ACAS also is producing materials that scholars can use to engage with students on their campuses and with teachers and middle and high school students in their communities, who are a major audience of the Kony2012 video produced by  Invisible Children.

Contact David Wiley(wiley@msu.edu), chair of the ACAS Task Force on Demilitarizing Africa and African Studies for more information or to participate in this effort.

“#StopKony2012: For most Ugandans Kony’s crimes are from a bygone era” by Angelo Izama. a Ugandan journalist and writer who founded the human security Think Tank, Fanaka Kwawote based in Kampala, and “The Problem with Invisible Children’s ‘Kony 2012′”  by Michael Deibert, a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies at Coventry University and author of the forthcoming Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair (Zed Books)

Iama: “…these campaigns are disempowering of [Africans’] voices… The Kony2012 campaign will primarily succeed in making Invisible Children, not Joseph Kony, more famous… For many in the conflict prevention community, including those who worry about the further militarization of Central Africa, this campaign is just another bad solution to a more difficult problem.”

Deibert: “By blindly supporting Uganda’s current government and its military adventures beyond its borders, as Invisible Children suggests that people do, Invisible Children is in fact guaranteeing that there will be more violence, not less, in Central Africa. I have seen the well-meaning foreigners do plenty of damage before, so that is why people understanding the context and the history of the region is important before they blunder blindly forward to “help” a people they don’t understand.”

The explosion of interest in this video this week has reignited the controversy about the Obama administration decision in October 2011 to send 100 US Africa Command (AFRICOM) soldiers, armed and with permission to kill, as “advisors” to support the fight against the Lord’s Resistance Army.

Some view sending AFRICOM as saving child soldiers and young girls from the notorious Joseph Kony; others see it as intrusive US intervention which could escalate instability in the region (southern Sudan, northern Uganda, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo).

Simultaneously, AFRICOM activity is growing across the continent with full-scale combat in Somalia, three new drone bases in the Horn, and arming and training of African troops in dozens of countries. ACAS scholars will be discussing this militarization of Africa in two panels at the November African Studies annual meeting.

This initiative is from the Oakland Institute and Solidarity Movement for a New Ethiopia (SMNE).

The government of Ethiopia is facilitating land grabs by foreign corporations by forcibly moving pastoralist communities into villages. The villagization program is defended as giving cattle herders “access to basic socioeconomic infrastructures … and to bring socioeconomic and cultural transformation of the people.” Since pastoralists must move their herds seasonally between rangelands and wetlands, what the government benignly calls “cultural transformation” would in fact force pastoralists to give up their livelihoods. The new villages are seen by the people as places where they can only “wait to die” (see the Human Rights Watch report cited below).

The government plans to forcibly relocate 1.5 million people in four regions: Gambella, Afar, Somali and Benishangul-Gumuz. The process is most advanced in Gambella, with 70,000 people moved by the end of 2011 and over 42% of its area slated for the Ethiopian land bank, a kind of holding operation until the land is allocated to outside investors.

The U.S. government has given over $1 billion to Ethiopia since 2007 and is involved in providing funds for villagization services, officially designated as “Protection of Basic Services”. Further, Ethiopia benefits from AGOA (African Growth and Opportunity Act), which gives the U.S. preferential treatment to Ethiopian exports (even if the producer is a Saudi corporation growing cash crops).

Here are two excellent reports:
Human Rights Watch. 2012. Waiting Here for Death. Forced Displacement and “Villagization” in Ethiopia’s Gambella Region
Press release, where you can also download full report.

Understanding Land Investment Deals – Ethiopia, Oakland Institute. 2011.

ACAS sponsored panel:
Agriculture, Food and Ongoing Struggles for Food Sovereignty: Paths to Contributing to Africa’s Liberation?
Thursday, November 17, 8:00-10:00 am

Chairs: Bill Derman, Norwegian University of Life Sciences and Noah Zerbe, Humboldt State University
Anne Ferguson, Michigan State University and Sieglinde Snapp, Michigan State University
From Food Shortages to Food Sovereignty: Malawi’s Troubled Road to Sustainable Agricultural Development Miriam Chaiken, New Mexico State University (mchaiken@nmsu.edu), and Richard Dixon, Save the Children (radixon@noble.org), Community Mobilization, Human Agency, and Shock Avoidance: Strategies to Promote Food Security in Africa
Ashley Fent, Columbia University (amf2193@columbia.edu), Engineering the Neoliberal Woman: A Critical Feminist Analysis of the Gates Foundation’s Gender Analysis
Bill Derman and Anne Hellum, University of Oslo, Water Scarcity, Water Security and the Right to Water
Noah Zerbe, Urban Food Sovereignty: Environmental Justice and Food Justice in Durban, South Africa

Other ACAS-related panels :
The Politics of Liberation: Transformations (Part I), Saturday, November 19, 8-10 am (chaired by Leslie Hadfield) and The Politics of Liberation: Contested Meanings (Part II), Saturday, November 19, 1:15-12:15

What Role Now for National Security Funding of African Studies? ASA Board of Directors Current Issues Plenary: (with ACAS members Carl Levan and David Wiley as two of three panelists), Friday, November 18, 2:15 pm