Justice in Conflict

This week I had the honour to participate in a debate at the historic Oxford Union on whether “social media has successfully reinvented social activism”. The relationship between social media and social activism has become a critically important subject in the wake of the so-called “twitter revolutions” in Iran and Moldova, the use of blogs, Facebook and Twitter in the Arab Spring as well as Invisible Children’s KONY2012 viral campaign. Nevertheless, we are only just beginning to understand how social media in fact produces real-life results in the context of conflict, revolutions, and social upheaval.

It was a fascinating debate and a wonderful event with an impressive cast of debaters. Speaking in proposition of the motion were David Vitter, US Senator for Louisiana, Mark Pfeifle, former Deputy National Security Advisor to President George W. Bush, Benjamin Cohen, Tech Correspondent at Channel 4 News, and Ella Roberston, a student at Oxford. In opposition were Dr. Christopher Carpenter, professor of Communications at University of Western Illinois, Matt Warman, the Consumer Technology Editor at The Telegraph, Robert Sharp, Head of Campaign & Communications at English PEN, and myself. I am very happy, proud and even a bit surprised to say that the opposition was victorious.

While not directly related, in the wake of KONY2012, the question of how social media and social activism relate has been on the minds of all of us interested in international criminal justice. I therefore wanted to share with you a draft of the speech I gave on this increasingly pertinent subject. At the bottom of this post, you’ll also find a small bibliography with a few online sources which I found particularly useful in my preparation for the debate, especially for deciphering fact from fiction. As noted above, this is just the beginning of the debate. In that vein, I would love to hear what you think!

Madam President, honourable members, ladies and gentlemen,

There is no point in standing before you and denying that social media has changed how political and social activism is done. It clearly and obviously has. Despite this, social media has not, I will argue, “reinvented” the fundamental rules of social activism. To suggest so is to misunderstand what it means to do social activism and to be a social activist.

We are told a very simple story about the relationship between social media and social activism. You have all heard it. Social media topples Arab tyrants. Social media leads to democratic elections. Social media can bring rebel leaders in the heart of Africa to justice. At the core of this apparently irresistible narrative is the belief that social and political campaigns are a success when they achieve massive online traffic and “go viral”. The problem here is simple. None of the above is true.

An absolutely necessary condition for the effectiveness and success of a social campaign is building a political community of real-life, off-line physical human beings committed to a common cause.

Take for example, Invisible Children’s KONY2012 campaign. It did not go viral randomly or because of celebrity endorsements on Twitter and Facebook. Beneath this popular veneer, is the reality that Invisible Children worked for almost a decade to build a network of like-minded individuals willing to drive across Canada and the United States in order to show the group’s latest films in schools and churches. It should thus come as no surprise that KONY2012 began trending on Twitter before the campaign video itself was released – as the carefully cultivated community of Christian youths in mid-sized American cities began tweeting.

Consider too, the role of social media in the Arab Spring. It would be wrong to attribute the effectiveness and success of human rights and democracy campaigners in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Bahrain, and so on, entirely to social media. The opposition to these regimes had learned from decades of experience, training in human rights and civil disobedience.

The people who bravely marched on Tahrir Square in Cairo and Green Square in Tripoli did so not because they heard about it on Twitter but because of real grievances; because of years of outrage and humiliation; because, to them, enough was enough.

Part of the popular narrative also tells us that re-tweeters and sharers on Facebook themselves are a new breed social activists, ready at the whim to tackle tyranny and oppression, their iPads and iPhones proof of their commitment to liberal democratic values. Of course, they’re not the same type of activists. Instead, the popular and rather disparaging argument is that they are “slactivists”. Again, this is fundamentally misleading. Sharing and re-tweeting KONY2012 was a symbolic action, the merits of which we can debate. But it was symbolic action taken almost exclusively by people who were never activists in the first place. This helps to explain why Invisible Children’s campaign to “Cover the Night” – which required real activists – was such an epic flop. Continue reading →