theorizing issue selection in advocacy organizations_an analysis of human rights activism around...

Why do advocacy organizations focus on some issues rather than others? Of the many decisions facing advocacy organizations, issue selection would seem to be one of the most important. The decision to devote limited time and resources toward raising awareness and taking action on certain issues of local, national, or global concern inevitably means that other important issues will fall by the wayside. Yet while scholars have shown that advocacy organizations influence which issues the public, the media, and policymakers focus on through the pro-cess of agenda-setting (e.g., Cobb and Elder 1983; Johnson 2008; King, Bentele, and Soule 2007; Kingdon 1984), we still know little about why advocacy organizations decide to promote certain issues rather than others in the first place (see review by Andrews and Edwards 2004).

THEORIZING ISSUE SELECTION IN ADVOCACY ORGANIZATIONS: AN ANALYSIS OF HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVISM AROUND DARFUR AND

THE CONGO, 19982010JONATHAN S. COLEYVanderbilt University

ABSTRACT: Why do advocacy organizations focus on some issues rather than others? Issue selection is an important area of study given that advocacy organizations have limited time and resources and thus many potentially important issues go ignored. Yet issue selection remains an understudied question in the scholarly study of advocacy organizations. In this article, the author draws on historical data, interviews, and a database of statements by major human rights advocacy organizations to examine one particular historical puzzle regarding issue selection: why advocacy organizations have focused on the recent conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan rather than the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, even though more people have died in the Congo. The author finds that advocacy organizations select issues not based on their severity but based on framing, political opportunities, and organizational resources.Keywords: advocacy organizations, social movements, political sociology, human rights, genocide, issue selection, Darfur, Congo

Sociological Perspectives, Vol. 56, Issue 2, pp. 191212, ISSN 0731-1214, electronic ISSN 1533-8673. 2013 by Pacific Sociological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photo-copy or reproduce article content through the University of California Presss Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/sop.2013.56.2.191.

Address correspondence to: Jonathan S. Coley, PMB 351811, Nashville, TN 37235-1811; e-mail: [email protected].
http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp.mailto:jonathan.s.coley%40%20vanderbilt.edu?subject=mailto:jonathan.s.coley%40%20vanderbilt.edu?subject=

192 SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES Volume 56, Number 2, 2013

In this article, I attempt to explain issue selection within advocacy organiza-tions by linking the study of advocacy organizations to central concerns in the sociological study of social movements. Specifically, building off recent studies by Bob (2005, 2009), Carpenter (2010, 2011), Shiffman (2009), and others, I argue that advocacy organizations select issues based on issue framing, political opportuni-ties, and organizational resources, rather than simply the severity of the issues or grievances themselves, which scholars such as Ron, Ramos, and Rodgers (2005) have emphasized.

I illustrate this argument through a comparative case study of human rights activism around the Darfur region of Sudan (hereafter, Darfur) and the Demo-cratic Republic of Congo (hereafter, the Congo) from 1998 to 2010. According to one study, more than 5 million people have died in the Congo since 1998, making the conflict the deadliest since World War II (Coghlan et al. 2007). Yet the conflict has received much less attention than a conflict in Darfur, where a comparatively smaller 300,000 people have been killed since 2003 (Hagan and Rymond-Richmond 2009). As I show, the Darfur conflict received more attention because advocacy organizations perceived the Darfur conflict to be a genocide; because the North-South Sudan conflict and the war on terror, as well as this labeling of genocide, had created opportunities to pressure policymakers on Darfur; and because more resources were available to both advocacy organizations and indigenous groups for activism around Darfur.

The article begins with a review of previous literature on issue selection by advocacy organizations, as well as a discussion of the basic facts surrounding the conflicts in Darfur and the Congo. Next, I use a dataset of statements issued by major human rights advocacy organizations, in addition to an analysis of orga-nizations solely devoted to either Darfur or the Congo, to demonstrate the dis-proportionate amount of attention that advocacy organizations gave to Darfur compared to the Congo. I then draw on historical data and interview data about human rights activism around these countries in an attempt to explain this dis-proportionate amount of attention given to Darfur rather than the Congo. Finally, I discuss the implications of this study for theories on issue selection and point to future directions of study. In the process, I present a unique narrative about activ-ism around Darfur and the Congo that highlights the role of several previously ignored actors in shaping the attention (or inattention) of advocacy organizations toward the atrocities in Darfur and the Congo.

PREVIOUS RESEARCH ON ISSUE SELECTION BY ADVOCACY ORGANIZATIONS

Over the past few years, advocacy organizations have become a growing focus of research within the social sciences. The concept of the advocacy organization, as formulated by Andrews and Edwards (2004), is a synthesis of the concepts of interest groups, social movement organizations, and nonprofit organizations, all of which seem to describe similar phenomenagroups and organizations that make public interest claims either promoting or resisting social change that if implemented, would conflict with the social, cultural, political, or economic

Theorizing issue selection in advocacy organizations 193

interests or values of other constituencies and groups (Andrews and Edwards 2004:485)but which are studied by very different scholars who have become iso-lated within their own disciplines.1

So far, one of the central lines of research on advocacy organizations has been the role and influence of advocacy organizations. As Andrews and Edwards (2004) suggest, advocacy organizations attempt to set the issue agenda of the public, the media, and policymakers (e.g., Cobb and Elder 1983; Johnson 2008; King et al. 2007; Kingdon 1984) and influence which policies are enacted and implemented to address those issues (e.g., Andrews 2001; Best 2012; Skrentny 2006). These kinds of topics have received enormous attention from sociologists and political scientists alike (see Andrews and Edwards 2004 for a review).

