Some Thoughts on Justice in The Hunger Games

After many years of people telling me to read The Hunger Games, I used my first weeks without school to read through the trilogy. I liked it quite a bit, and it was nice to sink back into some good fiction of the fantasy/sci-fi variety (it’s been a while). I hope to write about it some in the future, but for now, some thoughts on justice. Obviously, spoilers abound.

One thing central to the series is the role of justice. The building at the center of the town square in every district, the building in front of which the Reapings occur and the Victor’s Tours stop, is the Justice Building. Not the Treasury or State Building, not a library or monument. The Justice Building. And the Hunger Games themselves are held every year as punishment for a previous secession. But it’s bizarre just how central of a role justice plays in the events that transpire in Mockingjay.

When Katniss Everdeen takes up her role as the symbolic leader – the Mockingjay – of the rebellion in the districts, she is tasked with being filmed in a series of propaganda spots. The first one the rebels film, one that they have worked on for a long time with a script prepared specifically for this moment, is one in which Katniss declares, “People of Panem, we fight, we dare, we end our hunger for justice!” I think it’s particularly interesting that District Thirteen, which has spent generations plotting how to fight back against the Capitol, has decided that justice would be the rallying point for overthrowing the government. Reading the previous two books, of course there is a sense of injustice in Panem, but the daily lives of citizens seems to be one wrought with inequality, oppression, poverty, and isolation. Why would a farmer from District Eleven find “fight for justice!” more appealing than “fight for freedom!”?

Perhaps this is a hint to the nature of District Thirteen’s mission. There are several hints that President Coin of Thirteen doesn’t want to tear down the Capitol and refashion a new system, she wants merely to take President Snow’s place. Perhaps fighting for equality or freedom didn’t occur to a people who didn’t want actual equality and freedom. But justice, something which traditionally has a victor and a victim, a judge and a prisoner, allowed for Thirteen to come out on top. It’s later revealed that Thirteen didn’t care about the people of the other districts beyond their ability to help fight the Capitol. According to President Snow’s theory, Thirteen planned to allow the other districts to bear the brunt of the fighting so that it could rule. If true, it’s surely not equality or freedom they’re after, but rule. And you can’t have absolute rule until you have justice on your side.

If Thirteen is concerned with justice because it allows the new regime to punish the old, Katniss preempts this early on. In accepting the role of the Mockingjay, she establishes conditions that include an amnesty for captured victors from the 75th Hunger Games. After those Games resulted in a number of heroes surviving to either escape to Thirteen or be taken away to the Capitol, Katniss quickly realizes that the government in Thirteen assumes the prisoners have given up information and are therefore the enemy. In asking for amnesty before they are even in Thirteen’s custody, Katniss pushes transitional justice forwards, establishing the grounds for how those who cooperate with the Capitol are to be treated. She does this primarily for her love for Peeta, but she asks for the amnesty to be extended to all of the victors, because of the fact that they have been taken prisoner by the Capitol and therefore their allegiance to the war shouldn’t be up for debate. They’re prisoners and conscripts, brainwashed and interrogated by the enemy.

In Uganda, amnesty plays a huge role precisely because the rank and file of the Lord’s Resistance Army are viewed as prisoners and conscripts, indoctrinated by Joseph Kony’s spiritual rituals. Forced to fight against their own people in Acholiland and elsewhere, these soldiers are never fully viewed as the enemy for their former communities. And so many civil society groups petitioned for the amnesty program that lasted from 2000 to 2012 (and was recently reinstated). It was a blanket amnesty that encouraged escapes, if you surrendered you were forgiven, no matter what. This is radically different from other amnesties such as the ones that Argentinian and Uruguayan military juntas required before relinquishing power. Those amnesties protected those that society as a whole deemed most guilty. The amnesty in Mockingjay, like in Uganda, is predicated on the fact that the target population is as much victim as traitor/perpetrator. District Thirteen even has a rehabilitation program in which some of the rescued victors undergo treatment to deal with their PTSD and other effects of their torture.

If we fast forward to the final chapters of the book, though, this conception of justice shifts dramatically. After the war ends, we are left trying to piece together recent events as a trial that we never see finds President Snow guilty of a crime we never know, sentenced to death. Meanwhile, it is slowly revealed that the rebel leaders may have planned an attack that both murdered Capitol children and rebel nurses in an act that is simultaneously the last nail in the Capitol’s coffin and also an egregious war crime. As Katniss navigates the immediate aftermath of the war, it is never fully revealed how it was decided that Snow should be executed, all that matters is that he is.

