Conclusion: Imagining the Cosmopolitan

Abstract

As I look back over the various ideas and arguments that make up this study, the debate on the global campaign — ‘Kony 2012’ — of the US-based advocacy organisation, Invisible Children, deepens and proliferates around the world (Invisible Children 2012). Launched on 5 March 2012, and centring on a 30-minute video and a web-site, the online campaign’s objective is to make the criminal leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), Joseph Kony, visible or, more precisely, “famous” around the world, in order that he be tracked down and brought to justice. Together with the LRA, Kony is alleged to have kidnapped more than 30,000 children over a number of years. The children have been taken from various communities in northern Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic and South Sudan; boys have been trained to serve as soldiers and girls have been sexually abused and then put to work as slaves and porters (Invisible Children 2012). The most remarkable aspect of the campaign has been the viral reach of the YouTube video: to date (two weeks after its launch), it has received 83 million hits and instigated individual, community, government and organisational reactions globally.

Whenever people say ‘everything’, ‘always’, never’, ‘every’ you should watch out, because they’re really only talking about themselves — in the real world such generalities don’t exist.

(Olga Tokarczuk 2002, House of Day, House of Night, 100)