http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1826-2220
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ABSTRACT
Advocacy nongovernmental organizations based in the North adopt digital tools to bypass repressive regimes, raise awareness amongst global publics, sustain grassroots activists in the South, and engage in political action. Social media was expected to offer innovative platforms for mobilizing participants to act on behalf of “distant others.” But the practices of some organizations signal that something else is at play. Rather than empower individuals, digital campaigns reify elite politics, using outsider strategies to support insider lobbying. Through communicative processes of mediatization, organizations pay homage to the existence of a movement, but only afford thin forms of participation. Using the framework of media advocacy to explore Human Rights Watch and the Enough! Project, we argue that social media becomes a top-down platform that exacerbates the elite design of organizations, enabling them to assert legitimacy for political actions, while disingenuously marketing themselves as democratic with bottom-up credibility.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Joel R. Pruce and Alexandra C. Budabin, “Beyond Naming and Shaming: New Modalities of Information Politics in Human Rights,” Journal of Human Rights 15 (2016).
2 Colin Crouch, Post-Democracy (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2004).
3 Helen Yanacopulos, International NGO Engagement, Advocacy, Activism: The Faces and Spaces of Change (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015); Alex de Waal (ed.), Advocacy in Conflict: Critical Perspectives on Transnational Activism (London, UK: Zed Books, 2015).
4 See Elizabeth Stuart, “Can Laptop Humanitarians’ Solve History’s Largest Refugee Crisis?” Bright (November 16, 2017), available online at: https://brightthemag.com/laptop-humanitarians-refugee-crisis-health-facebook-social-media-192d358bc346.
5 Lisa A. Richey and Stefano Ponte, Brand Aid: Shopping Well to Save the World (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
6 Joel R. Pruce. “What Does Human Rights Look Like? The Visual Culture of Aid, Advocacy, and Activism,” In Information Politics Protests and Human Rights in the Digital Age Mahmood Monshipouri (ed), (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
7 Lilie Chouliaraki, The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post-humanitarianism (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2013).
8 Monika Krause, The Good Project: Humanitarian Relief NGOs and the Fragmentation of Reason (Chicago, IL; London, UK: The University of Chicago Press, 2014).
9 See Wendy Wong, Internal Affairs: How the Structure of NGOs Transforms Human Rights (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012); Laura Seay, “Conflict Minerals in Congo: The Consequences of Oversimplification,” in Alex de Waal (ed.), Advocacy in Conflict (London, UK: Zed Books, 2015), pp. 115–41; Ben Radley, “Western Advocacy Groups and (Class) Conflict in the Congo,” Review of African Political Economy Blog (2017), available online at: http://roape.net/category/blog/.
10 Eleftheria J. Lekakis, Coffee Activism and the Politics of Fair Trade and Ethical Consumption in the Global North (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan 2013), p. 15.
11 See case studies on measuring social media usage in Bogdan Patrut and Monica Patrut (eds), Social Media in Politics: Case Studies on the Political Power of Social Media (New York, NY: Springer International Publishing, 2014).
12 Sebastian Kaempf, “Digital Media,” in Roland Bleiker (ed.), Visual Global Politics (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2018).
13 Lisa A. Richey, “Humanitarianism”,“ International Political Economy of Everyday Life (April 19, 2018), available online at: http://i-peel.org/homepage/humanitarianism/.
14 Mark C. Suchman, “Managing Legitimacy: Strategic and Institutional Approaches,” Academy of Management Review 20 (1995), pp. 571–610.
15 Neil Stammers, “Social Movements and the Social Construction of Human Rights,” Human Rights Quarterly 21 (1999).
16 Clifford Bob, The Marketing of Rebellion (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Charli Carpenter, Lost Causes: Agenda-Setting and Agenda-Vetting in Global Issue Networks (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014).
17 John D. McCarthy and Mayer N. Zald, “Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory,” The American Journal of Sociology 82 (1977).
