Kony Heads

I’m not alone in my fascination with the YouTube video Kony 2012. It splits me right down the middle, tears at opposing sides of my identity as an intellectual. When you’re opened at the middle, your heart is exposed. So let’s go to the heart of the matter, to my heart.

Let’s get past the detour of pedantic correction, which some of my Africanist colleagues can’t seem to pass up. Honestly, it doesn’t matter if Joseph Kony is in the Congo now. It doesn’t matter (as a pure factual correction) if the Ugandan army is also guilty of human rights abuses (which is assuredly is). It doesn’t matter if the American people didn’t “demand” anything when it comes to Joseph Kony or Uganda. Yes, sure, getting the people inside the Beltway to write some proclamations isn’t the same as a huge popular upswelling of support, as the video itself acknowledges at 22:56.

I’m tired of this particular staging of the conflict between activists and scholars. It allows us to adopt a neutral pose, to act as if we’re just about accuracy, about facts, about truth. It’s acting as if all the world is an essay to be marked. It’s a misdirection, a cover for our deeper discomforts.

What I love about Kony 2012 is that it puts into action everything I push my students to consider: to understand how to speak effectively, to leverage the digital public sphere into an end run around the tired cynicism of our political elites. I love that it’s technically well-done, that it’s smartly circulated, that it weds organizational work to a powerful narrative. It’s a brilliant way to put a different kind of pressure on Kony. It’s basically taking a tactic from Amnesty International’s bag of tricks and amplifying it a thousandfold through new media.

What I hate about Kony 2012 is that it puts into action everything that I push my students to consider. I don’t want to get too distracted by the self-aggrandizing, self-congratulatory, white-man’s-burden tone of the video, though that certainly grated on me as much as it has on many others. I don’t want to get distracted because it’s true, as its makers have pointed out, that you don’t mobilize people by telling them that they don’t matter, that they don’t have a right to act or have an opinion, that every time they might care about an issue in Africa they need to issue a long string of pre-emptive apologia for having that opinion. An automatic genuflection towards local, from-below ‘voices’ can be just as troubled a gesture as the instantaneous dislike of Westerners talking about doing things for or to African societies. At its worst, this is a move straight from a hyper-nationalist playbook, a way to capture all ‘voices’ and hand them over to a small autocratic elite, as the UN New World Information and Communication Order sought to do.

That the tone does irritate me even when I feel I shouldn’t be so easily annoyed helps me to understand what it is that really bothers me. It’s not facts I want to correct. It’s something far more elemental. I want to correct the social theory behind the video. I want to contest its underlying philosophy. When I respond, my knee-jerking frantically all the while, that the world is just more complicated than that, I’m not marking up a point with red ink, I’m not being anal-retentive about the facts. When I and other commenters say that there’s a history here that runs far deeper than the filmmaker knows, I’m not just wagging my finger schoolmarmishly.

The heart of the matter is that when I see the video, I realize that I largely believe in a kind of inaction. Suggesting that the situation is really very complex is just a polite way of saying, “It won’t make much difference if you actually capture Joseph Kony, and it might actually make things worse if you succeed in making him the singular, obsessive focus of an international campaign.” If we lived in a world with superhuman ninja assassins or suavely indestructable British spies, you know what? I would totally support one of them sneaking through the northeast part of Equatorial Africa and blowing Joseph Kony’s head off. An international trial in which he was found guilty of every crime imaginable and thrown in jail for life, executed, you name it, would be a satisfying moment of justice in a world largely absent of it. But Kony is not a monster who clawed his way out of some subterranean hell. He came from the history of his place, out of the circumstances of his time. He has lived in a sociopolitical world full of warlords, guerilla leaders, state presidents, and generals whom he resembles and who resemble him. He is not the only person to take children as soldiers, maim civilians, order the rape of women, facilitate a shadow trade in weapons and drugs, operate in porous physical and institutional spaces at the boundary of national sovereignty.

