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Review of African Political Economy

ISSN: 0305-6244 (Print) 1740-1720 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/crea20

Rescuing African bodies: celebrities, consumerism and neoliberal humanitarianism

Patricia Daley

To cite this article: Patricia Daley (2013) Rescuing African bodies: celebrities, consumerism and neoliberal humanitarianism, Review of African Political Economy, 40:137, 375-393, DOI: 10.1080/03056244.2013.816944

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03056244.2013.816944

Published online: 05 Sep 2013.

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Rescuing African bodies: celebrities, consumerism and neoliberal humanitarianism

Patricia Daley∗

School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

This article examines the role of Western celebrities as part of new networks in the increasing commodification of humanitarianism in Africa. It explores the relationship between celebrities as neoliberal subjectivities and their shaping of ethical consumerism and humanitarian interventions. Using various case studies (Product RED, 50 Cent’s SK drink, Save Darfur Campaign [United to End Genocide], Kony2012, Raise Hope for the Congo and the Eastern Congo Initiative), the article considers how celebrities frame humanitarian crises for public consumption, their link to accumulation by dispossession, and their impact on African agency and on international solidarity against corporate exploitation.

Keywords: celebrities; humanitarianism; Kony2012; commodification; consumerism

[Secourir des corps africains: stars, consumérisme et humanitaire néolibéral.] Cet article examine le rôle de stars occidentales membres de nouveaux réseaux dans la marchandisation croissante de l’humanitaire en Afrique. Il explore les relations entre les stars, êtres néolibéraux, et leur façon d’élaborer un consumérisme éthique et des interventions humanitaires. Utilisant diverses études de cas (Produit rouge Product RED, boisson SK de 50 Cent, campagne pour sauver le Darfour [unis pour mettre fin au génocide], Kony2012, Espoir pour le Congo et l’Initiative pour l’est du Congo), l’article étudie comment les stars formatent les crises humanitaires pour la consommation du public, leur lien à l’accumulation par dépossession et leur impact sur l’agence africaine et la solidarité internationale contre l’exploitation commerciale.

Mots-clés: stars ; humanitaire ; Kony2012 ; marchandisation ; consumérisme

Introduction

In April 2012, Africa was the continent with the most humanitarian interventions; 30 out of 54 African countries were sites of disasters ranging from cholera, flooding to drought.1

Globally, humanitarian interventions have grown rapidly since the 1990s and so have humanitarian agencies, which are predominantly Western in origin. Some US$44.5 billion was spent on humanitarian aid between 2007 and 2009, and an estimated 500,000 people are employed in this growth industry (Harvey et al. 2009; GHA 2010). Humanitar- ian aid comes increasingly from Western governments, who are providing the bulk of the budgets, supplemented by donations from citizens. In effect, humanitarianism has become corporatised and professionalised at the same time that neoliberal economic restructuring

# 2013 ROAPE Publications Ltd

∗Email: [email protected]

Review of African Political Economy, 2013 Vol. 40, No. 137, 375 – 393, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03056244.2013.816944

has reduced state-provisioned social welfare, so much so that Duffield (2010, 66) sees the contemporary humanitarian system functioning ‘as an international insurance of last resort for the world uninsured’. Western humanitarian actors have become increasingly diversi- fied, ranging from government agencies, Western militaries, multilateral organisations, international non-governmental organisations (INGOs), wealthy philanthropic individuals, ordinary citizens, and celebrities.

Celebrities are people with a high public profile in a range of fields, though the term is used mainly to refer to those in the entertainment industry. Since the mid 1980s, celebrity advocacy has become more widespread; through its association with the technological developments in the social media, it is helping to reshape public engagement with politics in Western societies (Meyer 1995; Bang 2005; Furedi 2010; Marsh, ’t Hart and Tindall 2010). The literature on social movements concerned with international development points to the growing use of celebrity advocacy in anti-poverty campaigns (Cottle and Nolan 2007; Goodman 2008; Richey and Ponte 2008; West 2008; Harrison 2010; Huliaras and Tzifakis 2010; Biccum 2011; Ponte and Richey 2011). Multilateral organisations, such as the United Nations agencies (Children’s Fund [UNICEF], High Commissioner for Refu- gees [UNHCR] and World Health Organization [WHO]) and INGOs, such as OXFAM and Action Aid, have sought celebrity endorsements ostensibly to raise public awareness and profile their work in what is increasingly a crowded market place (Samman, Mc Auliffe, and MacLachlan 2009). Such a strategy may be beneficial, as research on the use of celeb- rities in corporate brand promotion indicates that there is often a positive return to compa- nies, especially if the celebrity is perceived favourably and is exclusive to one product (Tripp, Jensen, and Carlson 1994).

Western celebrities, addressing issues of social inequality and poverty, tend to direct their attention to the non-Western other. Ninety celebrities on the Look to the Stars.com site have charitable links with Africa. The continent is the focus of much of celebrity huma- nitarian advocacy, primarily because of its well-established inferior position in global ima- ginative geographies – at the bottom of the development hierarchy and outside of modernity, coupled with a colonial legacy that constructs it as the ‘White Man’s burden’ (Abdul-Raheem 1996; Brockington 2008; Cole 2012). Critics of the celebritisation of poverty highlight celebrity activism’s role in perpetuating gendered and racial ideologies (Richey and Ponte 2008; Balaji 2011; Repo and Yrjola 2011). Humanitarian action tends to reinforce hegemonic discourse by tapping into preconceived images and stereotypes of people and (distant) places. Since the 1980s, Africa has also become the scene of neo- liberal interventions and practices aimed at bringing the continent within the sphere of glo- balisation through the extension of market forces. This has been spearheaded by a range of actors: international financial institutions, private sector entrepreneurs and INGOs. In this context the role of Western celebrities cannot be trivialised due to their increasing influence on public opinion and access to global power brokers. Critics have begun to shift their ana- lyses from scepticism towards the effectiveness of celebrity advocacy and its apparent superficiality to consider its increasing significance in international relations (Huliaras and Tzifakis 2010) and its role in shaping Western civil society’s ‘political’ activism and acceptance of neoliberal imperialism (Biccum 2011).