When Coin assembles the remaining victors to decide the fate of the Capitol, they are told that popular opinion is to wipe out all of the citizens of the Capitol. Whether this is true or just something Coin uses to justify more atrocities, genocide as punishment for the previous regime’s crimes is perhaps the most extreme and total form of victor’s justice. It eliminates the enemy completely, while cleansing the rebels’ crimes by framing them through justice. The only way around such atrocities, according to Coin, is to host a final Hunger Games to serve as punishment for the citizens of the Capitol. The victors, themselves victims of the Hunger Games specifically and Capitol crimes broadly, debate the issue. During the debate, Peeta questions the cycle of violence, a common complaint that arises amid accusations of victor’s justice. If the new rulers simply trade places with the former ones without addressing grievances in a constructive way, resumption of violence is almost guaranteed. Half of peace deals fail in the first five years partially because of this failure to embrace true transitional justice. That’s what Panem faces as the victors debate revenge killings.

After the group ends up endorsing the next Hunger Games, with Katniss’s vote, we see that she never intended for Coin to follow through with the plan. When she serves as President Snow’s executioner, instead of killing him she looses an arrow into President Coin, avenging her sister’s death (who was a nurse targeted in the attack on Capitol children) and delivering some justice against District Thirteen, which she has never fully trusted. But in the aftermath she is diagnosed as crazed with grief for her sister and what can only amount to PTSD from her wartime experience instead of coherently acting on a legitimate grievance. Her trial goes on without her, and she is cleared of all charges. Because she is tried in absentia, she never gets to defend herself. While this may actually have saved her life, given her unwillingness to play a role unless it is to save others, it also papered over the past. The new republic misses an opportunity to truly address atrocities on both sides and perhaps get a true – or at least truer – history of what happened during the war. Transitional justice has a huge role to play during such a radical change as this, but it is completely sidelined by the rebels’ desire to be the victors. Instead, the Capitol remains evil and the rebels immaculate. Justice has been doled out, albeit in incredibly uneven ways.

The world we’re left with at the end of Mockingjay isn’t clear. A new president is elected, and there is talk to trying to run the country as a democratic republic. Public services like hospitals are being established across the country in order to better serve the people of Panem. But the question of what the government does with citizens of the Capitol and – more importantly – captured Peacekeepers is not answered. The question of whether the atrocities committed by District Thirteen and the rebels have been revealed is also unanswered, although odds are that they haven’t. As Plutarch argues, “we’re in a sweet period where everyone agrees that our recent horrors should never be repeated… [b]ut collective thinking is usually short-lived. We’re fickle, stupid beings with poor memories and a great gift for self-destruction.” Without an effective transition to bring the two sides together and balanced justice to begin mending wounds, the future of Panem may be bleak.

Against Teach for America

I’ve never been a big fan of Teach for America, and in the last few years I’ve grown to downright hate the organization. And yet, I’ve never actually explicated about it on this, my more enduring venting platform. Now seems like the time, though, as a conference called Free Minds, Free People is organizing against TFA this summer. This is happening despite TFA’s broad popularity among education “reformers” and neoliberal bureaucrats that would love nothing more than to break teachers’ unions and privatize the education sector. Can you tell a rant is forming?

None of this is groundbreaking opinion if you’ve been paying attention to the education scene. Governments at all levels are tightening their purses when it comes to education, and public schools are doing what they can to continue teaching the students entrusted to them. And by doing what they can I mean by and large students are being funneled into giant classrooms where they’re being prepared for the next standardized test. Social studies took the brunt of the class size increases while English, math, and more recently science absorbed the standardized testing aspect. But right now the English classrooms and science labs are growing too, and there’s perennial talk of state-standardized social studies exams. And as this continues across the country, some states are working hard to shut down teachers’ unions and shuttering schools. Only now are we finally seeing resistance, but even this is a little defense against an onslaught of government and business efforts to radically alter education for the worse.

Enter Teach for America. Plucking college graduates from across the country, TFA throws them into a summer preparation course before placing them in some of the toughest communities in the country to serve students in dire need of a quality education. Instead, students on the margins are being taught by brand new, untested and unqualified teachers who have only committed to two years of teaching before they move on to graduate school in fields only tangentially related to education like administration, psychology, or business. The aim of the organization is to concentrate not on actually helping students in need but instead on providing top college graduates with experience before they move on to other fields.

Take, for example, a statistic my friend (a former TFA-er) told me: Teach for America has the same number of staff tasked with recruiting at Columbia University as it does tasked with organizing teacher placement for all of the New York City area. That number is two. You could also take this professor’s widely-shared reasoning for why he refuses to let TFA recruit in his classroom:

Never, in its recruiting literature, has Teach for America described teaching as the most valuable professional choice that an idealistic, socially-conscious person can make.  Nor do they encourage the brightest students to make teaching their permanent career; indeed, the organization goes out of its way to make joining TFA seem a like a great pathway to success in other, higher-paying professions.

Three years ago, a TFA recruiter plastered the Fordham campus with flyers that said “Learn how joining TFA can help you gain admission to Stanford Business School.”  The message of that flyer was “use teaching in high-poverty areas a stepping stone to a career in business.”  It was not only profoundly disrespectful to every person who chooses to commit their life to the teaching profession, it advocated using students in high-poverty areas as guinea pigs for an experiment in “resume-padding” for ambitious young people.

