Mass Mobilization for Justice: Exploring Public Engagement around International Courts

Current research on international justice, transnational advocacy, and global governance neglects the growing role that human rights organizations (HROs) play with respect to world courts and public engagement. This paper explores HRO as communicative structures that attempt to articulate and advance international justice norms. As architects, witnesses, researchers, critics, and cheerleaders, HROs represent victims, build prosecutorial cases, and use social media to construct a popular mandate for various cases on the docket at the International Criminal Court. This expansion in HRO participation is driven in part by advocacy strategies that reveal contested mediations of “information politics” that we argue varies according to intended audience, media platform, and objective. We analyze these strategies and goals through the conceptual model of the social practice of media advocacy to give context to recent mass mobilization campaigns. Compared to other forms of HRO participation with international courts, we find that public engagement campaigns serve a critical role in generating an arena of debate around accountability in international justice but with uneven results due to a packaging of information that simplifies complex issues, proposes misguided solutions, and is undertaken without the consent of stakeholders. Moreover, dilemmas specific to international courts around selectivity and politicization may be intensified when mobilizing a public that may not be representative of a popular mandate. By examining the recent campaign around Joseph Kony by Invisible Children within the context of HRO participation with international courts, we show that mass advocacy campaigns have important implications for international justice.