This article examines the role of celebrities in the increasing commodification of huma- nitarianism and the networks that are formed to facilitate this process. It demonstrates that celebrities, as branded commodities – in essence neoliberal subjectivities – and their advo- cacy, serve to enhance consumer capitalism – thus helping firstly to commodify humanitar- ianism as a largely privatised concern that sits easily with neoliberal imperialism and secondly to divert attention from the structural inequalities associated with such forms of

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domination. Celebrity activism involves new configurations of networked relationship that obfuscate the workings of neoliberal imperialism; thus reinforcing global power hierarchies in which hegemonic powers are depicted as humanitarian ‘saviours’ whilst enforcing ‘accumulation by dispossession’ in the periphery (Harvey 2003). Celebrities, it is argued, play an intermediary role, making market relations and its effects acceptable at the core through consumption and at the periphery via humanitarian intervention. Central to this process is how humanitarian crises are framed by these Western cultural elites – often in opposition to African agency and progressive social movements. Crises are decontextua- lised and non-consumerist and radical political agenda are represented as flawed. Celebri- ties act to steer global mass political engagement away from those that are antagonistic towards capital, therefore, undermining the potential for global cohesion around emancipa- tory politics. In spite of attempts to render African voices silent, the social media has opened up spaces for them on the world stage. Progressive forces in the West now need to challenge these non-transformative celebritised ways of building international solidarity among global civil society.

Evidence for this article comes mainly from the publicity material produced by celeb- rities themselves, the consumer goods and the humanitarian agencies they endorse, from media reports, especially websites such as Look to the Stars.org: the World of Celebrity Giving, and newspapers. Looktothestars.org identified 90, mainly A-list celebrities who are involved in philanthropic activities in Africa. For the purposes of this article, I have selected a sample of initiatives by high-profile celebrities: Paul David ‘Bono’ Hewson (Product RedTM), George Clooney (Save Darfur Campaign/United to End Genocide and the Satellite Sentinel Project), Raise Hope for the Congo, 50 Cent (Street King high- energy drink), and Ben Affleck (Eastern Congo Initiative) and Invisible Children (Kony2012).

The article begins with brief reviews of the nature of celebrity culture under neoliber- alism and of the recent literature that tries to interrogate the role of celebrity in develop- ment and humanitarian campaigns. Drawing on the case studies, the discussion then focuses on the ways in which celebrity advocacy, with respect to Africa, involves the commodification of humanitarianism. Emphasis is given to the marketing of commodities to appeal to ‘caring’ consumers, the new networks that facilitate this process, and the link between celebrity-promoted humanitarian intervention and neoliberal imperialism. The latter is then shown to be masked by the depoliticisation of humanitarian crises by celebrity experts, the racialised discourses underpinning their actions, and the performative nature of ‘clickism’ – social media mobilisation. The conclusion explores the potentiality for African agency to engage with global civil society in the context of new media.

Celebrity subjectivity under neoliberalism and the humanitarian turn

This study of the relationship between celebrity advocacy and humanitarianism reflects three aspects of contemporary neoliberalism. First, neoliberalism seeks to commodify all that has never before been treated as commodities (Harvey 2005). Second, neoliberal glo- balisation forces open markets in spaces where they do not exist or are underdeveloped. Here, Harvey’s (2003) concept of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ is used to explain the continued practices of primitive accumulation by hegemonic capitalist powers in spaces in the periphery. Third, with market hegemony, governance becomes less state-centred, more networked, and involving a range of actors, including celebrity experts (Bang 2005; Marsh, ’t Hart and Tindall 2010).

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Of the growing multidisciplinary literature on the rise of celebrity culture in late modern societies, two sets are of importance here: that which focuses on the celebrity as commo- dified individuality or ‘personality brand’ and his/her wider involvement in political culture (Goldman 1987; Graeber 2001; Marshall 2006; Bauman 2007; Jorgensen and Bang 2007; Zizek 2008; Furedi 2010; Marsh, ’t Hart and Tindall 2010); and that on the relationship between celebrity advocacy and the growth of ‘ethical’/‘development’ con- sumption (Cottle and Nolan 2007; Richey and Ponte 2008; Goodman 2008; West 2008; Harrison 2010; Biccum 2011; Ponte and Richey 2011).

Contemporary celebrity status represents the commodification of the individual, of identity and personality. Marshall (2006, 635) sees individuality as ‘one of the mainstays of consumer capitalism, where through consumption, we as individuals can have a serial frisson of transformation and change and the sensation of choice and possibility even when we do not act on that possibility’. As the aura and charisma embodied by celeb- rities provide the same sensation to their followers as shopping, this enables Biccum (2011, 1340) to argue that celebrities are ‘embodied commodities of affective labour’. In other words, celebrities are branded personalities that are professionally marketed – increasingly by the celebrities themselves – with their worth determined by their ability to garner loyalty through affectivity. In effect, celebrities represent another type of Karl Marx’s ‘commodity fetishism’ under late capitalism. Goldman (1987) labels them ‘commodities signs’ – the joining together of a material entity with a signifier; in essence, by associating particular emotions with the consumption of goods, celebrities do the ‘interpretative labour’ for consumer capitalism (Graeber 2001). As Marshall (2006, 635 – 636) argues, ‘celebrities embody the power of the audience members . . . their economic clout – is represented by the celebrities and their capacity to deliver the audience for the industry.’ Therefore, corporations, politicians and chari- table organisations utilise celebrity power to tap into the ‘affective investment’ of an audience.

Much of the recent literature draws attention to the burgeoning scale of celebrity invol- vement in wider social life and the consequent blurring of the boundaries between politics and popular culture (Furedi 2010; Marsh, ’t Hart and Tindall 2010). Celebrities are said to have democratic currency because of their audience appeal, embodying the personification of Max Weber’s ‘charismatic individual’ – as an alternative source of authority within society. Furedi (2010) argues that politics is being celebritised at the same time that formal authority is being stigmatised; political authority is being ‘outsourced’ to celebrities, whilst politicians are captivated by the aura of celebrity. Jorgensen and Bang (2007) links the rise of celebrities to the hollowing out of the state under neoliberalism and envisages them as part of a discursive network of governance composed of elites incorporated by the state to shape and promote its agenda among a public disinterested in conventional politics.

Celebrity advocacy in the field of development, anti-poverty campaigns and humani- tarianism can be interpreted as strategic in that it helps to shape public opinion on the causes and solutions. Biccum (2011), in her examination of the role of celebrity advocacy in the development education of UK Department for International Development (DFID) and the Australian government’s Agency for International Development (AusAid), argues that these governments use celebrity-linked INGO projects to mobilise youth in the production of new global citizens who proselytise and support neoliberal globalisation as the answer to social injustice in distant lands. This, she notes, is in sharp contrast to the form of citizenry mobilised as part of the anti-globalisation [and Occupy] movements that emerged out of disillusionment with free-market approaches to development and poverty.