But the focus on how advocacy organizations attempt to influence which issues receive attention and debate suggests a possible blind spot in studies of advo-cacy organizations: the question of how advocacy organizations themselves decide which issues to focus on and pressure policymakers to act upon, a process which I label issue selection. Issue selection is an important area of study given that advocacy organizations have limited resources, and thus some potentially impor-tant issues must fall by the wayside.2 Yet only a few scholars in disciplines such as political science have begun to address this question (see especially Bob 2005, 2009; Carpenter 2007a, 2007b, 2010, 2011; Ron et al. 2005; Shiffman 2009), and as evidence of the fragmented literature on advocacy organizations, the literature on issue selection within disciplines like sociology is nearly nonexistent.

One of the earliest and most significant studies of issue selection in advocacy organizations is a study by Ron et al. (2005), which analyzes the number of back-ground reports and press releases published by Amnesty International between 1986 and 2000. The authors find that the only statistically significant predictors of both the number of background reports and press releases that Amnesty issued are Amnestys previous reporting on a country, Amnestys and the U.S. State Depart-ments scores for a countrys propensity to violate citizens personal integrity, and the percent of population killed in armed conflict. (Certain variables are significant for background reports but not press releases, or vice versaGDP, U.S. military aid, and media coverage.) As the authors argue, the significance of variables such as countries propensity to violate citizens personal integrity and the percent of population killed in armed conflict suggest that the severity of conflicts is one of the most important factors in issue selection by advocacy organizations.

Subsequent studies acknowledge these findings but also point out that many conflicts and human rights abuses receive attention disproportionate to their severity. Indeed, as I will soon demonstrate, the conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan from 2003 to present has received more attention from major advocacy organizations than the conflict in the Congo from 1998 to present, even though millions more people seem to have died in the Congo. For instance, two studies by Carpenter (2007a, 2007b) draw from constructivist theories in international rela-tions to argue for the importance of norm entrepreneurs (certain individuals or advocacy organizations that attempt to have their issues adopted by advocacy net-works), the politics within advocacy networks, and the politics between advocacy networks in explaining issue selection by networks of advocacy organizations.


Most recently, studies by Bob (2005, 2009), Carpenter (2010, 2011), and Shiffman (2009) have begun to draw attention to the importance of (1) issue framing, (2) political opportunities, and (3) organizational resources and strength in influenc-ing issue selection by advocacy organizations. Shiffman (2009:610), for instance, suggests that we might understand issue selection less in terms of the actual importance of the problem and more in terms of how severity, neglect, tracta-bility, and benefit are communicated and portrayed. Bob (2009:29) argues that scholars should pay attention to the broader field of political contention in which advocacy organizations are embedded, including the effect of states and counter-mobilizations on norms and norm entrepreneurs. Finally, Carpenter (2011) argues for the importance of highly connected and resource-rich advocacy organizations, rather than merely the influence of norm entrepreneurs to which her previous studies had drawn attention.

These most recent studies echo developments within sociological scholarship on social movements, which has drawn attention to the role of issue framing, polit-ical opportunities, and organizational resources in explaining the emergence and outcomes of social movements. However, the concepts of issue framing, political opportunities, and organizational resources, as used in studies of issue selection, remain underdeveloped. Furthermore, these studies have either not tested these concepts against previous explanations of issue selection such as issue severityindeed, some of these studies are almost exclusively theoretical (Bob 2009; Shiff-man 2009)or have focused on single countries or organizations, making it dif-ficult to establish patterns across different contexts. (Even Ron et al.s [2005] study, while employing a large dataset, is focused on a single advocacy organization, Amnesty International.) Thus, this study both joins together and extends previous research by further developing and testing these emerging theories of issue selec-tion using careful comparative analysis. I describe in more detail how the concepts of issue framing, political opportunities, and organizational resources have been used in social movements studies below, but I first provide historical background on the conflicts in Darfur and the Congo, in addition to introducing the puzzle of human rights activism around Darfur and the Congo, to provide proper back-ground to the study.

BACKGROUND ON THE CONFLICTS IN DARFUR AND THE CONGO

In April through June 1994, over 500,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed in what scholars have generally labeled genocide in Rwanda (Straus 2008:51). Fol-lowing this outbreak of violence, Rwandan Hutus, who had carried out the bulk of the killings on Rwandas smaller Tutsi population, began to flee into the neigh-boring state of the Congo, and in turn aggrieved populations of Tutsis living there. When countries such as Rwanda sent their forces into the Congo to both stabilize the country and plunder the countrys abundant natural resources, a war broke out that would, at its high point, involve eight countries and dozens of guerilla groups (Miskel and Norton 2003:2). And even though a U.N. peacekeeping force, the United Nations Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC), was eventually sent in to monitor a ceasefire agreement, a study by the International


Rescue Committee suggests that over 5.4 million people have died since 1998 due to war-related conditions in the Congo, making the conflict the deadliest since World War II (Coghlan et al. 2007; no new mortality rates have been released since 2007).3

Elsewhere in Africa, a war broke out in the Darfur region of Sudan in 2003 when two antigovernment groups, the Justice and Equality Movement and the Sudanese Liberation Movement/Army, launched an attack on the government for decades of alleged political and economic oppression. The government responded with significant force, arming nomadic Janjaweed groups who had been seeking more land after decades of desertification. The Janjaweed proceeded to wipe out entire villages, often targeting women and children (De Waal 2005:128). While the most intense periods of the conflict ended in 2005, and while the African Union, Euro-pean Union, and United Nations have at various times sent peacekeeping troops to Darfur, scattered violence has continued, leading to the deaths of some 300,000 people (Hagan and Rymond-Richmond 2009:99100).

THE PUZZLE OF HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVISM AROUND DARFUR AND THE CONGO

Given that several more million people seem to have died as a result of conflict in the Congo compared to the conflict in Darfur, and given the previous research that has shown human rights advocacy organizations tend to focus on those countries where human rights abuses are most severe (Ron et al. 2005), one might expect that advocacy organizations would focus more attention on the Congo rather than Darfur. But as stated, this has not been the case.