Treating youth in need as stepping stones to graduate school is but one of the major flaws with TFA. TFA’s woefully inadequate preparation for its teachers and tremendous lack of support for them is exacerbated by the fact that the two-year volunteers crowd out qualified teachers who are looking for work and create cracks in the fragile labor system that is teaching. I studied for four years and spent over 1000 hours teaching – including a semester in my own classroom – just to gain the experience and tools needed to be a good teacher, and even then I knew I had several years to go before I would be able to say that I excelled at the job. I’m desperate to get back in the classroom now solely because I want to continue that climb. But if I were to join TFA, I would be out the door and onto the next professional achievement outside the classroom before I could even get the hang of taking attendance. That is, of course, if I were accepted by TFA, which is notorious for rejecting people who want to be teachers and accepting future leaders in business and administration.

One former TFA-er reflected on the statistics of TFA teachers versus new, credentialed, trained teachers:

 Compare the performance of Teach For America corps members to another cohort: credentialed, non-TFA corps members. The same study indicates that novice TFA teachers actually perform significantly less well in reading and math than credentialed beginning teachers at the same schools. Keep in mind that to “perform significantly less well” as a teacher is quite literally to have a group of 10, 100, or even 200 students learn less than they would had you not been their teacher.

If you’re interested, you can read others’ thoughts on TFA here and here. While I think he gives a little too much credit to TFA, this former participant still advocates for shuttering the program, citing the experience at his school:

The other problem is the wasted investment a school makes in a teacher who leaves after just a few years. Sadly, I’m a poster child for this. I remember my last day at my school in Colorado, as I made the rounds saying goodbye to veteran teachers, my friends and colleagues who had provided me such crucial support and mentorship. As I talked of my plans for law school in Chicago, and they bade me best wishes, I felt an overwhelming wave of guilt. Their time and energy spent making me a better teacher – and I was massively better on that day compared to my first – was for naught. The previous summer I had spent a week of training, paid for by my school, to learn to teach pre–Advanced Placement classes. I taught the class for a year; presumably, I thought, someone else would have to receive the same training – or, worse, someone else would not receive the same training. All that work on classroom management and understanding of the curriculum, all the support in connecting with students and writing lesson – it would all have to begin again with a new teacher. (Indeed, my replacement apparently had a nervous breakdown and quit after a few months. She was replaced by a long-term substitute who one of my former colleagues must write lesson plans for.)

This teacher goes on to inspect the budget of TFA and it reflects what was mentioned above: 40% of TFA money doesn’t even show up in the classroom. Keep in mind that a number of school districts hire TFA teachers instead of experienced, certified teachers who want to be teachers. As cities like Chicago move towards mass closings of schools and cities like Philadelphia privatize their school districts, and teachers that remain employed in the schools that remain open find themselves saddled with excess work that stresses the system to its breaking point, TFA is breaking apart teachers – the only group still working to actually educate students. It’s efforts like this, aimed at keeping needy students in the margins in order to benefit elite future business and law school students while our school systems crumble, that tears me up. Teaching is my absolute passion, and I’m sitting here watching the whole education system torn down by TFA, by high-stakes testing, by No Child Left Behind, by Race to the Top, by reformers, by administrators, by governments. But these groups and objects have operated all as one. As Andrew Hartman explains, in a brilliant look at TFA:

TFA, suitably representative of the liberal education reform more generally, underwrites, intentionally or not, the conservative assumptions of the education reform movement: that teacher’s unions serve as barriers to quality education; that testing is the best way to assess quality education; that educating poor children is best done by institutionalizing them; that meritocracy is an end-in-itself; that social class is an unimportant variable in education reform; that education policy is best made by evading politics proper; and that faith in public school teachers is misplaced.

[...]

Successful charter schools, [TFA founder Wendy] Kopp maintains, also stop at nothing to remove bad teachers from the classroom. This is why charter schools are the preferred mechanism for delivery of education reform: as defined by Kopp, charter schools are “public schools empowered with flexibility over decision making in exchange for accountability for results.” And yet, “results,” or rather, academic improvement, act more like a fig leaf, especially in light of numerous recent studies that show charter schools, taken on the whole, actually do a worse job of educating students than regular public schools. Rather, crushing teacher’s unions—the real meaning behind Kopp’s “flexibility” euphemism—has become the ultimate end of the education reform movement. This cannot be emphasized enough: the precipitous growth of charter schools and the TFA insurgency are part and parcel precisely because both cohere with the larger push to marginalize teacher’s unions.

[...]