In real life you don’t get to throw the Emperor down a shaft in the Death Star and watch all the bad guys crash and burn. The world should know about Joseph Kony, but then, they should know about a lot of leaders in Central and Northeastern Africa. They should know about Kony’s kidnapping of children, but then they should know that most rebel movements and national armies in the region have resorted to the same tactic. They should know about Kony’s use of rape as a weapon but then they should know that the war against women washes through the entirety of eastern Central Africa. Outsiders should know about the Lord’s Resistance Army but also know that there are deep recurrent forms of militant prophetic leadership in the region that go back into the colonial era. Catching one man hardly matters against that backdrop. It certainly would not make any warlord, general or autocrat feel any fear of the same thing happening to them.

If with its current resources and aid, in a simple or unobtrusive way, the Ugandan army and American advisors can catch or kill Kony, that’s great. Making this the singular, surpassing international demand by the world, making this the objective that launches a million postcards from American schoolchildren, pouring whatever resources might be available into that goal? Not only does it miss the forest for a single tree, it runs the serious risk of turning into precisely the kind of crusade that does more harm in the end than it does good. A very similar rhetorical logic was used to sell the war in Iraq: get Saddam Hussein at all costs. A similar logic drew the American military into a disastrously misconceived crusade to “get” Mohammed Farah Aidid in Somalia. Real life isn’t Roy Rogers, it’s Unforgiven. Going after the bad guy often makes more bad guys, or gives other bad guys a gold star and lets them pretend to be the sheriff.

“Direct action” in the Invisible Children sense is all about instant gratification: it’s pushing 1-Click on “Change the World”. And the world just doesn’t work that way. Fundamental change is hard, it’s slow, it involves the messy working out of lives in the local, lives in the global.

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6 Responses to Kony Heads

  1. Jed Harris says:

    All interesting and probably correct. But there are some options near at hand that you don’t consider and that at least raise other questions.

    OK, no suave British action heroes handy. But we do have lots of drones. What if we engaged in a campaign to kill everyone who runs an institution that engages in those practices you condemn? I guess whoever should be responsible for this sort of decision could set up a court that would try and sentence them in absentia. From your description the evidence isn’t hard to gather.

    One question here is, given that “it’s complicated”: Would this make things worse on the whole? What would be the positive and negative effects?

    I guess a more fundamental question is whether the individuals are even part of the problem, or whether it is all institutional. Are there few enough sufficiently talented psychopaths that killing a bunch of them, and tilting the incentives against the rest adopting that particular career path, would empower other dynamics? Or does the institutional context produce this behavior in such an overdetermined way that the results would be just as bad, but perhaps less coherent and comprehensible?

    Of course the actual attempt to do this would run into all kinds of regional politics. But possibly that would clarify matters. Certainly it would provide a pressure point (“Bring the war criminals to justice!”) that would evade most of your objections.

    Finally, are there any relatively simple models of how this environment is stuck in such a messy state? If it is just “complicated” then I guess most of us will just tune out until it simplifies itself. I hope there’s some way to step back from the complication and describe the situation in a way that makes it somehow more comprehensible. For example, why are there “deep recurrent forms of militant prophetic leadership”? Can we anticipate any long term changes in this? Do these directly empower psychopaths? Etc.

  2. Timothy Burke says:

    Just on the drones.

    You’re talking, first off, a lot of drones just in this region alone, if you were going to target every head of a militia that has engaged in Kony-type atrocities. This is assuming that you decide not to target officers in what are supposedly national military organizations that also engage in said atrocities, or national politicians who order or condone such atrocities.

    Second, to do the targeting, you’d need human intelligence that I strongly suspect the US and NATO do not have and could not easily acquire. How are you going to find out who is in command of various small (two or three hundred at best) militias in the region in any given week? Moreover, much of this terrain is more difficult when it comes to spotting targets from aerial positions than Afghanistan and the US/NATO/UN would need to build the infrastructure to support drone strikes in the region. Try a Google Earth flyby of Bururu in Ituri Province, DRC and you’ll see what I mean.

    Which points to the third problem: these are mostly decentralized organizations that exist in part because there are plenty of guns, few jobs and little meaningful state authority in low-population density rural areas. Drone-kill a leader and all you’ve probably done is promote one of his chief aides or rivals into that role. You’d have to kill and kill and kill to make it enough of a threat to discourage armed men from assuming leadership over these groups. Or you’d encourage militia heads to adopt the same position that heads of state throughout the world adopt, including our own: to stay in a secure base and profess ignorance of what your troops are doing. Which wouldn’t be that far from the truth: the men in these militias do not need specific orders to commit atrocities, and might be able to function perfectly well without a specific leader.