378 P. Daley

Celebrities can serve to depoliticise globalisation and its humanitarian consequences by presenting their moral concern for humanity as being outside and above conventional poli- tics (Zizek 2008). Many, such as Bono, the singer with the Irish rock band U2, forge public relations with both conservative and liberal political parties. As Zizek (2008) contends, these new breed of philanthropists have no time for the old right and especially the old left. For Bono (2010), ‘It’s no secret that lefty campaigners can be cranky about business elites. And the suspicion is mutual. Worldwide. Civil society as a rule sees business as, well, a little uncivil. Business tends to see activists as, well, a little too active.’ Such celeb- rities believe that they are equipped to step back from politics, talk straight to big business and to the leaders of G8 countries, and solve global, distant problems through consumption and aid.

Under neoliberalism, development and humanitarian aid offers opportunities for ‘accumulation by dispossession’ through the increasing privatisation of service delivery. Contracts for humanitarian assistance and poverty alleviation are competitively tendered among a diverse range of potential ‘carers’. Consequently, humanitarian agencies, multina- tional corporations and celebrities are operating in a crowded marketplace and have recog- nised that joint collaborations may produce mutual benefits (Cottle and Nolan 2007; Ponte and Richey 2011).

Some celebrities, while chastising Western governments for doing little to alleviate humanitarian disasters in the global South, adopt neoliberal solutions that involve shifting part of the responsibility to Western individuals as consumers. Celebrities link development with ‘ethical’ consumption, where the process of purchasing everyday goods becomes not just consumption per se, but an act that is enveloped in ethical or moral values that add to the empty and temporary gratification of consumption (Goodman 2008). In a consumer society, Bauman (2007) argues, happiness is only temporary, as consumption depends on the perpetual creation of new needs. Justification of such needs, amidst images of global suffering and poverty, requires some compensatory activities. Ponte and Richey (2011, 2073) term this sort of action ‘causumerism’ and argue that consuming ethically has shifted from addressing the problems associated with the production and marketing side of commodities to ‘solving their manifestations’ via a cause – often fronted by celebrities. By using their wealth and influence in the West to sell branded goods that raise money, celebrities help to reconstruct humanitarianism as an economic enterprise and consumption as an ‘ethical’ act. For this new breed of celebrity philanthropists, according to Zizek (2008, 15), the ‘market and social responsibility are not opposites; they can be reunited for mutual benefit’. Therefore, humanitarian crises resulting from ‘accumulation by dispossession’ are treated in isolation from their economic and geopolitical roots.

Celebrities look for their own causes and are recruited by development agencies, especially UN agencies and INGOs. High-profile examples include the actor Angelina Jolie’s role as UNICEF ambassador and her appointment in April 2012 as a Special Envoy of UNHCR, and the singer Beyoncé’s cooptation for World Humanitarian Day 2012. The motives behind such advocacy are mixed; some celebrities use their high- profile status to promote their personal politics, while for others the cause is a public relations strategy to add an ethical component to enhance their market value. The actor George Clooney explains how he became involved in the Save Darfur Campaign: ‘The one thing I learned from Bono (U2’s lead singer) early on was you have to pick [a cause] you specifically want to work on, and you have to really engage’ (quoted in Horn 2012). According to Colapinto (2012), a celebrity with a negative profile might be told by his/her marketing agency that ‘we need you to start doing things that make you look sacrificing and compassionate.’ Central to this article’s analysis of celebrity advocacy is

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an understanding of (i) the increasing commodification of compassion through celebrity branding – a process that involves collaboration with a network of actors, (ii) how celebrity ‘experts’ frame humanitarian crises in Africa for a global audience who are enthralled to their aura, and (iii) the consequences of such framings for the expansion of neoliberal imperialism and global political activism.

Buying to save lives: promoting consumption as a humanitarian act

‘This is a new way of doing business’ (Chief Executive Officer, Pure Growth Partners, 2011, quoted in Ramos 2011)

Celebrity commodification of humanitarian involves the use of themselves as ‘brands’ to enter the market with consumer goods that they represent as ‘ethical’. Celebrities also join forces with established global brands, such as Coca-Cola and Nike, to produce and market the celebrity-branded products, and with aid agencies to gain moral legitimacy. This linking of celebrity with ‘ethical consumption’ has created new business opportunities in the global North, whilst representing old business practices in the periphery as socially responsible and humanitarian.

Three examples illustrate this perspective: First, Product (RED)TM is the brand name of a business venture that links celebrities, social responsibility (in this case the fight against diseases) and multinational corporations. Several studies have already examined how the concept, created by Bono in 2003, uses the celebrity ‘cool’ to market products, straddling the line between trade, ethical consumption and aid (Richey and Ponte 2008; Ponte and Richey 2011). RED teams up with corporate brands such as Armani, Starbucks, Apple, Dell, Nike, Gap, Converse and Dr Dre to produce a red version of their products with the RED label attached. Socially responsible ‘ethical’ consumers can distinguish them- selves by opting for red-coloured American Express cards, MP3 players, vodka, trainers and earphones.

RED also helps to shift the nature in which poverty is represented by celebrities by making poverty sexy and technical, rather than structural (Cameron and Haanstra 2008). To make their products appealing to the discerning consumer, RED, as Richey and Ponte (2008, 720) note, eschews conventional ‘humanitarian imagery of death and suffering’, by presenting its products and promoters with the ‘same glitz, glam and fashion-magazine gloss as any luxury goods, [demonstrating that] the desire to shop and to see the world a better place – are not always contradictory’. RED appeals to a young and trendy audience by linking up with brands that are popular among fashion-conscious trend-setters.

A percentage of the profits from the sale of RED products (US$190 million by August 2012) go to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria in Africa. The Global Fund is a private – public organisation set up in 2002 to tackle HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, with a mission to link disease control to corporate investments. It is a conglomerate of international financial institutions, governments and corporations that disburses grants to a range of actors: public, private, and INGOs. In its operations, the Global Fund justifies the absence of local NGOs as partners as being due to ‘the lack of capacity and experience’.2

This response is typical of the new type of networked governance. In these new forms of collaborations, the same development institutions, such as the World Bank and DFID, occupy primary positions in the governance structure, replicating the same power differen- tials of other development arrangements. The Global Fund claims that civil society activism plays ‘a central role in resource mobilisation, advocacy and policy dialogue’. However,

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such activism seems largely to be driven by Bono, who has become the celebrity face of the Fund (Ponte and Richey 2011).