One way to demonstrate this would be to analyze the amount of attention that general human rights and antigenocide advocacy organizations have devoted to Darfur and the Congo. While many of these organizations now exist, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are two of the only sizeable human- rights-related organizations that existed for the entire length of the conflicts in Darfur and the Congo. Furthermore, as the two largest human rights advocacy organizations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have significant research capacity in nearly every country and thus have capacity to report on atrocities in countries such as Sudan and the Congo as soon as (or soon after) they occur. Previous research has shown that smaller advocacy organizations tend to follow the lead of larger advocacy organizations, so Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are particularly influential within their networks (Carpenter 2011; Clark 2001; Lake and Wong 2005).

To examine the amount of attention Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch gave to Darfur and the Congo, I tabulated the amount of press releases, action alerts, background reports, multimedia reports, oral testimony, and other relevant documents (considered together, statements) published by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch in regards to the two con-flicts. The websites of both Amnesty International (amnesty.org) and Human Rights Watch (hrw.org) feature a comprehensive listing of all statements issued by the organizations since 1998 and 1997, respectively. However, because the


statements on the websites are organized by country, not by conflict, I exam-ined each statement carefully and included only those that pertained to the conflict in Darfur starting in March 2003 or the conflict in the Congo starting in August 1998.

Overall, the two organizations published 1,318 statements in regards to the conflicts in the Congo and Darfur. Human Rights Watch published 284 state-ments on the Congo from 1998 to 2010 and 353 statements on Darfur from 2003 to 2010, while Amnesty International published 271 statements on the Congo from 1998 to 2010 and 410 statements on Darfur from 2003 to 2010. The fact that both organizations have published more statements on Darfur than the Congo is striking, especially since the conflict in the Congo has lasted for nearly five more years and since the conflict in the Congo seems to have been over eigh-teen times as severe. For instance, when considering how many statements each organization released per month, one finds that Human Rights Watch published an average of two statements per month on the Congo and eight statements per month on Darfur (after rounding); Amnesty International also published an average of two statements per month on the Congo, but an even higher average of ten statements per months on Darfur (after rounding). Examined another way, Figure 1 shows the number of statements both organizations issued about Darfur and the Congo per 1,000 deaths, using the mortality rates cited in the section aboveHuman Rights Watch and Amnesty International both pub-lished more statements for Darfur than the Congo for every 1,000 deaths in Darfur and the Congo.

1.6

1.4

1.2

1

0.8

0.6

0.4

0.2

0

Congo

Human Rights Watch Amnesty International

Darfur

FIGURE 1 Number of Statements Released by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International

per 1,000 Deaths


Another way to demonstrate the disproportionate attention given to Darfur and the Congo would be to examine the kinds of advocacy organizations that exist solely to raise attention on Darfur or the Congo. Many of these organizations were founded by leaders of the more general human rights and antigenocide advocacy organizations, so an analysis of such organizations helps to further shed light on dynamics that were present across the human rights and antigenocide advocacy sector. Using interviews and historical data (see next section for methodological details), I constructed a list of organizations that are either solely focused on the conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan or solely focused on the conflict in the Congo. As Table 1 shows, twelve organizations have been founded that solely focus on the conflict in Darfur, while only three organizations currently solely focus on the conflict in Congo. (The Darfur count excludes the more than 850 Darfur-related organizations that have been established at high schools, colleges, and universities worldwide and which are represented on this list by the coalition STAND [2011]. The Darfur and Congo counts also exclude organizations based in Sudan and the Congo themselves, no accurate count of which currently exists.)

Whether one examines general human rights organizations or human rights organizations solely focused on Darfur or the Congo, one finds a significant dis-parity in human rights advocacy on Darfur and the Congo. This disparity presents problems for theories on issue selection by advocacy organizations that emphasize issue severity as one of the most important factors in issue selection (Ron et al. 2005). Explaining this disparity in human rights reporting and advocacy, in an attempt to further build and evaluate theory on issue selection that goes beyond the explanation of issue severity, will be the focus of the rest of the article.

EXPLAINING HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVISM AROUND DARFUR AND THE CONGO

To better understand why advocacy organizations have focused more on Darfur than the Congo, I look to developments in social movement studies, which has

TABLE 1 Advocacy Organizations Focused on Darfur and the Congo

Darfur Organizations Congo Organizations

24 Hours for Darfur Congo/WomenDarfur Alert Coalition Eastern Congo InitiativeDarfur/Darfur Save the CongoDarfur Fast for LifeDarfur Leaders NetworkDarfur Peace and DevelopmentDarfur Stoves ProjectHelp Darfur NowSave DarfurSTAND (Students Taking Action Now: Darfur)Sudan TribuneTeam Darfur


emphasized issue framing, political opportunities, and organizational resources in explaining questions such as why some social movements emerge and succeed while others do not. I illustrate how each of these concepts applies by drawing extensively on information recorded in both journalistic and scholarly accounts about activism around Darfur and the Congo. Since most of the advocacy orga-nizations that campaigned around the conflicts in the Darfur and the Congo are located in the United States, these accounts mostly focus on the United States, though I bring in information about events in other countries where relevant and significant.

I also occasionally draw on data from semistructured, in-depth interviews con-ducted with twelve members of nine human rights and antigenocide advocacy organizations: Amnesty International, Enough Project, Friends Committee on National Legislation, Genocide Watch, Genocide Intervention Network, Human Rights Watch, Oxfam America, Save Darfur, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museums Committee on Conscience. The interviews were mainly focused on his-torical details about human rights activism around Darfur and the Congo, and to ensure accuracy I consulted journalistic and scholarly accounts that corroborated the information relayed in those interviews. Thus, I refer sparingly to the inter-views to fill in gaps in the historical record and to help assess the plausibility of theories.