    One of the problems here is the extent to which an organized project to kill Kony-type leaders operates from an assumption: that killing the leaders of groups or movements that commit atrocities is sufficient to discourage others from stepping into that role, or sufficient to discourage atrocity. The deterrent effect of capital punishment isn’t exactly well-established in ordinary criminality, let alone this sort of context. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest the contrary: I do not see much evidence for thinking that future authoritarians will be soundly discouraged by the fate of Mussolini and Qadafi, because I don’t think becoming an authoritarian–or the head of a murderous prophetic movement–is a simple career choice that you can nudge easily in the other direction.

  3. Jed Harris says:

    Thanks! You say “just on the drones” but you actually answer most of my questions.

    You’re talking, first off, a lot of drones just in this region alone

    I suspect that wouldn’t be a problem, as long as we didn’t used Pentagon style procurement. They should be cheap to manufacture. And all the “smarts” are on the exponential curve; if they aren’t cheap now, they will be in a couple of years.

    “This is assuming that you decide not to target officers in what are supposedly national military organizations that also engage in said atrocities, or national politicians who order or condone such atrocities.”

    This is an interesting point. I think the convention of not charging sitting rulers, no matter how illegitimate, with war crimes is unfortunate. Since this is all hypothetical I’d just as soon target them too (after appropriate trial and conviction, of course).

    Second, to do the targeting, you’d need human intelligence that I strongly suspect the US and NATO do not have and could not easily acquire. How are you going to find out who is in command of various small (two or three hundred at best) militias in the region in any given week? Moreover, much of this terrain is more difficult when it comes to spotting targets from aerial positions than Afghanistan and the US/NATO/UN would need to build the infrastructure to support drone strikes in the region. Try a Google Earth flyby of Bururu in Ituri Province, DRC and you’ll see what I mean.

    Here we are on very different pages. I was thinking about an African war crimes tribunal, so the human intelligence etc. would come from locals.

    The issue about small militia is more fundamental. Heavyweight judicial processes couldn’t handle a large number of small cases. Plus if the problem is many small war crimes then this sort of approach is useless — which is the question I was really trying to get to. See more on this below.

    Which points to the third problem: these are mostly decentralized organizations that exist in part because there are plenty of guns, few jobs and little meaningful state authority in low-population density rural areas. Drone-kill a leader and all you’ve probably done is promote one of his chief aides or rivals into that role. …. the men in these militias do not need specific orders to commit atrocities, and might be able to function perfectly well without a specific leader.

    I take this as a strong “Yes!” answer to my question “[D]oes the institutional context produce this behavior in such an overdetermined way that the results would be just as bad [if we got rid of the leaders], but perhaps less coherent and comprehensible?” In fact I guess it is worse than that, the social environment spontaneously generates institutions that produce this behavior.

    This also seems to me to largely answer my question “are there any relatively simple models of how this environment is stuck in such a messy state?” To try to summarize your point, there are a lot of weapons and very few economic opportunities. So a lot of economically surplus young men become predators and clump into predatory bands because that’s the path that works for them. At the same time there are no anti-predator institutions nearly strong enough to counter these bands.

    It seems like part of this story may be that the population has outstripped economic opportunity (i.e. too many people for the good jobs) but this deep enough in the background that I’m not sure you were implying that.

    I don’t know what proportion of the (young male) population will turn predator in this kind of situation, or conversely what proportion of the population won’t, even when the incentives are strong. I wonder if there’s any good data on that. I also wonder how much this sort of conversion is situational and how much it has permanent effects.

    I do not see much evidence for thinking that future authoritarians will be soundly discouraged by the fate of Mussolini and Qadafi, because I don’t think becoming an authoritarian–or the head of a murderous prophetic movement–is a simple career choice that you can nudge easily in the other direction.

    No argument. I was trying a thought experiment to get more insight into the larger picture, and it worked pretty well.