The Global Fund is directly linked to corporations associated with accumulation by dis- possession. Grants from the Fund support private sector enterprises that appear to be extending a bio-political control over their local labour force. One such project is the grant of US$154 million to extend Anglo-Gold Ashanti’s (the gold mining multinational corporation) malaria control programme in Obuasi district, Ghana, to 40 other districts countrywide. The corporation’s programme was designed to reduce employees’ absentee- ism due to sick leave and involved spraying insecticides in all public and private structures in the area (The Global Fund 2012a). A similar strategy in Liberia is used by the Liberia Agricultural Company (rubber plantations) and Firestone Mining to provide antiretroviral treatments to its workers and their families (The Global Fund 2012b). Even though these interventions may have provided much needed relief for residents, they, nevertheless, are presented by these multinationals as fulfilling corporate social responsibility (CSR) through direct action against poverty. However, the resources used are derived partly from RED’s ethical consumers, rather than wholly from own surpluses, which are likely to be enlarged by the interventions.

The second example is of the African American rapper, Curtis ‘50 Cent’ Jackson, who adopted a similar networking strategy to launch Street King (SK) – a high-caffeine, vitamin-enriched water drink – aimed at the urban market. Here, the charity of choice is the World Food Programme (WFP), dubbed by 50 Cent as ‘the number 1 humanitarian agency’. According to the promotional material in September 2011, one shot of SK equals one meal for a starving African. At the launch, 50 cent tweeted that he ‘wants to impact people’s lives more. . . I created a new goal for myself, I want to feed 1 billion people in Africa over the next five year’.3 Here, the facts became confused. Given that Africa’s estimated population in 2011 was 811 million, one can only assume that 50 Cent was accurately predicting an increase of 189 million in Africa’s population over the next five years; moreover, everyone on the continent will be suffering from hunger! 50 Cent later changed his goal to providing 1 billion meals. By January 2012, 50 Cent could claim to have provided 3.5 million meals through the WFP. Evidence for this claim is unclear, and probably based on an estimate of how many SK cans had been sold.

A few lucky SK consumers are rewarded with access to 50 Cent and the opportunity to share in his fame. Fans of SK can sign up on Facebook or on Twitter and, using the codes from the drinks container, collect points that they can redeem for ‘exclusive offers’, which include swag, celebrity-branded earphones, tickets to, and VIP experiences at, 50 Cent’s concerts. Much like Bono, 50 Cent chastises global corporate greed, yet forms an alliance with the multinational corporation Pepsi-Cola for SK’s marketing and distribution. As with RED products, SK forms part of the trend in consumer goods being repackaged as huma- nitarian goods. Celebrities have helped to spearhead this form of social finance – invest- ment that delivers social good. However, such branding helps to extend the market into areas hitherto considered to be largely the consequence of market failure, state ineptitude and unequal global power relations.

The third example illustrates the emergence of a new business model based on finding suitable ethical investments for celebrities. This has resulted in the establishment of several commercial enterprises trading in such activities; one of these is a New York-based start-up company, Pure Growth Partners, which was established in 2011 specifically to help celeb- rities produce and market products that have an ethical component, and which describes itself as having a ‘revolutionary mission to find and create sustainable brands using a “one to one” give-back component to donate directly to the world’s most effective charities’

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(Ramos 2011). Its first client was 50 Cent and his SK drink. Another company is the Cali- fornia-based Global Philanthropy Group, set up in 2006 to manage the philanthropic activi- ties of the very rich (Colapinto 2012). The company markets itself as socially responsible by claiming that it is founded: ‘in the spirit of traditional philanthropy, for the love of humanity, [it] was formed to improve the world’ (http://www.globalphilanthropy.com/, 2012).

Framing the crises: power and authority in celebrity advocacy

Celebrities frame humanitarian crises in two principal ways, by decontextualising them from the causes; allowing for the forging of seemingly politically neutral networks aimed at resolving the crises, and by using their charismatic status as a guarantee of exper- tise, much to the detriment of local agency and alternative contextual readings.

In terms of the framing, the apolitical presentation of humanitarian crises, in order to appeal to a wider audience, serves to strip them of their historical and political context. Goodman (2008, 109) suggests that ‘wider structural and social problems are forcefully refracted through the neoliberal lens of the “heroic individual” taking responsibility off the institutions, states and the economic structures of inequality more generally.’ The argu- ment here, however, is that such individuals appeal for action to the benevolence of the hegemonic states, of which they are a part, whilst criminalising and by-passing those in the periphery.

The case of celebrity advocacy on the conflicts in Sudan illustrates this point. The actor George Clooney has styled himself as the unofficial spokesperson for the victims of the Omar al-Bashir regime in Sudan after taking the leading role in the Save Darfur Coalition (SDC), a US-based group campaigning against genocide in the Darfur region. SDC, which started out as a student- and faith-based initiative in 2004, led to the setting up of the ‘Not on our Watch’ project supported by celebrities Don Cheadle, George Clooney, Matt Damon and Brad Pitt. These celebrities aim to bring media attention to areas of the world suffering from violations of international human rights and mass atrocities that are happening outside of the limelight. However, SDC, part of the NGO United to End Genocide since 2011, is selective in its geographical focus on states that are seen as problematic by the USA.

Mamdani (2009), in an analysis of the campaign of the SDC, has already highlighted the decontextualising practices of the movement. He contends that the SDC ignored the complex history of Sudan, simplified the issues to racial and religious binaries of Arab Muslim perpetrators and black Christian victims. Furthermore, he claims that through the media and an advertising blitz, SDC reported fictional mortality data to support its claim of genocide in Darfur and its call for military intervention.

Mamdani (2009, 62) suggests that SDC’s campaign, following so closely after 9/11, presented Darfur as a moral rather than a political issue. Comparing Americans’ response to Iraq at the same time, he argues that ‘those who march for to Save Darfur were respond- ing as humans with a moral obligation, not as citizens.’ He proposes that Darfur and the Congo are easier for Americans to campaign for – ‘an act not of responsibility but of phi- lanthropy – of largeness of heart . . . cause(s) about which they can feel good’. Iraq and Afghanistan on the other hand ‘[make] some Americans feel responsible and guilty [and force some] to come to terms with the limits of American power’ (p. 62).

Certainly, the evidence since Mamdani’s study supports his thesis; tackling crimes against humanity in distant Africa is perhaps more politically palatable for US citizens. American discourse on race in Darfur and Sudan positions Americans as ‘powerful saviours’ located at the top of the hierarchy of humanity. As the contours of the conflict

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in Darfur became less simplistic to the public, the celebrity campaigners, perhaps not wanting to lose their investment in Sudan, extended their brief to policing the Sudanese state more widely and supporting the independence of ‘Christian’ South Sudan. After which SDC turned to the monitoring of ‘Islamic’ Sudan using spying equipment and regular satellite imagery.