As I discuss below, human rights and antigenocide advocacy organizations seemed to have been motivated by perceptions of genocide in Darfur; opportu-nities to pressure policymakers as a result of this labeling of genocide, the ongo-ing North-South Sudan conflict, and the broader war on terror; and the availability of resources to both advocacy organizations and indigenous groups in choosing to focus on Darfur more than the Congo.

Issue Selection Motivated by Perceptions of Genocide

Sociological theorists have long argued that humans do not respond directly to the world around them, but rather to the meanings they attach to other humans, objects, and phenomena in the world around them (Blumer 1969). Sociological theories of social movements have taken this idea into account, arguing that a key task of activists is to promote ways of understanding the social world, or frames, that will prompt individuals to better understand issues confronting them and thus join movements for social change (Benford and Snow 2000; Snow and Ben-ford 1988; Snow, Rochford, Worden, and Benford 1986). When examining why advocacy organizations focused more attention on Darfur than the Congo, then, we can look to see if any activists applied frames to Darfur and not the Congo that made the conflict in Darfur seem to be a more important issue, despite the conflict in Darfur not actually being as severe as the conflict in the Congo.

In regards to human rights activism around Darfur and the Congo, many orga-nizations seemed to be particularly concerned about the possibility of geno-cidethat is, the systematic killing of one group by another group, usually of an ethnic or racial nature. The label of genocide represents what Snow and Benford (1988) call an injustice frame, defining what is wrong with a particular situation.


The frame of genocide is particularly powerful because, as Blayton (2009) docu-ments, it invokes notions of evil. After genocides in several countries, including Rwanda in 1994, many scholars and activists alike began to raise alarm about U.S. inattention to genocides across the world. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum created a Committee on Conscience in 1995 to investigate possible instances of genocide around the world (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum 2011a). Advocacy organizations devoted to genocide began to form, such as Genocide Watch in 1998, though these kinds of organizations were still somewhat scarce. Perhaps most sig-nificantly, Samantha Power, a former journalist and then professor of public policy at Harvards Kennedy School of Government, released her Pulitzer Prize-winning A Problem of Hell: America and the Age of Genocide in 2002. Members of some orga-nizations like Genocide Intervention Network formed their organizations in part as a response to Powers call for a movement to keep the United States accountable on issues of genocide (Hamilton and Hazlett 2007).

It was in this environment that certain norm entrepreneurs began to seize the opportunity to frame new conflicts as genocide. Snow et al. (1986:469) describe this kind of frame alignment process as frame amplification, in which activists attempt to clarify the meaning of an event that might otherwise be shrouded by indifference, deception, or fabrication by others, and by ambiguity or uncertainty. In regards to Darfur, the first organization to label the conflict in Darfur geno-cide was the advocacy organization Genocide Watch (Stanton 2011). In an inter-view, the organizations president described Genocide Watch as an idea factory for other organizations and a catalytic network-building structure. The orga-nization chairs the International Campaign to End Genocide, in which a signifi-cant number of other advocacy organizations, from Aegis Trust and International Alert in the United Kingdom to International Crisis Group in Brussels to Geno-cide Intervention Network in the United States, take part. Thus, when Genocide Watch labeled Darfur genocide on April 2, 2004, other organizations quickly took notice. The president of Genocide Watch was in constant contact with the director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museums Committee on Conscience, Jerry Fowler, whose organization would declare a genocide warning for Darfur later in April 2004 and a genocide emergency on July 26, 2004 (Prevent Genocide International 2004). Genocide Watchs president was also in contact with David Bernstein of the U.S. Institute of Peace, who would help found Save Darfur (and which Fowler would later direct).

Also during this time, several key intellectuals, journalists, and celebrities began to bring the possibility of genocide in Darfur to the attention of the wider public. Eric Reeves, a professor of English at Smith College, began highlighting deteriorating conditions in Darfur on his website, SudanReeves.org, in early 2003. His analyses were picked up by media figures such as Nicholas Kristof, an opinion columnist of The New York Times, who called Reeves the first person I know to describe the hor-rors of Darfur as genocide (Kristof 2006). Kristof began to publish columns about Darfur regularly and enlisted movie star George Clooney to travel with him to the Darfur area and help bring further attention to the atrocities in Darfur (Kristof 2006). Clooney would later join celebrities such as Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, and Don Chea-dle in founding the antigenocide charity Not On Our Watch.


As the frame of genocide in Darfur began circulating in the media, activists such as the president of Genocide Watch met with Pierre-Richard Prosper, U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, about the need for a social scientific survey about the atrocities going on in Darfur. The U.S. State Department then contracted out a survey to the Coalition for International Justice, and when results showed evidence of mass killings, Prosper was able to successfully push U.S. Sec-retary of State Colin Powell to make a declaration of genocide on September 9, 2004 (Hamilton and Hazlett 2007). This would be the first declaration of geno-cide during an ongoing genocide in U.S. history (Totten 2006). Several months later, on June 1, 2005, President Bush would make the same declaration (Vande-Hei 2005). The European Parliament would follow in the United States footsteps, saying the atrocities in Darfur were tantamount to genocide on September 16, 2004 (European Union 2004), and a number of other U.S. organizations have called Darfur a genocide, including Save Darfur, the Enough Project, and Genocide Intervention Network.

It is true that many governments outside the United States and the European Union have strayed away from any declarations of genocide for Darfur, and a United Nations commission decided against calling the conflict genocide (Lynch 2005). Furthermore, Darfur would not be labeled genocide forever. By 2009, most of the actors who had declared genocide in Darfur downgraded their classifica-tion of the conflict. On July 30, 2009, President Obamas special envoy to Sudan, Scott Gration, told U.S. senators that the label of genocide should no longer be applied to Darfur (Lafranchi 2009). And on August 3, 2009, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museums Committee on Conscience officially downgraded its classification of Dar-fur from genocide emergency to genocide warning (Abramowitz 2009). But the number of governments and organizations that did label the conflict in Darfur as a genocide is astonishing, especially given previous reluctance on the part of many in the international community to label conflicts as genocides (Power 2002).

