IR Misc

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.