critically and in a deconstructive manner.
The first way to positively deconstruct Kony 2012 is to simply fact?check it. Many of the vague or misrepresented statements have already been corrected or elaborated upon. But it is not enough to settle for getting the facts right; the facts need to be understood. It is important to note that Kony left Uganda in 2006, failed to sign the inconclusive Juba agreement in 2008 and now only has a few hundred soldiers with him, not 30,000. However, it is imperative not to forget that Kony still presents a clear and present danger to the people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic and South Sudan. He will continue to kill and abduct to preserve his power.
A second deconstruction requires further inquiry into the Ugandan and East African political situation, as well as American foreign policy. Kony may be a uniquely evil man, but what happened in Northern Uganda was not a result of some murderous whim. Kony and the LRA have their roots in the 1980s, in an ethno?political conflict, which vaunted YoweriMuseveni and his National Resistance Army, who still rule to this day, into power. In addition, since the video was released, the African Union has deployed additional troops to apprehend Kony. The International Criminal Court (ICC) handed down its first ever conviction - that of Thomas Lubanga, a Congolese war criminal who used child soldiers. Both of those events merit further discussion, but their timing is surely not coincidental.
Finally, deconstructing Kony 2012 in terms of its cultural portrayals may be the easiest way to bridge some of the gaps that the video left. Kony 2012 did videographically exploit the images of subaltern children, denying them a voice in the documentation of their own ordeals. It gave that agency to Jason Russell's painfully cute son, who attempts to grasp the situation with a child's black?and?white point of view. It may be cute when Gavin calls the LRA "Star Wars people," but what this really does is reinforce the conception that Africa is "A Galaxy Far, Far Away." However, the cultural flaws the video possesses create an impetus to tell the story of the Acholi, Langi and Teso people victimized by the LRA, in a participatory manner. The absence of their voices in Kony 2012 beckons for someone to empower them to speak to the world.
Taking the time to productively elucidate the flaws with Kony 2012 does not yield condemnations. It yields possible solutions, not only towards the best way to bring Kony to justice and rebuild Northern Uganda, but also to create an accurate, authentic and practical social media campaign against famine in the Sahel region and the Horn of Africa or governments massacring their citizens in Syria and Sudan. If this occurs, then a hugely flawed campaign will have succeeded and proven that Western society has the ability to do more than just engage emotionally with trauma and turmoil across the globe. It will show a self?critical, globally aware force that understands the complexities of situations such as these and knows how it can and cannot play a positive role in resolution and recovery.
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