From its origins, the TFA-led movement to improve the teacher force has aligned itself with efforts to expand the role of high-stakes standardized testing in education. TFA insurgents, including Kopp and Rhee, maintain that, even if imperfect, standardized tests are the best means by which to quantify accountability. Prior to the enactment of Bush’s bipartisan No Child Left Behind in 2001, high-stakes standardized testing was mostly limited to college-entrance exams such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). But since then, the high-stakes testing movement has blown up: with increasing frequency, student scores on standardized exams are tied to teacher, school, and district evaluations, upon which rewards and punishments are meted out. Obama’s “Race to the Top” policy—the brainchild of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the former “CEO” of Chicago Public Schools—further codifies high-stakes testing by allocating scarce federal resources to those states most aggressively implementing these so-called accountability measures. The multi-billion dollar testing industry—dominated by a few large corporations that specialize in the making and scoring of standardized tests—has become an entrenched interest, a powerful component of a growing education-industrial complex.

Teach for America. High-stakes testing. Charter schools. Union-busting. School-closing. It’s all part of the same, terrible effort to throw our education system in the trash, and I’m glad to see more people resisting. With the economy making its slow climb out of the recession, many states are gaining or expecting surpluses. Schools are right to demand that this money go into education and not into privatizing more of our public goods. Teachers are organizing, and hopefully it isn’t too little, too late. The fight’s just starting, but – with hope – we can save our schools.

Violent in America

It’s been a while since Daryl Johnson, the analyst at Homeland Security tried to raise the alarm about right-wing violent extremism (and then lost his job amid Republican outcry). And it’s only been a few months since a study connected to Westpoint drew the connections between various right-wing groups and the use of violence (also criticized by the Republican Party). And yet, we have to observe recent evidence:

The head of the Colorado Department of Corrections was shot dead at his front door by a White Supremacist parolee who was later killed in a shootout with Texas police. And the Kaufman County, Texas, district attorney and his wife were just murdered, and a lot of people are linking it to the assistant district attorney’s murder in January after an investigation into the Aryan Brotherhood was opened.

Hayes Brown recently pointed out a study that showed that right-wing extremists are “highly engaged” with the Republican Party on Twitter, citing a report’s findings that the GOP could engage with these extremists in an effort to discourage violence. Instead, every time a study makes the connection between far-right groups and violence, Republicans say that they ought to be concentrating on Muslim extremists abroad rather than right-wing shootings at Sikh temples, attacks at abortion clinics, and targeted killings of law enforcement officials.

Compare this to the majority of liberals and even progressives that decry left-wing anarchist and animal rights violence. Even a single broken window at Occupy Oakland was shunned by a majority of liberals. Meanwhile, conservatives are working to discourage action on actual violence by actual extremists in their camp.

One Year After Kony2012: Resources for the Lord’s Resistance Army

Today marks a year since Kony 2012 was released, which means a year minus a couple of hours since it went viral. In the aftermath of the controversy, I threw together a link roundup about the video. To mark the occasion, I wanted to try my hand at a definitive reading list on the conflict and its many facets. I’ve broken this into categories to help anyone looking for specific aspects of the LRA conflict. A lot of the links are open access, but there are a lot of journals too. If you have trouble opening any articles, drop me a line. Please let me know in the comments if you know of other works I should include.

For a broad overview, there are two big things you need to read. The e-book, Beyond Kony 2012, edited by Amanda Taub, is available at whatever price you’d like to pay. It includes everything from the history of the conflict to advocacy responses to Invisible Children, all from great people in various fields. The Lord’s Resistance Army: Myth and Reality,  edited by Tim Allen and Koen Vlassenroot, is a good primer, especially on living in and near the LRA and the debate between peace and justice.

If you’re looking for other broad resources, International Crisis Group (ICG) has a report on understanding the conflict. The Justice and Reconciliation Project (JRP) has a number of field reports outlining various events in the conflict’s history that are worth perusing. For specific aspects of the conflict, Berkeley’s Human Rights Center and Tulane’s Payson Center for International Development have a report on LRA abductions. In additon, the LRA Crisis Tracker has just issued its annual security review on LRA activity.

There are quite a few decent articles on motivations and politics of the LRA: Frank van Acker, and Ruddy Doom and Koen Vlassenroot have written good analyses of the LRA; Adam Branch situates the conflict around Acholi  peasants; Paul Jackson views the conflict from the greed vs. grievance perspective.

Patrick Wegner wrote a great piece on the Internationally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps in Uganda. Chris Dolan has written a whole book (Google Books preview here) on the camps, in which he details their damaging effect on the entire northern Ugandan society. Adam Branch has written a book (preview) about the consequences of humanitarian involvement that I haven’t read, but if it’s anything like his other work it’s imperative. The Refugee Law Project has a paper [pdf] on effects of violence on displaced communities.