Clooney took on the role of the ‘heroic individual’ through his Satellite Sentinel Project (SSP)4 (a monitoring device tracking Sudanese troop movements and military activities). SSP has been heavily criticised by its supposed beneficiaries, the South Sudanese, who see it as spying that undermines the sovereignty of the state. In response, Clooney justifies his project as protecting South Sudanese from genocidal violence perpetrated from the Islamic Sudan to the north. He declares himself to be ‘the anti-genocide paparazzi . . . We want them [the Sudanese government] to enjoy the level of celebrity attention that I usually get. If you know your actions are going to be covered, you tend to behave much differently than when you operate in a vacuum’ (quoted in Benjamin 2010).

Critics of SSP, such as Samar Al-Bulushi (2011), highlight the fact that the company that is collecting the data on behalf of SSP supplies data to the US Africa Command (AFRICOM) – a force set up by the USA to protect its interests in Africa through further militarisation, in spite of opposition by African people (Keenan 2008). As Clooney’s partners are all US-based, Al-Bulushi asks: where is South Sudan in this power equation; what does independence mean for South Sudan? For him the exclusion of Sudanese actors and thinkers from the campaign signals ‘a lack of interest in the internal political processes that are crucial for strengthening democratic citizenship’ (Al-Bulushi: npn). SSP may not have factored in the ability of the South Sudanese to act independently and unilaterally drop its victim status by launching a military attack against Sudan in April 2012.

In March 2012, the Nuba Mountains of south-eastern Sudan became the new ‘celebrity hotspot’, as Clooney switched the geographical location of his mission in Sudan. Clearly, the Sudanese state was bombing the region, but the complex nature of the war in the Nuba mountains and its links with the South Sudanese conflict cannot be neatly encapsulated by the Muslim/Christian war portrayed by Clooney and SSP. Sudanese activists and opponents of the al-Bashir regime in Sudan accused Clooney of decontextualising the crisis from its history and taking ownership of their struggles for justice and peace (Al-Bulushi 2011; Malik 2012). These civil society groups find themselves marginalised in the global discus- sion of how to transform the authoritarian Sudanese state (Sudan Change Now 2012).

Unchallengeable experts

For celebrities framing of crisis to be authoritative, and in order not to jeopardise their core brand, they have to demonstrate a certain level of expertise. Clooney states reportedly: ‘you have to be more knowledgeable than most reporters would be on it, [for] when they try to make you sound stupid because you’re just an actor’ (Horn 2012). Expertise is achievable in two principal ways – visits to Africa and association with a known ‘expert’.

According to Goodman (2008, 109) being ‘placed’ in place is designed to provide the celebrity with first-hand, on-the-ground experience with respect to ‘their cause’, in order to develop the celebrity’s ‘convince-ability’. Credibility demands a fleeting visit to Africa, in the company of Western journalists and video cameras. Clooney established his credentials on Darfur by visiting Chad and South Sudan, where he met Darfuri. He explained the basis of his authority with, ‘well, I can name all the rebel leaders, and I have [their numbers] on my phone’ (quoted in Horn 2012). A visit to the Nuba Mountains in March 2012 and the production of a short film in which Clooney played the starring role strengthened his

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credibility as a serious and knowledgeable activist. Despite the possibility of real time reporting from Africa, celebrities return with films – similar to the sketches, photographs and trophies of earlier explorers. Africa’s image as a ‘remote’ and ‘dangerous terrain’ is uti- lised to enhance the intrepidness, determination, courage, and moral worth of the celebrity. Imaginative, geographically distant and racial privileging, along with charismatic status, gives credence to whatever narratives they present on their return.

Authority is also gained through alignment with a humanitarian agency or a recognised Western expert. If the celebrities are not attached to an established NGO and are developing their own personal campaign, they link up with a known Western expert, ‘a human rights or development activist’ (John Prendergast in the case of Clooney and Jeffrey Sachs for Bono). These experts move seamlessly between government and the non-governmental world. Prendergast was Director for African Affairs at the National Security Council and special adviser to the State Department (1996 – 2000) under the Bill Clinton presidency. He is also a co-founder of the Enough Project which campaigns against genocide and war crimes. Jeffrey Sachs is a former architect of the ‘shock therapy’ that brought market fundamentalism to eastern Europe at the end of Communism, and now a reformed free-market economist and adviser to the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals. These experts are celebrities in their own right, but give domestic and international legiti- macy to the entertainers’ own projects – Prendergast to Clooney’s ‘Not on our Watch’ project and the ‘Satellite Sentinel Project’ and Sach to Bono’s DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa) and ONE campaigns.5

The aura of celebrity ensures that Clooney and Bono can be called to address the UN Security Council, the US Senate and meet business elites at the World Economic Forum. After his brief visit to Chad and Southern Sudan in 2006, Clooney was asked to address the UN Security Council on the problems in Darfur. In March 2012, following his visit to the Nuba Mountains, Clooney was invited to speak to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee and was praised by Democrat Senator John Kerry as demonstrating the best of ‘citizens’ activism’ (Harris 2012). Clooney’s wealth and influence remove him from the cat- egory of an everyday citizen, with his political power increasingly being channelled into being a consumer and limited to a ‘hit’, ‘ping’, ‘tweet’ or ‘click’ in the social media.

Celebrity, networks and hegemonic states

Celebrities, as elites of hegemonic states, can give credibility to networks that appear to be horizontal in participation, but which instead reinforce traditional hierarchies of states and peoples. Those celebrities operating in the field of humanitarianism, who demand greater intervention of hegemonic Western states, can act to promote the agenda of those states. This traditional form of imperialism is packaged as a new form of politics that is collabora- tive and empowering for participants. For the purposes of illustration, three recent examples, including Kony2012, Raise Hope for the Congo, and the Eastern Congo Initiat- ive, are discussed below.

Kony2012: networked clickism and neo-imperial solutions

Kony2012 is a celebrity-supported geopolitical campaign, masquerading as humanitarian, that gained worldwide publicity in March 2012. It exemplifies further the ways in which con- temporary humanitarian issues are framed for mass mobilisation with the use of the social media; the coalescence of powerful networks of actors in Western humanitarian advocacy; but also highlights the potential for affected people in Africa to challenge such representations.