In comparison, almost no actor has labeled the conflict and its aftermath in the Congo genocide. Beginning in 2003, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum placed the Congo on its genocide warning list (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum 2011b), but never considered conditions there severe enough to declare a genocide emergency as it had with Darfur. During this time period, Geno-cide Watch similarly never declared the situation in Congo to be genocide as it did for Darfur, instead only acknowledging the existence of genocidal mas-sacres (Genocide Watch 2008). (This did change in March 2012, when Genocide Watch issued a press release acknowledging genocide had been underway in the eastern region of the Congo since 1998.) NGOs such as the Enough Project and Genocide Intervention Network have never called the conflict in the Congo geno-cide, nor have Western governments such as the United States and the European Union or intergovernmental organizations such as the United Nations. The only significant international actors to do so have been a few African countries such as Namibia (BBC 2001).

How compelling is the argument that advocacy organizations paid more atten-tion to Darfur than the Congo because Darfur was labeled as a genocide, which was considered to be a crime of great concern? There does seem to be significant


evidence that advocacy organizations were responding in part to perceptions of genocide in Darfur in choosing to focus so much attention on Darfur rather than Congo. In interviews, every human rights and antigenocide organization stated that their interest in Darfur came at least in part from its status as genocideindeed, nearly all of the Darfur organizations listed in Table 1 were formed after the declaration of genocide, as well as several human rights and antigenocide organizations such as Genocide Intervention Network and the Enough Project. Furthermore, when examining the statements made by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, one finds that Human Rights Watch had published only one statement about Darfur before the declaration of genocide occurred, but in the first three months after the declaration was made, Human Rights Watch published twenty-three statements. Similarly, Amnesty International had published some statements about Darfur before the declaration of genocide (including eleven statements in the three months immediately preceding), but released twenty-five statements in the three months after the declaration starting in April 2004. Both organizations would release their highest number of statements during this first year after the genocide declaration, and they would remain high through 2008. This is true even though the months when Darfur began to be labeled genocide do not seem to correspond with the months where atrocities were most severe in Darfur. Death counts seem to be highest in the year prior to the declaration of genocide and had begun to drop precipitously by April 2004, before ceasing almost completely in subsequent years (see Guha-Sapir and Degomme 2005:34).

There is likely credence to the argument that certain frames, such as genocide, spark a reaction from advocacy organizations when they are perceived to apply to certain issues or countries, despite the neglect frames have received in studies of issue selection (Ron et al. 2005). Still, perceptions of genocide cannot fully account for the amount of attention given by organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International to the conflicts in Darfur and the Congo. If that were the case, one would expect that the organizations would not have released any statements at all before Darfur was labeled genocide, and that the number of statements released about Darfur would have been relatively constant while Darfur was called a genocide; instead, the number of statements varied. Other factors were likely at play, and I explore explanations surrounding perceptions of political opportunities, as well as resources of advocacy organizations and oppressed groups, in the following sections.

Issue Selection Motivated by Political Opportunities

Another concept that has gained popularity within social movement studies over the past few decades is that of the political opportunity structure. As schol-ars such as McAdam (1999) have shown, activists often look to see whether the political climate is favorable for social change, and then strategize accordingly. In the case of Darfur and the Congo, several prominent and influential policymakers were highly motivated and interested in issues regarding Sudan, including the President of the United States. Advocacy organizations realized this, sometimes sharing their motivations for concern, and then shifted their focus accordingly.


As hinted above, many policymakers and international leaders shared in advo-cacy organizations concern that the atrocities in Darfur constituted genocide. For instance, several members of USAID and the State Department during Presi-dent George W. Bushs administration, such as Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Pierre-Richard Prosper, had also served during the Clinton administra-tion and had been disappointed by the United States failed response to Rwanda (Totten 2006). Thus, they played a major role in pushing Secretary of State Powell and President Bush to take action on perceived genocide in Darfur. Similarly, the declaration of genocide piqued the interest of the International Criminal Court (ICC), formed in 2002 for the purpose of prosecuting individuals for genocides and other crimes against humanity. The ICC would eventually issue an indict-ment for Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, which was the first time the Hague-based court has accused a sitting head of state of committing the most egregious international crime (Lynch and Hamilton 2010:1).

Other policymakers interest in Darfur stemmed, in part, from their previous interest in Sudan due to the North-South Sudan war.4 Many evangelical Christians in Congress had been active around the North-South Sudan war during the 1980s to the 2000s, in which the government of Sudan was attempting to drive out or kill the large populations of Christians in what is now the country of South Sudan. Thus, early on, prominent conservative Christians in Congress, such as Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas and Representative Frank Wolf of Virginia, became unlikely allies with liberal Democrats such as Representative Donald Payne of New Jersey (Hamilton and Hazlett 2007). To date, members of Congress such as these have helped shepherd through over forty pieces of legislation on Dar-fur (Save Darfur 2011), on which all of the advocacy organizations have lobbied intensely. Furthermore, representatives in the House formed a Sudan Caucus that would continue to look for ways to take action on Darfur and other regions of Sudan (Sudan Tribune 2005).