Regarding the ICC, Allen’s short book on the subject is best, but you can also settle for his DFID report [pdf]. Branch has written this short piece [pdf] and a longer one [pdf] on ICC involvement. My professor in undergrad, Victor Peskin, wrote this analysis of the ICC’s approach to both Uganda and Sudan. The Refugee Law Project has working papers on the ICC, traditional justice, . Louise Parrott looks at alternatives to the ICC. There is also a series of blog posts at Justice in Conflict about LRA commander Thomas Kwoyelo’s trial in Gulu.

On the flip side, regarding Uganda’s amnesty process, Louise Mallinder analyzes the amnesty process and Linda M. Keller looks at alternatives to the ICC. The first issue of JRP’s magazine, Voices [pdf], was about the amnesty process, and the Refugee Law Project has a working paper [pdf] on it as well. ICTJ and Berkeley’s Human Rights Center have a report on popular attitudes towards the ICC and amnesty, and ICTJ, Berkeley, and Tulane later published a joint report [pdf] on attitudes towards these ideas and reconstruction.

ICTJ and JRP have a joint report [pdf] on memorials and memory in LRA-affected regions. There’s also this piece on young adult perceptions of the LRA, which is an interesting perspective. Accord has a great report [pdf] on the long history of peace negotiations between the LRA and Uganda. They also put out this addendum [pdf] by Chris Dolan about the Juba peace process. I wrote a condensed history of peace and conflict in the war.

Looking at the military side of things, Mareike Schomerus has a look at the UPDF’s actions in Sudan, Sverker Finnström wrote about Kony 2012 and military humanitarianism; a group of authors wrote this article shedding light on what a military solution to the conflict would actually require. The Resolve LRA Crisis Initiative released this report right before Kony 2012, outlining what U.S. involvement should look like. More recently, Resolve helped release this report [pdf] on problems with the UN’s response. ICG has a report spelling out what else is needed beyond Kony’s capture/death.

This is my no means an exhaustive list of readings, merely the ones I think are the most important or ones with interesting perspectives, in addition to some reports with lots of information. Again, if you know of other things that are missing that you think are important, leave a comment.

Latin America’s Exception, From the Torture Network to the ICC

About a week ago, Greg Grandin wrote a piece about the CIA’s extensive torture network, noting that, among the 54 countries involved, Latin America was completely absent. The article is a really great read and sheds light on why the region didn’t render itself part of the massive anti-terror network. The history of U.S.-Latin America relations is, of course, a dubious one. Grandin cites Cold War involvement as well as economic failures brought about by neoliberalism as setting the stage, and both the Iraq War and the U.S.’s aggressive post-9/11 militarization as informing the Latin American response to Washington’s requests. He cites several WikiLeaks cables regarding Brazil’s effort to prevent U.S. expansion into South America:

[The cable] went on to report that Lula’s government considered the whole system Washington had set up at Guantánamo (and around the world) to be a mockery of international law. “All attempts to discuss this issue” with Brazilian officials, the cable concluded, “were flatly refused or accepted begrudgingly.”

In addition, Brazil refused to cooperate with the Bush administration’s efforts to create a Western Hemisphere-wide version of the Patriot Act. It stonewalled, for example, about agreeing to revise its legal code in a way that would lower the standard of evidence needed to prove conspiracy, while widening the definition of what criminal conspiracy entailed.

It’s really fascinating to look at the reasons that Brazil and other South American countries might be wary of what the U.S. is trying to use them for. This is also evident in the context of the International Criminal Court. Every single country in South America – and almost all of Central America – are members of the ICC, despite U.S. efforts to prevent such membership in the Court’s early years.

When George W. Bush entered office, he quickly set out to cripple the ICC before it was even officially created. He and like-minded senators targeted the ICC and tried to discourage states from signing the Rome Statute, the founding treaty behind the Court. They passed laws like the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, which barred U.S. cooperation with the Court and prevented military aid and training from going to countries that joined the Court. The White House also set about signing Bilateral Immunity Agreements (BIAs, also called Article 98 agreements) with countries establishing that they would not extradite American citizens to the Court. If states joined the ICC but didn’t sign BIAs, they would no longer receive aid.

The Bush administration worked hard to either isolate the ICC or cripple it by preventing jurisdiction over U.S. citizens. The response wasn’t what conservatives had hoped. By October of 2005, 54 countries had denounced BIAs (pdf), including a number of Latin American countries. While countries around the world issues such statements, Latin American countries had much more to lose in aid dollars, and yet they still refused to cooperate with the U.S. attempt to derail international justice. Ecuador lost more in aid funds than any other country in the world, and Peru and Uruguay both lost over a million dollars, in 2004, with threats of more in years to come.

In 2005, General Bantz Craddock of SOUTHCOM testified before a House committee (pdf) that he was unable to work with 11 countries in his region, and that these countries were turning elsewhere for training and aid, causing severe damage to U.S. influence. Losing its sphere of influence in it’s own backyard, the U.S. eventually backed down, allowing aid to flow into these countries in order to reestablish military support, but apparently not enough to marshal admission into the CIA torture network. It’s not crazy to assume that holding aid hostage for U.S. gains in the early 2000s played a role when it came to trying to build anti-terrorist laws and programs in the region.

