In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Africa

20 Apr

[Mark A. Drumbl is the Class of 1975 Alumni Professor at Washington and Lee University and author of Reimagining Child Soldiers (OUP, 2012).] How does Kony2012 inform our understanding of child soldiers? How does it sculpt international efforts to prevent child soldiering? Kony2012 feeds into and reinforces pre-existing assumptions and narratives. I argue in my book Reimagining Child Soldiers that these assumptions...

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20 Apr

[Julie McBride is a PhD Candidate at Queen’s University Belfast, researching the development of the war crime of child soldier recruitment in international criminal law, and a member of the United Nations Global Experts, specializing in international crime and transitional justice. You can find her on Twitter @JA_McBride] When the Kony2012 video was launched last month, I found myself, for one of the first times,...

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19 Apr

[Anne Herzberg is the Legal Advisor at NGO Monitor, a Jerusalem-based research institution. Her post is based on a forthcoming paper (2012), presented at the “Old Laws, New Technologies Conference” sponsored by the Hebrew University Minerva Center for Human Rights and the ICRC (early draft here). Anne is the co-author of Best Practices for Human Rights and Humanitarian NGO Fact-finding (Nijhoff 2012).] Many...

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19 Apr

[Beth Karlin is the Program Director of the Transformational Media Lab within the Center for Unconventional Security Affairs (CUSA) as well as a Research Associate at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) and a doctoral student in the School of Social Ecology at University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on the potential and application of new media and technologies for civic...

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19 Apr

[Mark Kersten is a PhD candidate in International Relations at the London School of Economics and author of the blog Justice in Conflict. You can find him on Twitter @MarkKersten] It is widely accepted wisdom that social media is radically transforming how we understand the world and share information. In this context, the emergence of Twitter, Facebook, blogging, etc. challenge the very practice...

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18 Apr

[Sarah Kendzior is an instructor at Washington University in Saint Louis. Follow her on Twitter @sarahkendzior] Kony2012 rose and fell on the power of celebrity. “We want to make Kony famous”, Invisible Children proclaimed, and it did, enlisting the support of twenty “culture-makers” to spread the word that an African child-killer was still at large. Kony2012 is often touted as an example of...

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18 Apr

[Charli Carpenter is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She blogs at Duck of Minerva.] One of the most curious aspects of the Kony2012 campaign is its backing by an important and powerful public servant, Luis Moreno-Ocampo. In publicly endorsing the campaign, Moreno-Ocampo, the chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, has espoused a powerful causal...

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18 Apr

Opinio Juris is pleased to announce an online symposium addressing social activism and international law. As our readers know, Kony 2012 was a YouTube sensation, spreading faster than any video in history. Although the details are airbrushed, the central theme of the video is about international law. The key idea of the video is that the indicted fugitive Joseph Kony...

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17 Apr

I have no idea whether it's true, but that's what the BBC is reporting: The International Criminal Court could soon drop its demand that Saif al-Islam Gaddafi be transferred to the Hague for trial, officials have told the BBC. They say the most prominent son of the former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi could instead be tried inside Libya but under the supervision...

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14 Apr

Moreno-Ocampo's inability to avoid allegations of bias has long haunted his tenure as Prosecutor.  It's impossible to forget, for example, photos of him standing next to the Ugandan President, Youweri Museveni, as he announced that he was investigating the situation in Northern Uganda -- an act that Ugandans widely perceived, rightly in light of the OTP's failure to seriously investigate...

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11 Apr

In 1973, Hans Blix and Jirina Emerson edited the Treaty Maker’s Handbook to help newly emerging States appreciate, post-decolonization, the intricacies of treaty-making as a matter of both domestic and international law. One of the work’s lasting legacies was the inclusion of sample provisions drawn from existing treaties on various treaty topics such as participation, entry into force, reservations, and...

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