Law in popular belief

Myth and reality

Anthony Amatrudo, Regina Rauxloh

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526115416
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

In recent years there has been a significant growth in interest of the so-called "law in context" extending legal studies beyond black letter law. This book looks at the relationship between statute law and legal practice. It examines how law is applied in reality and more precisely how law is perceived by the general public in contrast to the legal profession. The authors look at a number of themes that are central to examining ways in which myths about law are formed, and how there is inevitably a constitutive power aspect to this myth making. At the same time they explore to what extent law itself creates and sustains myths. The book will be of general interest to a number of different disciplines such as legal theory, general law, criminology and sociology.

II

PERCEPTION SHAPED BY OTHER MEANS

4Regina E. Rauxloh

‘Kony is so last month’ – lessons from social media stunt ‘Kony 2012’

Introduction

The role of the International Criminal Court (ICC) is to bring those responsible for committing the most serious crimes to justice when no domestic court is willing or able to do so. Although as of 2015, the Court has as many as 123 member states, one of its most crippling weaknesses is its lack of enforcement power.¹ The ICC is entirely dependent on the co-operation of national states, whether it is for enabling investigation by permitting entry into a country, granting access to evidence and witnesses, executing arrest warrants, or carrying out the Court’s sentences. Even though the member states are under a legal obligation to co-operate with the Court (Article 86 Rome Statute), there are numerous cases where both member and non-member states have refused to co-operate with the Court (Cole, 2013; Fairlie, 2011). This opposition is hardly surprising considering the high political sensitivity of ICC cases, especially when they involve sitting heads of state.² At the same time, those states that are not directly affected by the atrocities have little interest in jeopardising diplomatic relations over a problem far removed from their electorate, who are rarely aware of the crimes and even less aware of the ICC. While there are more and more people in the West who have heard about the ICC, their awareness is still rather hazy. The trials of Charles Taylor (Special Court of Sierra Leone), Slobodan Milosevic (International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia) and Uhuru Kenyatta (ICC) seem to be reduced to the proceedings of a single court in The Hague, quite often also confused with the International Court of Justice. The Special Court of Sierra Leone is more known for the appearance of Naomi Campbell in the witness stand than for the historical trial of the Liberian President. The result is that some of the most important criminal trials in history are held with very little knowledge or interest from the international public. An outreach programme is placed at the Court, which aims to increase information and communication but it is targeted only at the population affected by the crimes rather than the public in general.³ A more interested and active public in non-affected states on the other hand could encourage governments to co-operate better with the Court. But the question is how to inform and engage the wider public in the work of the ICC?

This chapter examines to what extent both new communications technology and the subsequent interdependence and interconnectedness among citizens around the world can increase the engagement of the global public in the work of the ICC. Already there have been examples of when social media was the primary tool for facilitating political engagement, such as the 2008 Obama campaign or the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 (Karlin and Matthew, 2012). The most cited example of where social media are claimed to have been essential in shaping historical events are the protests in the Middle East, which were also called the ‘Twitter Revolution’ or ‘Facebook Revolution’ (Tufekci and Wilson, 2012, p. 365). The prominent role of internet communications in these movements led to claims that social media could dramatically change political participation at the grassroots level and revolutionise civic engagement (Hill, 2010).

In 2012, the non-governmental organisation Invisible Children released the video ‘Kony 2012’⁴ to raise the awareness of one of the oldest ICC cases, namely the case against Joseph Kony, leader of the African paramilitary rebel group ‘Lord’s Resistance Army’ (LRA). The video became almost instantly the most watched video on YouTube, attracting 100 million views in the first six days (Haris, 2013, 265). This success was especially surprising considering that the film was comparatively long (30 minutes) and comparatively serious for a popular YouTube clip. One reason for the instant ‘virality’ of the film undoubtedly lay in the various forms of modern social media that enabled easy sharing of the video, such as Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace pages (Bal et al., 2013, p. 204). The quick and widespread dissemination of the video begs the question of whether social media can be used to benefit the ICC by promoting its public profile and thereby encourage state co-operation. As one commentator expressed enthusiastically: ‘I think “Kony 2012” has the potential to blow wide open the hidden power of public opinion in this country and the media that can now harness it as never before’ (cited in Curtis, 2012).

Looking at the potential of social media for public awareness and grass root activism this chapter asks what lessons can be learned for the ICC from ‘Kony 2012’. It will argue that the danger of social media campaigns is that rather than informing and engaging the public, they easily create myths and beliefs far remote from the aims of international criminal justice. It will also be shown that the potential of social media for popular activism is in itself but a popular myth. The chapter will briefly set out the background of the organisation, and examine the video and the situation in Uganda before analysing the three main myths created or perpetuated by ‘Kony 2012’.

‘Kony 2012’

