KONY 2012

Can the pursuit of justice be carried out by a random group of people, even if they are committed, rather than some kind of organisation with judicial legitimacy? That, in essence, is the question posed by the Kony 2012 project.

Joseph Kony is undoubtably one of the nastiest people on this planet, indeed he may well be insane. For the past couple of decades his Lord's Resistance Army has been fighting a guerilla war in the northern part of Uganda. What makes the LRA different from other rebel movements is the brutality of his methods. Children are abducted from local villages, and forced into being either sex slaves or child soldiers, who then commit atrocities and even kill their own parents. A sign of the seriousness of his alleged crimes is that Kony was the very first person to be indicted by the International Criminal Court. However, by operating in the remote border areas where Uganda, South Sudan, Congo and the Central African Republic meet, nobody has yet managed to arrest him and send him to the Hague for trial.

Jason Russell, an American who had spent time in Uganda and met some of Kony's victims, decided to try to do something about it. The end result is a 30-minute video, Kony 2012, which has just gone viral on You Tube, being seen by more than 50 million people in a matter of days. His basic thesis is that nobody is really trying to capture Kony, because he is not on people's radar screens. If enough people knew about him, then they would in turn pressure the powers-that-be to do something about it. Ergo, the first step is to educate the world about who Kony is and what he has done. By making him as famous as a movie star, and by using the same sorts of social media as movie stars do, "the people" can bring justice to the world.

Having just watched the video, part of me thought the idea was complete tosh and part of me was intrigued. The tosh comes from the tenuousness of the links between me as rich-world social media user (albeit one who already knew who Joseph Kony is) and his possible physical arrest in a country far away. The intrigue comes from the fact that 50 million - and rising fast - represents quite a large, single-issue constituency. Knowing that politicians tend to listen to, and then act in the interests of, large single-issue constituencies, they might just listen to this one.

Anyway, whatever the outcome in this particular case, it seems likely that this sort of thing will be more common in the future. If I am to remain a serious blogger, I will have to learn how to do video.

Walter Blotscher