Putting Kony 2012 in Context

In the last issue of Journal of Human Rights Practice, there was a debate about the Kony 2012 film and campaign by Invisible Children, four authors contributed analyses of the phenomena that captured the world’s attention last March.  Now that we’ve passed the campaign’s self-imposed “expiration date,” it’s worth revisiting it to explore some of what these authors critiqued, to offer yet more criticisms on the campaign, and also to defend some of the campaign’s accomplishments.

All four essays are worth reading. Sam Gregory explores the important pitfalls of centering a film around its audience the way that IC chose to, especially in regards to how the film was interpreted outside of that context.  David Hickman rightly points out that the film lacks an observational mode, rendering any exploration of the war’s history impossible.  Meanwhile, Lars Waldorf correctly observes that the campaign has raised the alarm, and that online attention must transition into real action. Mark A. Drumbl offers a strong analysis of the depiction of child soldiers. These are all important aspects of the film from which IC and others seeking to replicate their success can learn. But there are a few moments when the essays address the pitfalls of the film without considering the context in which it is set and the other activities of Invisible Children.

When he questions IC’s failure to garner offline support, Waldorf cites the poor showing in April’s Cover the Night activities.  However, I think it is important to situate Kony 2012, both the film and the campaign, within the organization’s almost decade-long campaign to raise awareness about the LRA conflict.  The fact is that IC has translated its surface appeal into real action on numerous occasions, with tens of thousands of American youth committing to day-long actions to draw attention to various aspects of the conflict.  In addition, IC and its partners were able to mobilize over a thousand supporters, myself included, to descend on Washington, DC, in 2009, helping usher the LRA Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act into passage.  It was hailed as the largest lobbying initiative for any Africa-related bill, garnering record-breaking bipartisan support. This law would later be the foundation for President Obama’s decision to deploy 100 military advisers to the region and the stepping stone for the post-Kony 2012 lobbying push to gain more funding for civilian protection programs in LRA-affected regions and to expand the State Department’s “Rewards for Justice” program to include LRA leaders, both of which have passed.  In November, long after the luster of the viral video had worn off, IC was able to host a massive summit in DC that included political and civil society leaders from LRA-affected countries as well as representatives from the AU, UN, and ICC, with an audience in the thousands. Whether you support the goals or not, this is a record that overshadows the piecemeal results of Cover the Night, and the number of victories IC can claim is a testament to the depth and breadth of the organization’s grassroots support.

When Drumbl criticizes IC, he argues that the organization fails to provide other needs that victims may require beyond the capture of Joseph Kony.  Here he makes the same mistake, failing to look beyond the film itself while criticizing the organization as a whole.  IC’s programs in Uganda have included scholarships for children to return to school, employment in a number of agricultural and craft-making programs, teacher exchange programs, and efforts to rebuild schools and provide better sanitation in villages. In an effort to criticize IC’s humanitarian proposals, Drumbl also states that child soldiers are often not rescued at all; most former abductees actually defect.  But IC understands that, and while they may urge their donors to “help bring them home,” their efforts to make that happen are actually through leafleting and radio broadcasts specifically targeting conscripts, encouraging them to defect.

One critique that Waldorf levels, however, is very important to expand upon.  In this video, as in their other videos, IC has taken clear sides in the conflict between the LRA and the Government of Uganda, depicting Kony as pure evil.  While Kony has committed egregious acts of violence, often on innocent civilians, it is imperative that an organization with the platform that IC holds turn some attention to the Ugandan government, which has allowed Kony’s terror campaign to continue to benefit its own agenda, which has employed devastating tactics on civilians under the auspices of anti-LRA missions, and which has forced millions of civilians into displacement camps with such deplorable conditions that they have been described as torture and genocide.  Anything less is a misrepresentation of the situation and a disservice to the mission of ending the conflict.

Another problem that IC has chosen to ignore was highlighted by Drumbl, and that is that the organization fails to depict the complexities of opting for prosecuting Joseph Kony over other alternatives, such as Uganda’s recently-ended amnesty program.  While Invisible Children’s programs fund radio come-home messaging aiming to encourage defections by promoting amnesty, the organization’s video made no mention of how the amnesty complicates the ICC’s indictments for Kony.  And worse, when the Ugandan government chose to end the amnesty program in May, Invisible Children failed to use its platform to adequately condemn the decision, choosing to sign a joint statement [pdf] with other organizations, but without broadcasting very much information to its massive support base.  When coupled with its support for the ICC indictments and Uganda’s military solution to the conflict, Invisible Children is involved in what is an increasingly militarized, judicial agenda that is replacing amnesty and negotiations.