Background: Invisible Children

Invisible Children, the non-profit organisation based in San Diego which produced and released ‘Kony 2012’, was founded in 2004 by Jason Russell, Laren Poole and Bobby Bailey, to raise public awareness about the violent LRA and their victims in the Acholi region, northern Uganda. From the very beginning, Invisible Children organised biannual tours across the USA, where they showed short films and raised funds (usually on the autumn tour) and promoted action days (usually in the spring tour) (Finnegan, 2013, p. 138). In total, Invisible Children ran fourteen campaigns and produced and screened twelve films. The most successful campaign before ‘Kony 2012’ was ‘The Rescue’ in 2009, which achieved the mobilisation of 85,000 participants in the spring action day. The organisation also participated in projects in northern Uganda, such as building radio networks, providing services to displaced children and their families, helping to rebuild schools and offering scholarships. Their main focus, however, has been to increase awareness of the LRA outside Uganda and to influence US policy. By 2012, two-thirds of the organisation’s funds were used for film production, travelling and lobbying rather than for Ugandan projects (Finnström, 2012, p. 129). Although the organisation Invisible Children has been criticised for not using more of its funds in Uganda on the ground, one must keep in mind that the organisers have not portrayed themselves as an aid organisation but rather as an ‘advocacy and awareness organisation’ (Jefferson, 2012). Invisible Children’s greatest success was in 2010 when, together with Resolve and John Prendergast from the Enough Project, they allegedly managed to prompt US policy and to be instrumental in the passing of the LRA Disarmament and northern Uganda Recovery Act (Audette, 2013: 54). Invisible Children also claimed that they were influential in that in 2011 President Obama committed 100 military advisers to the Ugandan military to help arrest Kony (Finegan, 2013, p. 139). While Invisible Children questioned neither the motives nor the consequences of the military involvement of the US military in Uganda, militarisation of the area by AFRICOM has been criticised for having domestic objectives such as counterbalancing China’s growing influence on the continent, advancing the global war on terror, and securing access to oil and other natural resources (Finnegan, 2013, p. 142). Thus rather than influencing US policy, it seems Invisible Children supplied additional justification and legitimacy to a number of already established policy priorities of the Obama administration.

Invisible Children’s fourteenth campaign was launched on 5 March 2012 with the organisation’s twelfth film, ‘Kony 2012’, in order to prepare the new action event ‘Cover the Night’ on 20 April 2012. The goal of the video was to make Joseph Kony (in)famous and thereby raise international support for his capture. The film was released on YouTube, vimeo and the Invisible Children website with the target of reaching 500,000 viewings by the end of the year (Gregory, 2012, p. 464). Within only six days, the video had over 100 million viewings and was celebrated as ‘the most viral video campaign in history’ (Audette, 2013, p. 53). According to a telephone poll by the Pew Research Centre, 58 per cent of Americans aged between eighteen and twenty-nine had heard about ‘Kony 2012’ within a week of its release (Pew Research Centre, 2012). After only three days, the video was covered on three American national network newscasts and on 9 March it became the New York Times’s headline.

‘Kony 2012’ was the last campaign of Invisible Children which, in December 2014, announced that it would close all US-based activities and focus on Ugandan projects alone. In 2015, Invisible Children decided to close down completely. Sadly, the rebel group that Invisible Children set out to stop, has outlived the NGO.

Background: Uganda

Joseph Kony, a former army commander, became the leader of the LRA in the 1980s, opposing Yoweri Museveni who took control of Uganda in 1986 after leading rebellions against the northern-dominated government. After his coup, Museveni’s army committed atrocities against the northern population, which in turn led to opposition and counter-rebellions. The twenty-year-long conflict between the armed rebel groups and the government led to over 100,000 killings, 2,000,000 displaced people and 60,000 abducted children (many of them turned into sex slaves and child soldiers). In 2003, Betty Bigombe, former Minister of State for Pacification of the North, started meeting senior LRA members for peace negotiations. In spite of the peace talks and subsequent ceasefires, in December 2003 President Museveni referred the situation to the ICC. In 2005, the ICC issued arrest warrants against five members of the LRA including Joseph Kony,⁵ which clearly disrupted the ongoing peace negotiations between the LRA and Bigombe. In 2006, the LRA withdrew from Uganda and moved into the border region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic and what would become the Republic of South Sudan. Since then, thousands of LRA members have left the group which is now believed to consist of less than 200 fighters. Nevertheless, the LRA continues to terrorise local populations and according to a report released by the UN in 2014, the number of attacks has been increasing every year.⁶

Three key myths

Soon after the release of the video, Invisible Children was attacked for a lack of transparency regarding the use of their funds, and the organisation’s reputation suffered further when a video of co-founder Jason Russell emerged, exposing himself on the street after a nervous breakdown. This chapter focuses, however, on the role played by the video in creating and perpetuating myths about the conflict in Uganda, possible solutions and the impact of social media campaigns.

1.The myths about the depicted problem

The northern Uganda perspective

The first of the film’s problems is the presentation of the factual background. Even though compared with other YouTube videos, thirty minutes is quite long, the film’s information about Joseph Kony and Uganda is surprisingly inaccurate and simplified. The video gives the impression that Kony still has an army of tens of thousands of child soldiers and that he is still acting in Uganda. There are three points of misunderstanding here. First, while the LRA was operating in Uganda when Invisible Children was founded in 2004, the rebel group retreated from Uganda in 2006, six years before ‘Kony 2012’ was released. On the other hand, the Central African Republic, a country where brutal LRA attacks on villages occur on a regular basis, is completely absent from the video (Edmonson, 2012). Secondly, while throughout the duration of the war, the total number of recruited child soldiers is estimated to count over 30,000, today the LRA is believed to have less than 200 fighters. Thirdly, the film shows an outdated portrayal of Uganda, omitting the enormous recovery of post-conflict north Uganda in recent years. Thus, although not saying this explicitly, the film gives the impression that the Acholi region is still in the situation it was in 2004 when Invisible Children started its work.

Furthermore, the armed conflict itself has been misrepresented. The long war in Uganda, which now continues in neighbouring countries, has been reduced to a single individual attacking Ugandan civilian victims, mainly children. Co-founder Laren Poole sets out this simplistic narrative as follows:

It’s one man: it’s Joseph Kony. He’s a monster. You’re going to hear about him today. We are going to be talking about ways this can become a reality. But I want you guys to know that this one man is preventing millions of people from going home … He is the world’s first and arguably the worst criminal near here. Not because of him, but because o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Notes of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• I Perception shaped by traditional media
• II Perception shaped by other means
• III Perception of those at the fringe of society
• Index