384 P. Daley

Kony2012 is a 29-minute film (http://www.kony2012.com/) launched online on 5 March 2012 by the American-based NGO, Invisible Children, to raise public awareness of the abduction and brutalisation of children by the rebel Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Northern Uganda. Kony has been part of a rebel move- ment in Northern Uganda that dates back to 1986 and uses Christian fundamentalism as the rallying cry for a war against the Ugandan state. The LRA became notorious for the kidnap- ping of children and their use as child soldiers and ‘bush wives’. Atrocities were also alleg- edly committed by the Ugandan military in its offences against the LRA. One strategy was to displace forcedly the population of two million into camps supported by international humanitarian agencies. Since 2004, Northern Uganda has been returning to normality. On the request of the Ugandan government, Kony was the first African indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC), in 2005, for war crimes. Since 2006 the LRA has shifted its base to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and more recently to the Central African Republic.

The NGO, Invisible Children, established in 2004, represents itself as a charitable organisation that seeks to ‘inspire young people’ to campaign to end the LRA’s war in East and Central Africa after the founder, Jason Russell, visited Uganda as a child mission- ary and saw the devastation that the war had exacted on the people. Russell’s links with Christian fundamentalist groups, such as the Christian Broadcasting Network and Liberty University, challenge the secular, all-inclusive image that he presents in Kony2012.

However, Russell’s background has encouraged the interpretation of Kony2012 as a disinformation and counter-radicalisation strategy by the American right and the military.6

Russell graduated from the US-military-funded Institute of Creative Technologies of the University of Southern California, where story-telling and common sense reasoning using social media are developed as key counterinsurgency strategies. Bratich (2012) unpacks the use of the social media and the video format typified by Kony2012 as part of a US government strategy focused on ‘domestic dissenters, such as the Occupy Move- ment’. He argues:

Youth are dissuaded from seeing in their own neighborhoods and local organisations the oppor- tunity to get involved in street activism and direct action in which they also shape the goals. Instead, they are routed into a heavily pre-organized package, complete with easy heroes/ enemies and a game-like scenario (Bratich 2012, npn).

Kony2012 was a social media success story, having attracted over 100 million viewers across the globe within a month of its launch. The film promoted four forms of activism for the ordinary socially conscious person: consumption, donation, invisible night protest and clickism. Young people were entreated to buy a bracelet and a US$30 action kit and to make monetary donations for the charity’s reconstruction work in Uganda. The action kit included branded materials, such as posters, to be used in a coordinated mass publicity in several global cities on 20 April 2012, as part of the charity’s ‘cover the night’ campaign. This form of protest, unlike conventional methods such as street marches, is silent, anon- ymous and non-confrontational.

Clickism forms part of the participatory activism that is characteristic of the social media, based on ‘performative action that [does] not require solidarity . . . and [can be] devoid of any critical or radical urge’ (Tatarchevsky 2011, 309 – 310). Activists can share their concern with others and sign petitions. With one click of the computer mouse on Invis- ible Children’s webpage its supporters can send messages directly to 21 celebrities, compris- ing entertainers and dot-com billionaires and 13 policy-makers (a mix of Republicans,

Review of African Political Economy 385

Democrats and the UN Secretary General). These are depicted as change agents, in that ‘they have the authority to see Kony captured’. For some people the ‘click’ enables them to pass on responsibilities and marks the end of their activism. In the case of Kony2012, after the initial surge in viewers, the participation rate started to decline to the extent that the ‘cover the night’ campaign was not as widespread or successful as the organisers anticipated.

The Kony2012 campaign was structured on the creating of branded personalities and strategic use of celebrity status. The film does this in three ways: it draws on existing high-profile celebrities, it seeks to give celebrity status to the key interlocutors in the film, the charity’s founder, his young son and the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, and it seeks to give international notoriety (a form of celebrity status) to Joseph Kony.

First, using A-list celebrities, both as endorsers and opinion makers, is central to the film’s mobilisation among the young. Endorsed by high-profile celebrities, such as George Clooney and Oprah Winfrey, the film gained publicity and legitimacy. Second, fame is seen as conveying authority and legitimacy – reinforcing the cult of the individual. By centring the film on himself and his five-year-old son as authoritative voices, Russell also uses the film for self-promotion, and his eventual psychological breakdown demon- strates the limitations of too much fame. The then Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) Louis Moreno-Campo – who endorsed the charity’s actions and appeared in the film – seemed also to have been drawn to the charisma of the celebrity. Moreno-Campo was reported as having attended a Hollywood dinner in his honour accompanied by Invisible Children’s Director of Ideology, Jedidiah Jenkins, at which Moreno-Campo encouraged the celebrity guests to support video activism (Slosson 2012). The irony is that Kony2012 sought to mobilise American children to put pressure on the US government to bring a war criminal to an international court that the US does not recognise. Prior to Kony2012, the ICC and Moreno-Campo were criticised for being biased in only indicting those leaders and countries that are not friends of America, and in the case of Uganda, for not indicting the government for the commitment of war crimes in its military campaign against Joseph Kony (Mamdani 2012).

Third, Joseph Kony was accorded celebritised notoriety: branded, using ‘wild west’ mythology, as ‘a bad guy’ who ‘good guys’ can stop militarily. George Clooney reinforced this by exalting the ‘viral’ effect of the film in the social media when he stated: ‘there’s 100 million people who know the name of a war criminal now that didn’t necessarily before, and that’s a good thing’ (quoted in Cassata 2012). The narrative of the film assumes that because the producers and America’s youth had no knowledge of Kony’s 26 years of infamy in Africa, he was ‘invisible’, and that making him and his atrocities famous will ensure his capture and return Northern Uganda to normality.

Invisible Children’s solution involves the extension of America’s military intervention in the search for Kony. Moreno-Campo reiterates this with: ‘the only way to stop Kony is to arrest him and solve all the problems.’ Advocating a naı̈ve military solution to a complex regional problem reinforces the view among some critics that Kony2012 is a disinformation tool.7 The film simplified and misrepresented the problem, since the war in Northern Uganda had ceased (Atkinson et al. 2012; Mengestu 2012). It also omitted that, in 2008, the USA had already sent 17 advisers from its African Command to help Uganda in its search for Kony and that an African Union force had found military intervention the least effective means of ending the campaign of the LRA. Invisible Children’s pressure may have provided a cover for the US to send 100 troops to Uganda in October 2011 alleg- edly to support the Ugandan army in its hunt for Kony and, in March 2012, the African

386 P. Daley

Union also agreed to dispatch a 5000 strong military force, which, however, by July 2012 had not obtained the resources necessary to mount the operation.