18 Stephen Hopgood, Keepers of the Flame: Understanding Amnesty International (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).
19 Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).
20 Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1979), p. 7 and throughout.
21 Ibid., xxi.
22 Debra C. Minkoff, “Bending with the Wind: Strategic Change and Adaptation by Women’s and Racial Minority Organizations,” American Journal of Sociology 104 (1999); pp. 1666–703.
23 Ibid.
24 Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2002).
25 Pruce and Budabin, “Beyond Naming and Shaming.”
26 Lars Waldorf, “White Noise: Hearing the Disaster,” Journal of Human Rights Practice 4 (2012), pp. 469–74.
27 Lisa M. Dellmuth, and Jonas Tallberg, “Elite Communication and Popular Legitimacy in Global Governance,” SSRN (February 2016), available online at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2757650.
28 De Waal, 35.
29 Jonas Tallberg, Lisa M. Dellmuth, Hans Agné, and Andreas Duit, “NGO Influence in International Organizations: Information, Access and Exchange,” British Journal of Political Science 48 (2015).
30 Crouch, Post-Democracy, p. viii.
31 Ibid., 4.
32 Dan Brockington, Celebrity Advocacy and International Development (London, UK; New York, NY: Routledge, 2014).
33 Alex de Waal, “Genealogies of Transnational Activism,” in Alex de Waal (ed.), Advocacy in Conflict: Critical Perspectives on Transnational Activism (London, UK: Zed Books, 2015), p. 24.
34 We are grateful to a reviewer for making this point clear.
35 Keck and Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders.
36 de Waal, “Genealogies of Transnational Activism,” pp. 35–36.
37 Petros Iosidis and Mark Wheeler, Public Spheres and Mediated Social Networks in the Western Context and Beyond (London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan 2016), p. 166.
38 See Shelley Boulianne, “Social Media Use and Participation: a Meta-analysis of Current Research”, Information, Communication & Society 18:5 (2015), pp. 524–38.
39 Ella McPherson, “Social Media and Human Rights Advocacy,” in Tumber and Waisbord (eds), The Routledge Companion to Media and Human Rights (London, UK: Routledge), pp. 279–88.
40 See Manual Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012).
41 Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), p. xiii.
42 Zizi Papacharissi, “Affective Publics and Structures of Storytelling: Sentiments, Events, and Mediality,” Information, Communication & Society 19:3 (2015), p. 5.
43 Sam Gregory, “Kony Through a Prism of Video Advocacy Practices and Trends,” Journal of Human Rights Practices 4:3 (2012), pp. 463–8; Helen Berents, “Hashtagging Girlhood: #IAmMalala, #BringBackOurGirls and Gendering Representations of Global Politics,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 18 (2016), pp. 513–27; Johanna Herman, “Hashtags and Human Rights: Activism in the Age of Twitter,” Carnegie Ethics Online (2014), available online at: https://www.carnegiecouncil.org/publications/ethics_online/0099.
44 Evgeny Morozov, “From Slacktivism to Activism,” Foreign Policy (September 5, 2009), available online at: https://foreignpolicy.com/2009/09/05/from-slacktivism-to-activism/.
45 Malcolm Gladwell, “Small Change,” The New Yorker (October 4, 2010), available online at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell.
46 Kate Cronin-Furman and Amanda Taub, “Solving War Crimes With Wristbands: The Arrogance of ‘Kony 2012,’” The Atlantic (March 8, 2012), available online at: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/solving-war-crimes-with-wristbands-the-arrogance-of-kony-2012/254193/.
47 Martin Scott, Media and Development (London, UK: Zed Books, 2014), pp. 160–1.
48 Nina Hall and Phil Ireland, “Transforming Activism: Digital Era Advocacy Organizations,” Stanford Social Innovation Review (July 6, 2016), available online at: https://ssir.org/articles/entry/transforming_activism_digital_era_advocacy_organizations.
