Wanted Dead or Alive: Speaking of Social Media . . .

I am not on Twitter in any way, shape, or form, but apparently while I was linking to the State Department's social media manhunt on March 31, two human rights groups were launching an online campaign against Lord's Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony that went viral, and the groups' video was viewed roughly 17 million times (8 million on Vimeo, 9 million on YouTube) as of yesterday afternoon. Kony is the target of an ongoing manhunt in which 100 U.S. Special Forces troops are advising and assisting Ugandan and other local forces conducting operations against the LRA, a campaign I've blogged about before.

Despite the success of the Twitter campaign in raising awareness, there are some dissenting voices regarding the campaign. In the AP story above, London School of Economics professor Tim Allen questions the long-term significance of capturing Kony:

Even if Kony is removed tomorrow the problems are not going to go away. There is a chronic wide-spread failure of governance in parts of Central Africa. This is a part of the world in which hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people have been killed since the late 1990s in ongoing wars, and the Lord's Resistance Army and Joseph Kony himself is responsible for very, very few of those deaths.

Similarly, on Foreign Policy.com, Michael Wilkerson notes the video's inaccuracies, and says "it is unclear how millions of well-meaning but misinformed people are going to help deal with the more complicated reality" of Uganda's problems. Writing in the Toronto Globe and Mail, Salvator Cusimano and Sima Atri agree, arguing that "the Kony 2012 campaign's stated goals are simplistic at best and misleading at worst," and reaching a conclusion similar to my finding in Wanted Dead or Alive that "silencing one man doesn't silence the movement behind him."

Again, nobody is saying Kony isn't an evil man, and that he shouldn't face justice as soon as possible, whether before the International Criminal Court or at the business end of a rifle. But is is far from clear that his apprehension will significantly affect the humanitarian nightmares springing from Central Africa's wars.