If you were alive in 2012 (don’t lie; you were!), you most likely remember the immediate and incredible popularity of this video, put out by a San Diego-based organization called Invisible Children:
Kony 2012 remains one of the most viral videos to date. “Nothing is more powerful than an idea,” the video began, and it has been seen over 100 million times on YouTube. Invisible Children, the organization behind the video, was founded in 2004 as a vehicle to bring awareness to the activity of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda. Today, the organization announced that it would close its doors sometime next year. Ugandan journalist Angelo Izama wrote of the video:
Campaigns like “Kony 2012” aspire to frame the debate about these criminals and inspire action to stop them. Instead, they simply conscript our outrage to advance a specific political agenda — in this case, increased military action.
“At some point [U.S. staff] will be zero,” Invisible Children CEO Ben Keesey told NPR. The group will be shuttering their stateside operations and transferring all remaining agenda items to partner organizations in Uganda, Central African Republic, and the Congo.
Kony 2012 poster | Photo by Brad Bethell via Flickr (http://bit.ly/1388sm8)
Invisible Children has had a significant presence on Christian college campuses and in churches across the country. Some of those partnerships grew tenuous after IC co-founder Jason Russell suffered a public breakdown after the intense scrutiny on the organization after the Kony video went viral. Can you imagine? You head a small organization picking up traction at schools and churches when, all of a sudden, celebrities like Oprah and Justin Bieber and Rihanna are tweeting the video you sent. But there was backlash, and plenty of it–people were accusing Invisible Children of spreading misinformation and feel-good activism that amounted to nothing. At the time the video was posted, Kony was no longer in Uganda, and the LRA had been reduced to a force of hundreds, not thousands. “It is unclear how millions of well-meaning but misinformed people are going to help deal with the more complicated reality,” Joshua Keating said at Foreign Policy.
When I was a sophomore in college, I was part of a class that started a chapter of Invisible Children on our (Christian liberal arts) campus. It represented so much that Christian college students loved to get involved with: injustice, militarism, Africa. It was naïve on everyone’s party to think Invisible Children might last and, apparently, the founders never meant it to: “We never built Invisible Children to be something that would last forever,” Keesey told NPR. “Frankly, we thought it would be a one- or two-year project.” It turns out it was a ten-year project. Joseph Kony is still at large.