In Kony2012 and celebrity advocacy in general, there is an uncritical representation of Western governments as forces for good in the world, if only they could be pressured to do so by public activism. The makers of Kony2012 promote what Belloni (2007, 454) sees as ‘the belief that western involvement in weak states in order to protect individual and group rights arises from unquestionably altruistic motives and is the answer to addressing human suffering worldwide.’ By linking ordinary young people with celebrities and politicians, Kony2012 forms a powerful network that appears credible and essentially humanitarian.

Because Kony2012 producers present Kony as ‘bad’ and seek to appeal to ‘good’ people by calling on a common humanity, the political complexity of the LRA’s war was absent from the film. The film’s motto (‘humanity’s greatest desire is to love and connect’) draws on what Mamdani (2009) calls ‘the largeness of heart’. Therefore, calls for Western military intervention by Invisible Children and the Save Darfur Coalition ignore the contribution of the imperial legacy, the history of Western interventions in the affected regions, and how the pursuance of a military – industrial complex in the West con- tributes to the militarisation of Africa, thus creating opportunities for rebels, such as Kony. Furthermore, as many have argued, a poorly conceived military approach to capture Kony is likely to cause more civilian casualties (Atkinson et al. 2012).

In sum, Kony2012 and other celebrity-supported advocacy, such as United to End Gen- ocide, promote a form of global citizenship under neoliberal governance that seeks to mobilise global youth on international issues from a narrow militaristic, corporate and pol- itically conservative perspective, whilst claiming to be transcending politics.

The Congo: celebrity advocacy and networks of power

A number of celebrity advocacy networks have formed to draw attention to the scale and intensity of violence in the DRC – a country renowned historically and in the contemporary as a site of accumulation by dispossession (Nzongola-Natalaja 2002; UNSC 2003). In 2011, George Clooney, under the umbrella of United to End Genocide, called for Western military intervention in the DRC because of the scale of estimated deaths there. Since 1998, warfare in the DRC, especially in the east, has led to widespread humanitarian crises. In response, the UN established its largest ever peace-keeping mission in the Congo. Despite the signing of peace agreements and two successive national (2006 and 2011) elections, eastern Congo continues to suffer from endemic violence. The resource-rich provinces of North and South Kivu and Maniema have been the scene of intense competition between local, regional and international interests for control of mines and farmland, including armed groups partly driven by ethnicity (Pottier 2010; Autesserre 2012). The impact on the civilian population has been so horrific that it may seem churlish to criticise advocacy aimed at alleviating their suffering.

Celebrity advocacy targeting eastern DRC has grown, many addressing sexual vio- lence, as aid agencies – such as Raise Hope for Congo, a subsidiary of the Washington- based NGO the Enough Project – along with the Western media, have dubbed the eastern Congo ‘the rape capital of the world’.8 Celebrities, such as Javier Bardem, Robin Wright, Eve Ensler, Angelina Jolie and Ashley Judd, have visited the DRC to highlight sexual violence. As with Darfur, celebrity advocacy helps to reduce a very complex and ‘multilayered’ context to simple narratives focusing essentially on conflict minerals and sexual violence and proffer solutions that de-link cause and effect (Autesserre 2012).

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Celebrity advocacy encourages the formation of networks promoting military interven- tion by the USA, as well as socially responsible behaviour among corporations operating in the Congo. As with Invisible Children, United to End Genocide links young people in churches, schools and universities with corporate investors through its Conflict Risk Network (CRN). According to its site, this is a network of ‘institutional investors, financial providers and related stakeholders’ (http://crn.genocideintervention.net, 2012), which acts as an intermediary for corporate sector investors in conflict-ridden countries that are seeking to act in a socially responsible fashion. CRN develops and monitors human rights policies for corporations. Through CRN, corporations can gain legitimacy for resource extraction among its consumers, often by providing to the communities in the areas in which they operate the most basic development facilities. For example, the NGO Raise Hope for Congo highlights the coming together of celebrity and mineral exploitation in the form of the black Canadian actor Jeffrey Wright, who has his own mining company (Taia Lion Resources Inc.) in Sierra Leone that is used as an example of a new socially conscious business model. This company is touted as a model for ethical mining, since it has estab- lished a foundation that amasses grants from a range of donors that are used for develop- ment projects in the company’s operational areas.

Another example of the merger of celebrity advocacy with multinational corporations and the US state is the Eastern Congo Initiative (ECI) founded in 2009 by the actor Ben Affleck.

ECI targets community-based organisations in partnership with Causes.org and the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and is backed by a range of investors, notably Google, the Howard G. Buffet Foundation, Humanity United, the Bridgeway Foun- dation, and Cindy Hensley McCain. According to its website, ECI ‘believes public and private partnerships, combined with advocacy that drives increased attention and public policy change, will create new opportunities for the people of Eastern Congo’.9 By the nature of its partnerships, ECI cannot empower communities, but draws them into a depen- dent institutional relationship with an international and Western INGO, from which the Congolese people’s chances of acquiring democratic accountability are even more remote than the Congolese state. ECI further proclaims that it will drive ‘policy changes that will increase US government’s engagement in Congo’. There is no mention of geopo- litics or the US government’s long history of involvement in the Congo, especially its support for the kleptocratic regime of President Mobutu Sese Seko during the Cold War (De Witte 2001).

Challenges to celebrity advocacy

What are the implications of celebrity activism for progressive social movements in Africa? Social movements challenging accumulation by dispossession in Africa tend to situate issues within the national and global political economy. This is in marked contrast to the type of celebrity activism discussed above. Since the celebrities do not seek their legitimacy from Africans they present humanitarian crises not as political but as moral problems. This occurs partly because contemporary Western celebrities’ engagement with Africans draws on the colonial legacy of proselytising Christianity, Western enlightenment and assumed custodianship of humanity (Biccum 2011). Bono and Jason Russell (the founder of Invis- ible Children) both draw on Christian beliefs as the motives behind their interventions. They rely on their audiences’ pre-existing assumptions about Africa in order to evoke superiority of knowledge and rightfulness of purpose. As Richey and Ponte (2008, 720) explain, ‘Africa’s place in the hierarchy of development is so well-established’ that the ‘construction of donor and recipient would not be challenged’. Therefore, celebrities can

388 P. Daley

position themselves as self-appointed intermediaries for Africans (Alibhai-Brown 2005; Daley 2005). In his speech to the UN Security Council in 2006, Clooney could claim, ‘I am here to represent the voices of people who cannot speak for themselves.’ Challenging the disempowering representation, Al-Bulushi (2011), in an open letter to Clooney and others at SSP, writes:

The people of Sudan are invisible in the global conversation, now heavily shaped by your project. The very real political issues at stake are diluted into nebulous questions of morality and the ‘responsibility to protect’, in which external actors like yourself claim a moral authority to defend people who have no way of holding you accountable.

