Child Soldiers and Clicktivism: Justice, Myths, and Prevention

The Kony 2012 campaign, conducted under the auspices of an American advocacy group, Invisible Children, highlighted – somewhat belatedly – the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), its leadership, and its many victims in northern Uganda, notably child soldiers. Deeper questions lurk, however, amid the breezy media flurry. How does Kony 2012 inform our understanding of child soldiers? How does it sculpt international efforts to prevent child soldiering? Kony 2012 draws from and buttresses pre-existing assumptions and narratives. I argue in my book Reimagining Child Soldiers that these assumptions and narratives, however well intended, incubate policy initiatives that assuage collective sensibilities but, ultimately, fall short in terms of actual effectiveness (Drumbl, 2012). People have thought hard about the impact of media on messages for quite some time, including well before the dawn of the internet. Nearly 50 years ago, Marshall McLuhan opined that the medium was (is) the message (McLuhan, 1964). Undoubtedly, activists and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) would do well to harness the power of contemporary social media. But the content of the message itself still really matters. Is it sensible for international law and policy to be based upon stylized content deliberately airbrushed just to increase attention-worthiness? More international law, and more attention to international law, does not invariably lead to progress. Substance counts, too. Misguided law, after all, leads to ineffective outcomes.