49 Pruce and Budabin, “Beyond Naming and Shaming.”
50 Ibid., 415
51 See documentary film “We Will Win Peace” where Enough! Project refused to conduct interviews with the film makers. Christoph Vogel, “New Doc Film, ‘We Will Win Peace,’” Africa Is A Country (June 11, 2015), available online at: https://africasacountry.com/2015/11/we-will-win-peace-skillfully-debunks-many-of-the-myths-behind-conflict-in-the-drc/.
52 Stephen Hopgood, Keepers of the Flame: Understanding Amnesty International (Ithaca, UK: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 140.
53 David P. Forsythe, Human Rights in International Relations (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 243.
54 Human Rights Watch, “About,” (January 15, 2018), available online at: https://www.hrw.org/about.
55 Ibid.
56 Human Rights Watch, “#BreakTheChains: End Shackling in Indonesia,” (January 15, 2018), available online at: https://www.hrw.org/breakthechains.
57 Ibid.
58 Interview with Second Author (October 18, 2015).
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid.
62 Interview with Second Author (September 22, 2014).
63 Interview with Second Author (October 18, 2015).
64 Interview with First Author (October 18, 2015).
65 Human Rights Watch, “#NoRaids: Stop Trump’s Immigration Agenda,” Human Rights Watch (January 15, 2018), available online at: https://www.instagram.com/p/BP3VSaRggy7/.
66 Human Rights Watch, “#NoRaids: Stop Trump’s Immigration Agenda,” (January 15, 2018), available online at: https://web.archive.org/web/20170416164853/https://www.hrw.org/NoRaids.
67 Enough!, “About,” (January 15, 2018), available online at: http://www.enoughproject.org/about.
68 Interview with First Author (February 26, 2009).
69 Ibid.
70 Ibid.
71 Ibid.
72 Ibid.
73 VOA News, “John Prendergast on Enough Project,” YouTube (August 16, 2012), available online at:
74 Enough!, “About,” (January 15, 2018), available online at: https://enoughproject.org/about.
75 Enough!, “Join,” (January 15, 2018), available online at https://enoughproject.org/get-involved/join.
76 Enough!, “Raise Hope for Congo,” (January 15, 2018), available online at http://www.raisehopeforcongo.org/content/take-action.
77 The Sentry, “Take Action,” (January 15, 2018), available online at https://thesentry.org/take-action/.
78 Enough!, “Satellite Sentinel Project,” (January 15, 2018), available online at http://www.enoughproject.org/about/campaigns-initiatives.
79 Enough!, “Our Partners,” (January 15, 2018), available online at https://web.archive.org/web/20170515072253/http://www.enoughproject.org/about/partners.
80 Enough!, “What Are Upstanders?” (January 15, 2018), available online at https://enoughproject.org/upstanders.
81 Enough!, “Facebook Page: Enough Project,” Facebook (January 15, 2018), available online at https://www.facebook.com/enoughproj/.
82 Lesu Torchin, “White Band’s Burden: Live 8 and Humanitarian Synergy,” in Meg McLagan and Yates McGee (eds), Sensible Politics: Visual Cultures of Non-Governmental Activism (Cambridge, UK: Zone Publishing; MIT Press, 2012).
83 Interview with Second Author (October 18, 2015).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Alexandra C. Budabin
Alexandra C. Budabin is senior researcher at the Human Rights Center of the University of Dayton. Her research looks at non-state actors in human rights, humanitarianism, and development. She is a co-investigator in the research project “Commodifying Compassion: Implications of Turning People and Humanitarian Causes into Marketable Things” (2016–2020), funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research.
Joel R. Pruce
Joel R. Pruce is assistant professor of Human Rights Studies in the Department of Political Science at the University of Dayton. He is the author of The Mass Appeal of Human Rights (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), editor of The Social Practice of Human Rights (Palgrave MacMillan, 2016), and producer of “Ferguson Voices: Disrupting the Frame,” a multimedia, multiplatform storytelling project.