    But building on the model you’ve articulated, the question of motivation is pretty important — specifically the motivations of militia members, since the leaders aren’t that big a factor. (I guess if they had hardly any followers, the leaders would be easy to deal with.) If we sanction behavior or improve opportunities, but those changes don’t shift the motivations of the militia members, the effort is wasted. Conversely if we can identify cost-effective ways of shifting militia member motivations, maybe changes would not be so hard.

    Is there research on what motivations determine militia participation — to the extent that people have a choice — and what changes them?

    I wonder if giving militia members unlimited amounts of addictive drugs (e.g. heroin) would chill them out. That would be cheap.

    I guess this leaves one question that you didn’t answer: Why are there “deep recurrent forms of militant prophetic leadership”? The incentives you describe to become a predator don’t address that. If militia members are driven by deep religious belief then shifting their choices may be pretty hard, short of deprogramming — though I wonder if that could be cost-effective using local resources.

    Also, in general militant prophetic leaders don’t gravitate to war crimes as consistently as these seem to. Why aren’t more of these prophetic leaders organizing some equivalent of “meaningful state authority” instead of predatory militias?

  4. Western Dave says:

    Jed Harris,
    The way you think is very interesting and I’m wondering what discipline you are coming from. You are making assumptions here that I would never think to make, such as “what motivations determine militia participation — to the extent that people have a choice” and there are examples where you are looking for patterns or rules. I don’t really think of these situations (chaos and disorder) as following rules. But then again, I’m trained as a historian and I focus on contingency and the specific – not necessarily big patterns. I would suggest, given what we know about drug cartels, that giving them massive amounts of heroin would not result in “chilling them out.”

  5. Pamela Crouch says:

    While I certainly agree that the situation in Africa and the world is not cut and dried, I would like to point something out. You say, “Catching one man hardly matters against that backdrop.” I disagree. Each person has many opportunities every day to do a few small things that will improve life for other people, for example, there might be someone out there who will have the opportunity to (or already has) prevented Joseph Kony from killing families and kidnapping children. That would make a difference in the lives of *those*children*. By making sacrifices and caring about others, we actually could change the world, person by person. But it isn’t possible to do so in the grand scale, all at once, you are right.

    That is why I think your focus is wrong. By focusing on all the evil in the universe, you are not focusing on what you *can* change, and you are thereby missing opportunities to limit or decrease the suffering of individuals put in your path. Do you think that the situation in Africa has been improved by this blog post? Have any of the sex slaves or child mercenaries been set free? I mean, scoff if you want to, but the fact is that the only way for anyone to make a difference in the world is by focusing on one thing that they can change, and then not resting until they make that change.

    So, to hear you imply that your inaction is in some way mitigated by the existence of more evil in the world than you can shake a stick at makes me very sad, because if you are still not willing to take any action to help the oppressed in Africa, even after seeing a video that moved you, that means that the situation in our world is truly hopeless: if even intelligent people with good, compassionate hearts like yourself are not willing to do one thing to help the oppressed because the problem is “just too big,” then evil will spread unchecked, and there is no hope of improving anyone’s situation in any way. So, I have to admire at least the passion that it takes to make a video like the Kony 2012 video, and I also think it’s hard to deny that many more people are now more aware of the plight of children kidnapped by warlords than at any time prior to this month. At least they tried to do something, which is more than some of us can say.

    “A young girl walks along a beach collecting sand dollars that have washed up on shore. Still alive, they are destined to dry out and die in the heat of the sun. She picks one up and throws it back into the ocean. She continues doing this, one by one. An older man walks up to her and asks, “Why are you doing this? There are thousands of sand dollars on this beach that are going to die. What you’re doing doesn’t really matter.”
    The girl picks up another sand dollar and hurls it into the sea: “It matters to this one.””

  6. Sage Johnson says:

    To be honest I don’t think that this Kony thing reveals the whole truth. Many bloggers and people from Uganda blogged and made videos, uploaded at YouTube, saying that this is lie – Kony is out of Uganda and he’s been out for a long time. Also, we shouldn’t forget about the Petroleum found few years ago… How do you think about that?

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