What we have seen in the last year is that IC’s support base has grown, but its policies have remained the same.  The group is still using a simplified narrative to gather massive amounts of support, pushing a military solution as the only way forwards.  On this, their critics and I agree.  However, it is important to also consider the places where IC has succeeded, in its ability to raise awareness, in its efforts to support the local population, and in its work to protect civilians.  It seems that we are past debating whether Invisible Children has had an influence or whether they are doing any good at all; the debate should be about whether the net influence is positive, and whether the good work comes at a cost. As we move forward in 2013, it is critical that Invisible Children do three things: give a more nuanced and balanced depiction of the conflict, including naming and shaming the government where it is desperately needed; take a step back from its pro-military agenda, allowing room for amnesty and protection of soldiers forcibly conscripted into rebel ranks in their messaging; and stop dismissing critics, engaging them in a healthy dialog about how best to resolve the conflict.

Would America Be Better with Private Prosecutions?

I’ve been debating this idea for a while. I first learned about private prosecutions in The Justice Cascade by Kathryn Sikkink, in which she examines human rights prosecutions in Argentina, Portugal, and Greece and argues that they contributed to the creation of the International Criminal Court by diffusion of the concept of human rights prosecutions. In her chapter on Argentina, Sikkink mentions a characteristic of the Argentinian judicial system that allowed human rights prosecutions to occur, and it’s a practice common in Latin American civil law systems (and maybe civil law systems in Europe and Asia – I don’t know). Basically, in common law systems like America’s, the state is always the prosecutor in criminal cases. This stems from the notion that a crime against the state’s laws is a crime against the state/society as well as a crime against the actual victim. While this functions in many ways, it fails in instances where the state doesn’t want to proceed with prosecutions either because the case is deemed too weak to be successful or because the state is actually culpable or even the perpetrator of crimes.

In Argentina, after years of disappearances and human rights abuses by the military regime, some people began to circumvent state prosecutions by leveling accusations at members of the state police independently through private prosecutions. Others were able to use private prosecution to force wary state prosecutors in the judiciary to continue moving forwards against the executive. Sikkink believes that this is just one of many things that allowed human rights prosecutions to arise in Argentina, but it is surely an important one.

While private prosecutions aren’t part of the American justice system, I wonder if they should be. I’m no lawyer, and this isn’t realistic, but it could be a tool with which victims typically unable to see perpetrators prosecuted (because the crime was ignored by the state or they were victimized by societal problems as much as by actual perpetrators) could still seek justice. Right now you can sue others in civil court and win monetary judgements, but the prosecution in criminal court is run by the state. If you end up in jail, it’s because the state thought you should be in there and a jury agreed. What if, instead of just suing for damages, victims of foreclosure fraud could get fraudulent bankers facing jail time?  What if, to circumvent police that refuse to call date-rape “rape,” victims of sexual assault could send rapists to jail?

Obviously this is no guarantee of justice: rich bankers and corporate executives would have the best lawyers, and even rogue police could be protected by their own, and judges and juries are just as affected by rape culture as the rest of coeity. But it could be a start.  Especially if lawyers were willing to take up these cases pro bono (or non-profits/social movements could start funds to pay fees) victims that usually can’t afford to seek out justice would be that much closer to some peace of mind. If only a few trigger-happy stand-your-ground neighbors, poisoned-your-water-supply polluters, or you-were-drunk-but-you-still-said-yes rapists who usually stay free instead found themselves in jail, it would send a message that just because you are powerful or your crimes don’t get everyone’s attention doesn’t mean you won’t at least be brought before a court and maybe found guilty.

Of course, even if it were possible to implement this, there would be problems. The power of some groups could still be strong enough to dissuade some from filing prosecutions, and the shaming of some victims would be too much for many to even think about coming forward. And it isn’t unrealistic to think that corporations-as-people would use private prosecutions to enact even more overreach against each other, whistle-blowers, and the usual victims.

What Can We Do?

Yesterday, in light of recent events, my friend Adam and I engaged in a thorough conversation over what the next step is in changing the national discourse on gun control. The truth is that I have no idea. I figured I’d lead with that before writing this post. I’ve never worked on any gun control issue, and I’m not even that well-read on the issue. But I have a lot of thoughts on it, because it’s something that enters my thoughts pretty often.

When looking at the recent history of gun violence and massacres in the United States, it’s hard to parse out a strategy or narrative that’s deals solely with guns. The perceived importance of guns is tied up with our Constitution’s Second Amendment, and any conversation about preventing such tragic events must include talk of access to, funding for, and reduced stigma of mental healthcare and increased support for victims of domestic violence. And when you talk about political or legal solutions to gun proliferation, you involve the political system, the powerful gun lobby, and the ideologues of the Republican Party along with unequal state laws, a Supreme Court that strikes down bans, and a Democratic Party scared to use its strength.

