My ears are always open to development discourse. I find it
fascinating to listen to people from different academic and cultural
backgrounds discuss development-related topics. Not necessarily to criticise
but to try to understand why people think the way they do. I enjoyed every
minute of the discourse sparked by the Kony 2012 campaign. And I have to admit
I got involved in every related discussion and post I came across. What shapes
the way we think, and most importantly, what shapes our perceptions of the
world? That’s a question I’ve been asking myself for years in my quest for the
true face of this concept we call ‘international development’.
My favourite critic of the Kony campaign was Teju Cole. He
originally posted seven tweets about the White Saviour Industrial Complex and
explained them in this article in The Atlantic. Invisible Children has posted a
second video as a response to all the criticism they have been receiving. In
this attempt at saving their campaign, one message stands out above all to me.
Although indirectly stated, it is a message promoting ‘global citizenship’.
Does everybody in the world have the privilege of being a
‘global citizen’, though? Doesn’t this idea further advance the agenda of those
taking advantage of global inequities to begin with? The Kony 2012 campaign
reached a phenomenal number of people. Although flawed in its proposed
solution to conflict, at least it has educated the masses on this issue… right?
I find it problematic that such campaigns give people hope in their
ability to ‘help’ others in less privileged areas of the world because in doing
so, they are unknowingly supporting pillars which uphold strategic power
structures. As Teju Cole says, the banality of sentimentality is dangerous.
The big unanswered question for me remains the following:
can development-related discourse be redirected to the examination of our own governments’
national interests and foreign policies? A bit more support from the masses of
do-gooders may be what is needed for a systemic change in global inequities.
What would it take for this redirection to begin?
