This week marked the one-year anniversary of the killing of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan. President Obama marked the event by making an unannounced trip to Afghanistan to sign a treaty with President Karzai establishing post-war relationship. And today, the United States Military Academy released select documents that were seized in the raid that killed Bin Laden and translated them into English.
The death of Osama Bin Laden was, at the very least, a symbolic victory in the “war on terror.” The title of the New York Times’ piece on the recovered documents was “Recovered Documents Show a Divided Al Qaeda.” The story seems to indicate that Al Qaeda is not as strong as when it attacked the United States on September 11, 2001.
But are we safer now than we were 10 years ago as a result of our policies and two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? And what [...]
Continue reading Osama Bin Laden is Dead but the “War on Terror” Lives On
By Guest Blogger | April 13th, 2012 By Kim Howell
“Conclusion: Occupy Facebook!” A recent analysis of Occupy Wall Street web analytics found that because Facebook users are an engaged community, those who come to www.occupywallst.org from Facebook spend more time on the website and interact with it more. Furthermore, photos of peaceful protests are far more likely to go viral than videos. People will watch a video of police pepper-spraying protesters, but they’re much more likely to share a photo of a stunt with a bed in the middle of Madison Avenue.
So what does this have to do with Instagram? Everything.
Used with permission from @Ialmansi
“Facebook isn’t buying an app; they are buying us. They are buying a community” says CNN’s Dirk Dallas. Instagram’s membership numbers are impressive, but Facebook isn’t buying quantity—it’s buying quality. Facebook’s users are, by most meaningful metrics, far more engaged than Twitter’s, but Instagram members leave them in [...]
Continue reading What Facebook’s Acquisition of Instagram Could Mean for Activists
By Matisse Bustos Hawkes | April 2nd, 2012 Burma held parliamentary by-elections for a portion of the entire parliament body yesterday. By most accounts, the polling went relatively smoothly with some incidents of irregularities being reported. Our friends at the U.S. Campaign for Burma created a feed about the election on Storify, a platform for aggregating and curating news stories from across the social web- including news sites, Twitter, YouTube, etc.
Scenes in this video from Democratic Voice of Burma depict election workers inside voting stations and people queuing to vote by referencing a ballot. The only hint that this is a new experience is an interview with an election monitor noting that so far as he’s witnessed, all has been peaceful.
There were hopeful congratulations shared by the U.S. government and others for Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and leader of the National League for Democracy, the main opposition party. The [...]
Continue reading A Small Step for Democracy in Burma but More Attention Needed For Ethnic Minorities
By Sam Gregory | March 17th, 2012 “Kony 2012“ is now the most rapidly disseminated human rights video ever. In six days it reached an aggregate 100 million views – faster than other pop culture phenomena like Susan Boyle (9 days), Rebecca Black (45 days) and ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’ (445 days).
Because of this enormous reach Kony 2012 (the video and associated campaign) has been a lightning rod for celebration and critique, both around dimensions that are specific to the video and campaign themselves, as well as viewing them as proxies for whole genres of contemporary activism. These debates range across: specific advocacy choices, finances, accuracy, slacktivism and clicktivism, organizing, communications strategy, the failings of traditional NGOS, and the ethics of representation and voice.
In this blog I will look at Kony 2012 through the prism of two core video advocacy principles that guide our work here at WITNESS (do also look at an earlier post by my colleagues Rose and Matisse with initial reactions [...]
Continue reading Kony 2012: Juggling Advocacy, Audience and Agency When Using #Video4Change
By Matisse Bustos Hawkes | March 14th, 2012 Bukeni Waruzi, Program Manager for Africa and the Middle East at WITNESS, and a long-time advocate for children’s rights in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) reacted with relief and hope to the guilty verdict of former rebel leader Thomas Lubanga Dyilo announced at the International Criminal Court (ICC) earlier today.
At the ICC in The Hague, Bukeni witnessed the judge’s delivery of the verdict and participated in the press briefing held afterwards.
“I’m so proud today to see that the work that WITNESS and AJEDI-Ka carried out in the Congo, advocating for the rights of children not to be used as soldiers, has paid off,” he beamed. (Before WITNESS he was the executive director of AJEDI-Ka with whom we partnered to produce several videos on the situation of child soldiers in the DRC.)
We recored a conversation with Bukeni via Google+ Hangout following the proceedings. He answered questions [...]
Continue reading Lubanga Verdict Brings Justice To Child Soldiers in DRC – Tomorrow The Work Continues
|
|