President Bushs unusually intense and personal interest in the conflict in Dar-fur also seems to stem, in part, from the North-South Sudan war. Some scholars have traced his interest to before the 2000 election, when President Bush made a personal promise to prominent evangelical Franklin Graham that he would work to establish peace in southern Sudan, where Christians were undergoing persecu-tion (Stedjan and Thomas-Jensen 2010). Others have pointed out how churches in Midland, Texas, the hometown of Bush and his wife, reached out to the Bushes, as well as other Bush administration officials, to secure their commitment to Sudan (Power 2004). Whatever the exact cause, President Bush showed an early inter-est in Sudan: before the conflict in Darfur even began, President Bush appointed former Senator and fellow evangelical John Danforth to be a Special Envoy for Sudan (Stedjan and Thomas-Jensen 2010). At times, Stedjan and Thomas-Jensen (2010:272) recount, President Bush was so engulfed in the issue (that) some of his staff later referred to the President as the Sudan desk officer, a junior level position at the State Department working full-time on Sudan. Perhaps perceiving a point of leverage, antigenocide organizations made lobbying President Bush a top priority (Eichler-Levine and Hicks 2007). The efforts were arguably successful: President Bush would go on to sign every piece of legislation on Darfur sent to


him by Congress (Save Darfur 2011), support an African Union Mission (AMIS) in Sudan through the U.N. Security Council (Mamdani 2009:45), and even authorize a highly classified CIA mission to support clandestine efforts to stop genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan, which has only recently come to light (Woodward 2010).

Finally, policymakers interest in the conflict in Darfur might also be understood in light of the United States broader geopolitical interests, especially as under-stood by the foreign policy establishment following September 11, 2001. As Mam-dani (2009:64) argues in his book Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror, because the conflict in Darfur was (misleadingly) portrayed as one perpe-trated by Arabs against black Africans, Darfur could be neatly integrated into the War on Terror, for Darfur gives the Warriors on Terror a valuable asset with which to demonize an enemy: a genocide perpetrated by Arabs. Furthermore, for those individuals who were outraged by the war on terror, Mamdani (2009:60) argues that Darfur could be credited with an even greater success: depoliticizing Ameri-cans, especially those Americans who felt the need to do something in the face of disasters perpetrated by the Bush administration. The Save Darfur Coalition was able to capture and tame a part of this rebellious constituencyespecially stu-dentsthereby marginalizing and overshadowing those who continued to mobi-lize around Iraq. While many of the advocacy organizations involved in activism around the Congo were also vocal and active in opposing the war in Iraq and evi-dence of torture in the war on terror (especially Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Friends Committee on National Legislation), it is true that a few organizations such as Save Darfur participated in casting the conflict in Darfur as a genocide perpetrated by Arabs against black Africans (Mamdani 2009:6465).

In comparison, in interviews several antigenocide advocacy organizations lamented that the conflict in Congo was perceived as just another African war by international leaders, a conflict unworthy of humanitarian intervention. One reason is that, following international efforts to bring peace to various African countries during the 1990s, including the failed intervention in Somalia in 1993, countries like the United States had been shying away from involvement in more African wars. Another is that much of the international community was com-plicit in the conflict in the Congo, benefiting from the large amount of natural resources that were exploited during the conflict (Herman and Peterson 2010). Past attempts to intervene in conflicts in the Congo had been deemed morally sus-pect for such reasons, particularly when France sought to unilaterally intervene in 19961997 to protect its longstanding sphere of influence there (Huliaras 2004). Thus, until the Enough Project launched its Raise Hope for the Congo campaign in 2008, ten years after the conflict began, no antigenocide advocacy organization was actively and publicly lobbying for legislation on the Congo. There were a few gen-eral advocacy organizations lobbying on the Congo, such as Oxfam America, but their efforts were often overshadowed by the attention given to Darfur. It is true that, in June 2003, the European Union launched a three-month military operation known as Operation Artemis, which was designed to bolster a U.N. peacekeep-ing force (MONUC) already operating in the country (Miskel and Norton 2003). Three years later, in June 2006, the European Union returned to the Congo in its


EUFOR DR Congo mission. The operation, which once again lasted for only a few months, was launched to assist MONUC in watching over the country during elections (Hoebeke, Carette, and Vlassenroot 2007). But these efforts have been highly criticized as half-hearted humanitarian interventions (Gegout 2005; Haine and Giegerich 2006), and the presence of peacekeeping forces may have only fur-thered the perception of the conflict in the Congo as just another African war.

How compelling is the argument that advocacy organizations focused more on Darfur than the Congo because they perceived U.S. and international leaders as being more interested in Darfur? In interviews, nearly all respondents stated the United States previous actions and involvement in Sudan as a reason why attention was so quickly shifted to the conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan. Indeed, major human rights advocacy organizations have continually described the opportunity to bring about change as a major factor, along with the severity of a crisis, in decid-ing on which countries to focus. On its website, Human Rights Watch states that they try to strike a balance between working in countries where the most atrocious human rights violations occur and those where we can bring about the most change (Human Rights Watch 2011). Similarly, Amnesty Internationals former Secretary General has stated, It is the severity of the human rights violations in a country that trigger our reaction. But not just the severity. We also look at windows of oppor-tunity. Is it the right time to do it, if we do it now before the electoral campaigns start? Or when is it the right time to do it in order to influence the agenda? (Kreisler 1998). The existence of political opportunities does seem to help account for some of the variation in statements by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International fol-lowing declarations of genocide, with both organizations issuing more statements around the times that the United Nations was making decisions about peacekeep-ing troops and the ICC. As one example, Human Rights Watch issued fifteen state-ments during the first three months of 2005, and Amnesty International issued ten statements during the three months of 2005, to pressure the U.N. to authorize ICC investigations in Darfur, which the U.N. would do shortly after.

It should also be noted that there has been a revolving door between many of these human rights and antigenocide organizations and the government agencies that make up the foreign policy establishment, lending more credence to the idea that advocacy organizations were aware of policymakers interests. Many former members of the Clinton administration joined or assisted with human rights and antigenocide organizations after the election of President Bush. For instance, for-mer Secretary of State Madeline Albright and former Secretary of Defense William Cohen agreed to chair a Genocide Prevention Task Force for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museums Committee on Conscience, which was prompted in large part by the events in Darfur (Genocide Prevention Task Force 2008). A former assistant at the National Security Council, Gayle Smith, founded the antigenocide organi-zation Enough Project, which was itself housed in the Center for American Prog-ress, a project by former Clinton Chief of Staff John Podesta. After the election of President Obama, several members of these antigenocide organizations, including Smith, would leave to work in government agencies such as the National Security Council, thanks in no small part to Podestas role as head of the Obama-Biden Presidential Transition Team (White House 2012).