So, eschewing the question of when it’s right to talk about gun control, I ask: what will be done? We can’t really accept that nothing will be done, even though a lot of us have reluctantly muttered the question “how many more times will this have to happen before we do something about it?” at least a few times in the past week, month, year, or decade. But if we refuse the idea that nothing will be done, if we decide that something will be done, what will that something be?

A relative of mine recently tried to take advantage of some gun sales at a hunting store in Arizona, and the guns had all sold out almost immediately. When my dad asked him why, the relative reiterated the fear that Obama will be banning all guns any day now, so a lot of Republicans are getting them while they can. Nevermind the fact that Obama hasn’t had the gumption to do anything when it comes to gun violence, and has actually helped facilitate the militarizing of a host of countries around the world. What do we do about gun control when people are already hoarding weaponry to face both the apocalypse and the specter of a government crackdown on guns, both of which are completely unfounded?

It will be a long and arduous campaign to shift the cultural mindset. The NRA and similar organizations have always had a tight grip on the lawmakers of this country, and they have also fostered a deep love for guns among the citizenry. The recent radical turn of the Republican Party has only exacerbated this as more and more people feel tied to their right to bear arms. There’s no easy way to reverse this trend, but a long and committed campaign could slowly chip away at the power of firearms.

It is, of course, my dream that I could live in an America where there is either a full gun ban or something close.  But that’s all it is. It’s a dream, and it will remain that way. After all, yesterday’s tragedy, and many gun-related tragedies, was carried out by legal weapons. But there has to be some argument that, if killing sprees and this easy while ostensibly following the law, maybe we should change the law. The fight against gun violence and mass killings needs to start locally, and it needs to start with conversation.

Only Nixon, Only Reagan – International Treaties and the Presidency

A lot of people have been lamenting the US Senate’s failure on Wednesday to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities by a vote of 61-38 (treaties need 67 votes to be ratified), and rightly so. There is virtually no reason not to ratify the treaty, and many GOP senators even went back on promises at the last minute by voting no. It’s really terrible that the United States is so unwilling to ratify international conventions, many of which are great treaties, on the absurd fear of losing all American sovereignty (or whatever it is they’ve convinced themselves).

But the fact is, we shouldn’t be surprised. The Unites States is the only country other than Somalia that hasn’t ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. And we’re in the minority of non-ratifiers for a host of other conventions and treaties, from landmine bans to climate change protocols to international justice. The next time the U.S. signs onto anything like this, it will be because a Republican President wants to.

Sometimes people look at me with a bit of skepticism on that point, but it’s true. In an only-Nixon-could-go-to-China way, only a Republican president could twist the arms of enough GOP senators to vote alongside Dems, who for the most part already support such measures. The only reason the U.S. ever signed onto the Genocide Convention was because Ronald Reagan accidentally visited a Nazi cemetery (and didn’t visit any concentration camps) on a trip to Germany. To solve the controversy, he pushed for the Genocide Convention’s passage and voila. That is almost the only route for America to sign anything.

So we just need the next GOP President to fuck up on an issue, I guess.

Wanja Muguongo on Exporting Homophobia

On November 1, Wanja Muguongo, a Yale World Fellow and the Executive Director of UHAI – The East African Sexual Health and Rights Initiative, spoke at Yale’s African Studies program’s weekly speakers’ series. She spoke about homophobia in Africa and the role of the West. I have been meaning to write a recap of what was said, and am finally doing so now for two reasons. Firstly and unfortunately, Uganda’s parliament is again revisiting the infamous anti-gay bill; in addition, an African Studies reading group which I have organized will be discussing Stanley Kenani’s “Love on Trial” [pdf] soon, which is relevant to all of this as well. Below is my attempt to cover everything that Muguongo said at the event, which was cut short (hence the abrupt ending).

It’s important that you understand where I’m coming from and who I am, so a bit about myself and my beliefs: I manage a fund that supports NGOs, and we are a resource but also part of a movement. The conversation of LGBTI rights doesn’t take place in a vacuum; it takes place in a world of power and patriarchy. On top of this, I believe that band-aids don’t help, and that you need to tackle problems to fix them. Ending anti-gay laws doesn’t end hate fundamentally, but it’s a step in the right direction. We must also tackle sex workers’ rights by allowing them to fight oppression and patriarchy and change how society looks at sex. I believe there is way too much power in the world that is being used badly, and that normativity has always been a cause for bullying. I have chosen to endeavor to dis-empower bullies as much as possible. One of the things supporting power is religion being used as a mechanism of that power. Here, when I say religion I do not mean faith or belief, but the institution of organized religion. I have a problem with institutionalized religion as it is being used today.

Faith and belief are supposed to be kind and supportive, but when they are institutionalized they fail to do those things. Religion is about control and can be used to target outliers. We must contemplate what it means to be non-normative in a strongly religious community that supports hate and is intolerant. We tend to think of GLBTI/sex workers are people that are not of faith, which isn’t always true. Things are more complex than they seem.