In the contemporary period, the social media has enhanced the capacity of Africans to mount a challenge to the stereotyping and the negatively skewed representation of the con- tinent. Ugandan activists quickly dismissed Kony2012 as disinformation by claiming that the film did not reflect the situation on the ground. The Ugandan state was concerned about the implications for tourism of the negative image of the country. Rosebell Kagamire, a Ugandan journalist, was quoted as saying.

If we hadn’t [challenged the representation in Kony2012] god knows how many people would still have believed there was a war here. The media and community groups stepped in and said look what’s happening on the ground. Even organisations on the ground were coming out and saying the military option is not the only option. It’s good the other side was covered. (Quoted in Curtis 2012)

Invisible Children’s reaction to the criticism of the absence of African voices in Kony2012 was to produce another video, Kony2012 Part II: Beyond famous, with more African voices – predominantly the charity’s workers in Uganda. This time, in classical neoliberal par- lance, the film refers to African ownership of the solutions to the problem of Kony – even though the path and strategy had already been defined by the charity – with which Africans are expected to demonstrate compliance. As Belloni (2007, 454) argues, ‘rather than originating from a transnational morality, humanitarianism originates and reproduces the unequal power relationship between the West and the less developed world.’ Celebrity advocacy means that social movements seeking to address wider political and economic dynamics that impoverish people, especially capitalist exploitation in Africa, can be mar- ginalised precisely at the moment when the extension of social media to Africa offers so much opportunity for transnational alliances.

Conclusion

Contemporary humanitarianism reflects material and hegemonic geographies and is embedded in the metropolitan core/periphery relations based on developmentalism that see certain spaces – the West/global North – as superior centres of human progress, from which emanate the knowledge and ability to instruct and protect ‘global others’. Humanitarianism is partly bound up with neoliberal processes of ‘accumulation by dispos- session’ within a hierarchical network of power relations. As a result, humanitarianism can serve to undermine the potentiality of an emancipatory transformation of the state, thus embedding the neoliberal vision as morally acceptable and marginalising other forms of opposition politics.

However honourable the intentions of celebrities, the nature of their engagement with humanitarianism suggests that they form part of an emerging discursive network of

Review of African Political Economy 389

governance of others who are seen as being outside the sphere of modernity. Celebrities are examples of neoliberal subjectivities, and their attempts to monopolise particular crises lead to humanitarianism becoming privatised around the cult of the individual, and commodi- tised, as protest is channelled through increased consumerism. This trend towards the com- modification of ‘care’ offers immense opportunities for capital accumulation by celebrities and their corporate backers – using new business models.

For the Western public, consumerism, especially overconsumption, is no longer a banal, trivial pursuit; it becomes morally justifiable when presented as the first step to active protest, and delivers moral gratification. By promoting conspicuous consumption as ‘ethical’ and the solution to poverty and dispossession, celebrity humanitarianism helps to further entrench non-Western others in globally unequal relations.

Celebrities, like humanitarian agencies, seek to appear politically neutral in domestic politics, as they garner support and funds across the political spectrum and adopt technical and managerial solutions that often do not reflect the realities on the ground. As cultural elites and products of global capitalism, they do not challenge the inequalities of global power relations, but work with them to produce new disciplinary networks of governance of the global civil society.

Western celebrities render Africa invisible to probing by dehistoricising and depoliticis- ing the causes they support. In this way they shift the public’s attention (especially that of the young) away from exploring the roots of the crises to tackling the manifestations. Africa’s problems are presented essentially as moral – as the consequences of human failure that can be technically fixed – by the Western leaders.

Humanitarian work is presented as if it is in isolation from the hegemonic discourse of race and the spatial hierarchies of power embedded in such action. In the context of Africa, celebrity and humanitarian activities are predicated on economic power and ideologies of race and place. Celebrities can demonstrate their marketability by claiming power over life and death in a ‘remote’ Africa, in which Africans remain as ‘docile bodies’. Claims of unaccountability, false authority and racism are brushed aside as minor, because of the urgency of the need to save lives.

Finally, the ephemeral nature of celebrity status can mean that an individual celebrity’s influence is likely to be superficial and short-lived, but together celebrities might have a pro- found impact on the ability of global social movements to mobilise against the exploitative effects of global capitalism and geopolitical interests. However, despite attempts to margin- alise African voices, through the use of the social media Africa’s challenge to celebrity advocacy is gaining prominence. Progressive forces in the West, seeking to build inter- national solidarity, will need to seek out ways of giving prominence to such voices.

Acknowledgements This paper benefited enormously from the suggestions made by the editors and anonymous reviewers to whom I am most grateful.

Note on contributor Patricia Daley is a university lecturer in Human Geography at Oxford University and a fellow of Jesus College Oxford.

Notes 1. According to reliefweb.int [last viewed 20 August 2012].

390 P. Daley

2. Quote taken from http://www.theglobalfund.org/en/about/partnership/civilsociety/ [last accessed 12 August 2012].

3. Also quoted in ‘50 Cent talks about his Street King Mission to feed starving Africans’, 20 October 2011 http://omg.yahoo.com/news/50-cent-talks-street-king-mission-feed-starving- 183100358.html [last accessed August 2012].

4. SSP is a collaboration with Not on our Watch, the Enough Project, Sudan Now, Google Trellon, the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and DigitalGlobe.

5. Debt, Aid, Trade Africa (DATA) and ONE are NGOs co-founded by Bono in 2002 and 2004 respectively, and merging in 2008. Both organisations target Western governments and audience in their anti-poverty campaigns. ONE boasts that it is a grassroots advocacy organisation, but its board and that of DATA are made up of some of the elites of neoliberal economic governance.

6. Jason Russell, one of the founders of Invisible Children, studied at the Institute of Creative Tech- nologies at the University of Southern California, a US military-sponsored centre focusing on the use of cybertechnology as a counter-intelligence strategy. See Campbell (2012).

7. See the Rosebell Kagumire video at http://bit.ly/GTIv8T; Women Civil Society Groups in Uganda: Kony2012 Campaign, Blurring realities! at: http://www.isiswomen.org/ 16 March 2012; Cole, at: http://www.theatlantic.com; Lancaster (2011); Mamdani, at: http://www.monitor.co.ug; Campbell, at: http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/80989; and Atkinson et al. (2012).

8. 28 April 2010. ‘UN official calls DRC ‘rape capital of the world’; http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/ 8650112.stm.

9. See http://www.easterncongo.org.

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