It seems clear, then, that political opportunities factor into advocacy organiza-tions decisions to focus on certain issues, such as the conflict in Darfur. Yet previ-ous studies of issue selection by scholars such as Ron et al. (2005) have not fully explored variables related to political opportunities in explaining why advocacy organizations focus on some issues more than others.

Issue Selection Motivated by Availability of Resources

One final set of explanations for why advocacy organizations may have focused more on Darfur than the Congo centers around the availability of organizational resources. While political opportunities may enable action on social change, they are not enough to ensure that efforts for social change get noticed or take off in the first place. Rather, in a world where thousands of issues confront society and thousands of organizations vie for attention, who gets noticed often comes down to who has the most resources, whether that be organizational capacities, money, leaders, activists, and so on.

Organizational resources may factor into an explanation of issue selection in two ways. First, when organizations that work for social change have abundant resources available to them, they are more likely to influence the advocacy agenda (Edwards and McCarthy 2004; McCarthy and Zald 1977). In the study by Ron et al. (2005), Amnestys previous reporting on a country (an indicator of where Amnesty has invested resources) emerged as the only other statistically significant variable in explaining Amnestys decisions surrounding issue selection, besides the sever-ity of human rights abuses in a country. One can see how this explanation would apply to the case of Darfur and the Congo: human rights advocacy organizations had been focused on the North-South Sudan conflict, and a peaceful resolution to that conflict had only been reached in the early 2000s, so organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch would still have had resources in Sudan that they could easily shift to Darfur. It is true that there had been another war in Congo just a couple years before the 1998 war broke out; but Amnesty Inter-national, for instance, had only begun to shift from issues surrounding prisoners of conscience to broader human rights concerns by the time the conflict in the Congo began in 1998 (Amnesty International 2011).

The cause of genocide prevention in Darfur also drew significant amounts of money from outside donors. The major antigenocide advocacy organization Genocide Intervention Network, which focused primarily on Darfur in its early years, has received the bulk of its fundinghundreds of thousands of dollarsfrom the philanthropic organization Humanity United (Genocide Intervention Network 2008), which drew its own money from Armenian Americans who were disappointed by U.S. inaction to the Armenian genocide during World War I. On its website, Humanity United notes that it has similarly funded such human rights and antigenocide advocacy organizations as 24 Hours for Darfur, Aegis Trust, Darfur/Darfur, Enough Project, Save Darfur, Stop Genocide Now, Sudan Tribune, Team Darfur, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museums Committee on Conscience, as well as independent activists such as Brian Steidle (who wrote the book-turned-documentary The Devil Came on Horseback) and Eric Reeves. In


interviews, organizations such as Genocide Intervention Network and Enough Project said that foundations have given them so much money that they have not had to conduct the large fundraising drives that characterize so many other non-profits and advocacy organizations. Humanity United has only funded one orga-nization primarily focused on the Congo, Congo/Women, and few other founda-tions have funded efforts to raise awareness and take action on the Congo, which may help explain why almost no organizations dedicated to ending the atrocities in the Congo exist (Humanity United 2011).

Finally, many religious leaders and laypeople across the United States, who had been focused on the North-South Sudan conflict for many years or had made a connection between the situation in Darfur and previous genocides such as the Holocaust, mobilized around Darfur. Save Darfur is actually a coalition of over 150 faith-based organizations, including the World Evangelical Alliance, the Union for Reform Judaism, and the Council on American Islamic Relations, all of whom came together at public rallies in Washington, D.C., and New York City in 2006 (Eichler-Levine and Hicks 2007). And the American Jewish World Service helped to organize one of the first summits about the mass atrocities in Darfur, held at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in July 2004 (Hamilton and Hazlett 2007). Faith-based communities had not been widely organized around the Congo, and there was not a readily identifiable constituency that could be mobilized against the conflict in the Congo.

When considering the impact of resources on which issues receive attention, however, it is not only the resources available to major advocacy organizations that matter. A second way organizational resources can factor into an explanation of issue selection is when considering the resources available to those people in places where human rights abuses take place. As scholars such as McAdam (1999:43) have argued, a conducive political environment only affords the aggrieved popu-lation the opportunity for successful insurgent action. It is the resources of the minority community that enable insurgent groups to exploit these opportunities. In recent years, scholars led by Bob (2002:37) have been making the case that, in the human rights arena, marketing trumps justice, as global civil society is not an open forum market by altruism, but a harsh, Darwinian marketplace where legions of desperate groups vie for scarce attention, sympathy and money (see also Polman 2010). In other words, whether advocacy organizations focus on cer-tain issues may come down to whether groups in need of help are clever enough to attract those organizations attention. Recently, some scholars have been taking this argument further in regards to Darfur, arguing that certain groups may pro-voke war themselves in an attempt to attract international sympathy. Kuperman (2006), a public policy scholar and vocal critic of human rights activism around Darfur, argues that Darfur was never the simplistic morality tale purveyed by the news media and humanitarian organizations. Violence was initiated not by Arab militias but by the black rebels who in 2003 attacked police and military installations. The rebels, much weaker than the government, would logically have sued for peace long ago. Because of the Save Darfur movement, however, the rebels believe that the longer they provoke genocidal retaliation, the more the West will pressure Sudan to hand them control of the region. While it is unclear


whether the rebels Kuperman discusses provoked the war with the goal of invit-ing a disproportionate response and gaining support from the international com-munity, there is significant evidence that factions of the increasingly splintered rebel groups refused to sign the Darfur Peace Agreement of 2006 with the goal of receiving more favorable terms and assistance from the international community (Mamdani 2009:26567).

