[…] in part I’m thinking through the recent discussions among Darfur advocates on this site about the fraught process involved in transitioning from “noise-making” – the awareness […]
[…] Shocking. You claim to be somehow challenging basic assumptions by asking this, but in your final post about this question, in which you summarize what you’ve learned from people’s responses, […]
Interviewing Vice President Riek Machar while covering the South Sudan referendum for The Washington Post
A backgrounder on how climate cases came before four international courts, with a summary of issues each court has been asked to address, offers a one-stop resource to refer to as opinions are issued in the weeks and months ahead. Read … Read more >>
The silence emanating from the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Karim Khan, is growing louder by the hour. Three full days after Hamas perpetrated atrocities inside Israel and took civilian hostages into Gaza, Khan has … Read more >>
In its public-facing quarterly financial reports, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, labels all countries in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East as the “Rest of World.” Although one-third of Facebook’s … Read more >>
B.C. L. Rev (2022). Online intermediaries are omnipresent. Each day, across the globe, the corporations that run these platforms execute policies and practices that serve their profit model, typically by sustaining user engagement. … Read more >>
Harv. Int'l L. J. (2021). Social media platforms are the public square of our era – a reality that has been entrenched by the widespread closure of physical public spaces in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. And this online space is global … Read more >>
Rebecca Hamilton, User-Generated Evidence, Col. J. Transnat'l L. (2018) Around the world, people are using their smartphones to document atrocities. Smartphone apps designed to allow Users to record material that will meet evidentiary … Read more >>
We need both – but the devil is in the detail
As this week’s posts have been articulating so well, advocates need both noise-making and policy-prescriptions in their toolkit – at varying degrees over different times and, I would add, depending on which kind of advocates we are talking about (grassroots vs. grasstops etc). Today Jill Savitt makes the important point that “the cost of having noise without policy is that you make it easier for policymakers to avoid taking action” (A brief side note: It seems to me that a contemporary version of this dilemma for Darfur advocates is how to translate the impressive – and ever-growing- amount of “noise” generated by the Darfur FastforLife, spear-headed by Mia Farrow, to spur policymakers to take action). Meanwhile, Alex de Waal’s post forces us to take a step outside of the current Darfur crisis and look back at the way previous campaigns – HIV/AIDS and the banning of landmines – dealt with these issues.