While those advocacy organizations interviewed agreed that the availability of resources to mobilize around the Darfur ultimately made a difference in the amount of attention they were able to give to Darfur, all but one of the human rights and antigenocide advocacy organizations interviewed dismissed arguments that emphasize the so-called marketing of rebellion as blaming the victim. Even if we do not accept the argument that groups provoke war to attract support from advocacy organizations, though, it is certainly true that some groups have more resources to connect with advocacy organizations than others, and thus, the resources available to oppressed groups may also factor into an explanation for issue selection.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

In a world where thousands of issues confront humans, advocacy organizations must make tough decisions about which issues to focus on and how to expend limited resources. While a few scholars have begun to examine the circumstances under which advocacy organizations decide to focus on issues (Bob 2005, 2009; Carpenter 2007a, 2007b, 2010, 2011; Ron et al. 2005; Shiffman 2009), most work on advocacy organiza-tions still focuses on questions of their influence and impact (Andrews and Edwards 2004). By drawing on concepts from social movement studies, and conducting a com-parative analysis of human rights activism around Darfur and the Congo, this article has sought to further build and evaluate theory on issue selection in advocacy orga-nizations. I conclude this article by summarizing the implications of this article for theory on issue selection, as well as discussing how scholars can extend this research and what policymakers and activists can take away from this article.

This article has first shown that the existence of important issues themselves does not guarantee that advocacy organizations will focus on them, as studies such as Ron et al. (2005) had strongly suggested. While the conflict in the Congo represented the deadliest war since World War II, with one study showing that several million more people died as a result of conflict in the Congo as compared to Darfur, advo-cacy organizations focused more of their attention on Darfur. This finding reflects decades of research in social movements theory that has shown that the severity of grievances themselves does not guarantee that social movements will emerge and succeed (cf., McAdam 1999). Thus, while issue severity should still be examined in future studies of issue selection, scholars should also examine other explanations.

This article has also shown the utility of such concepts as issue framing, political opportunities, and resources for explaining issue selection in advocacy organiza-tions. A few other studies have raised these concepts as possible explanations of issue selection (Bob 2005, 2009; Carpenter 2010, 2011; Shiffman 2009), but these con-cepts had until now not been tested, or at least not tested across multiple cases or


contexts. In regards to framing, advocacy organizations seemed to be more inter-ested in the conflict in Darfur because they perceived it to be genocide. In regards to political opportunities, policymakers were already eager to take action on issues related to Sudan and the broader war on terror, and thus, advocacy organizations knew there were political leaders they could pressure to take action on Darfur. And in regards to resources, advocacy organizations had already poured resources into Sudan, foundations and constituencies were already interested in Sudan and issues of genocide, and some groups in Darfur tried to market their oppression in order to attract sympathy. For the most part, these things were not true in regards to the Congo. These kinds of factors deserve further attention from scholars; indeed, the findings in regards to political opportunities and resources would seem to go against the grain of the agenda-setting literature and constructivist theories of international relations, suggesting that policymakers and other actors in the international com-munity may have just as much influence on advocacy organizations as advocacy organizations have on them (see Bob 2009 for more on this critique).

How can scholars extend this research in future studies? Given that this study focuses on two cases, scholars might test the hypotheses evaluated in this study across a larger number of cases. Of course, scholars should continue to consider alternate explanations such as issue severity (Ron et al. 2005). Furthermore, while this study has focused on the literature on issue selection by human rights advo-cacy organizations specifically, issue selection is an important topic of consider-ation for other kinds of organizationssee especially Shiffmans (2009) research on global health issues. Additional work is especially needed on issue selection by more contentious social movement organizations.

Finally, what implications does this analysis of human rights activism around Darfur and the Congo hold for activists and policymakers? This article withholds final judgment on whether the focused attention on Darfur by policymakers and human rights activists was ultimately worthwhile. But this article strongly sug-gests that further debate about whether all issues facing the international com-munity are being equally weighted by policymakers and advocacy organizations is needed: indeed, the decision to ignore the conflict in the Congo was ultimately one of life-and-death consequences.

Acknowledgments: This article was presented at the annual meeting of the Mid-South Sociological Association in Little Rock, Arkansas, in October 2011. The author thanks Erin Bergner, Dan Cornfield, Larry Isaac, Andrew Konitzer, Holly McCammon, Fred-erick Shepherd, the editors, and several anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions. He also thanks the Alabama Power Foundation for research funding and Frederick Shepherd for research assistance during the early stages of this project.

NOTES

1. I choose to adopt the concept of advocacy organization for the purpose of this article not only because of my explicit attempt to bring together literature in political science and sociology but also because the human rights and antigenocide organizations I study in this article have been variously conceptualized as both interest groups and social movement organizations.


2. I use the word selection rather than similar terms such as adoption (Carpenter 2007b) to match the language of social movements scholars, who have also produced studies of frame selection, tactic selection, and so on.

3. Mortality estimates during wartime are an inexact science, so this number should be interpreted with caution. Furthermore, some scholars have since criticized the Interna-tional Rescue Committees study for sampling regions that were not representative of the region as a whole (Bohannon and Travis 2010). Nevertheless, most advocacy orga-nizations did accept International Rescue Committees mortality estimate, which still leaves open the question of why advocacy organizations focused on the conflict in Dar-fur rather than the Congo.

4. This raises the possibility that issue selection can be explained in part by path depen-dency (see overview by Mahoney 2000)prior attention to an issue explains future attention to an issue. In this case, advocacy organizations might have been more inter-ested in the conflict in Darfur because they had committed so much attention to the North-South Sudan conflict, whereas advocacy organizations ignored the conflict in the Congo because they had generally ignored previous conflicts in the Congo. This would also help explain why many advocacy organizations have begun to turn their atten-tion to conflict in the new country of South Sudanthe organization Genocide Watch declared genocide was occurring in South Sudan in March 2012.

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