Content uploaded by Alexandra Budabin
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Alexandra Budabin on Apr 29, 2016
Content may be subject to copyright.
A preview of the PDF is not available
Ben Affleck Goes to Washington: Celebrity Advocacy, Access, and Influence
Abstract
Among the larger field of celebrity humanitarians, a small but growing number have started development organizations, thereby crafting exclusive platforms that focus attention on underreported areas and promote unique visions for interventions in the Global South. This chapter offers a treatment of Hollywood actor/director Ben Affleck’s celebrity humanitarianism by examining his activities on behalf of the Eastern Congo Initiative (ECI), an NGO he co-founded in 2010 to spur social and economic development in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In the North, Affleck raises funds from elite circles, educates political elites, and lobbies the US Congress in order to shape foreign policy towards DRC. In the South, Affleck pays visit to local partners who have been given grants; ECI also conducts research to identify potential grantees for Northern donors. Following Brockington’s (2014) use of Crouch (2004), I adopt a post-democratic lens to situate and understand Affleck’s ability to found his organization, gain access, and build influence. I contend that celebrity-led organizations reflect a post-democratic context, where political and financial elites are able to propel select individuals like celebrity humanitarians. The presence of this privileged dynamic deserves enquiry for positioning celebrities to mediate between the Global North and South.
... Besides charity work, the ECI has also engaged itself in the effort to influence policy makers in the USA by releasing the paper "Strengthening United States Foreign Policy in the Democratic Republic of Congo." Affleck himself was successful in presenting the issues of Eastern Congo in US Congress and various American agencies (Richey and Budabin 2016b) and was able to shift the understanding and perception of Eastern Congo in the North (Budabin 2016). ...
The present article discusses the role of celebrities in the conflict resolution processes presented by the case study of George Clooney's engagement in South Sudan. Methodologically, it is a critical discourse analysis of published articles in selected media. The main argument of the article is that the role of celebrities in conflict resolution processes is overestimated by media and the image of celebrities' involvement reproduces stereotyped understanding of distant regions as lacking agency and dependent on the actors from the West. The image of Clooney's role in the South Sudanese peace process creates an idea that celebrities have been crucial actors in this process. The present article brings critical new insights on the engagement of celebrities, including the fight against the violation of human rights and points out the corruption of South Sudanese politicians.
... Affleck's capital is able to generate financial resources not only for his development projects in the South, but also for business elites in the North. Budabin (2015) argues that with this elite network support, Affleck was primed to enter US political circles and build influence. Despite being a relatively new player in the humanitarian politics of Washington, D.C., Affleck quickly established his organization through high-level contacts that provided extensive bipartisan political endorsement. ...
These politics articles were commissioned by an editorial board as part of our former online-only review article series. We are offering them here as a freely available collection.
Scholarship of celebrity humanitarianism has been dominated by Western icons like Angelina Jolie, Madonna, and Bono, whose high-profile engagement has sought to alleviate various political, ecological, and humanitarian crises. In the past two decades, Asian stars have engaged in humanitarian issues as extensively as their North American or European counterparts. The intellectual effort devoted to this category of celebrity, nevertheless, remains scarce. To fill this gap, this article explores the crossover image of celebrated and powerful Bollywood celebrity-humanitarian, Aamir Khan. In what ways does Khan’s goodwill envision and contend cosmopolitan ideals? How does his commercialised presence in China complicate or explicate his embodied experience of advocacy? Finally, what does his commercial and benevolent engagement convey about Asian celebrity power in the global politics of star-making? This article adopts cosmopolitanism as the critical framework to examine Khan’s oscillation between cosmopolitan prospects and local attachments. It argues Khan’s Asian-yet-global persona exhibits a new mode of consciousness, which I describe as cosmopolitical, to thrive commercially and benevolently in multiple cultural and media networks. By so doing, this article not only attempts to disrupt Western-centric scholarship about celebrity humanitarianism but also expands the parameter of analysing Asian star power in bourgeoning networked cultures.
Case studies and correlational evidence suggest that celebrity political advocacy leads to media coverage and public attention. With a new dataset of celebrity witnesses at congressional hearings, we develop a systematic analysis that allows us to estimate whether celebrities increase media coverage of the issues they advocate in official government venues. We also use this dataset to measure how much celebrity advocacy efforts increase public engagement with policy issues—a necessary condition for the expansion of issue publics. We find that the issues addressed in congressional hearings featuring celebrity witnesses are about three times more likely to be the subject of the New York Times reporting, but the average celebrity witness has no discernible effect on public issue attention, as measured by Wikipedia page views. We conclude that while the Internet vastly expands the opportunities for political communication, it is difficult to appropriate non-political social network infrastructures to promote policy change.
The past decade has seen a frontier open up in international development engagement with the entrance of new actors such as celebrity-led organisations. We explore how such organisations earn legitimacy with a focus on Madonna’s Raising Malawi and Ben Affleck’s Eastern Congo Initiative. The study draws from organisational materials, interviews, mainstream news coverage, and the texts of the celebrities themselves to investigate the construction of authenticity, credibility, and accountability. We find these organisations earn legitimacy and flourish rapidly amid supportive elite networks for funding, endorsements, and expertise. We argue that the ways in which celebrity-led organisations establish themselves as legitimate development actors illustrate broader dynamics of the machinery of development.
From serving as UN ambassadors to appearing as spokespersons for major NGO campaigns, global celebrities have become increasingly important actors in promoting humanitarian causes in Africa. Yet the growing visibility and proliferation of celebrity humanitarianism has been critiqued for legitimating and promoting neoliberal capitalism and global inequality. This article, using emerging literature on celebrities in north-south relations, analyzes the celebrity discourses and practices of professional entertainer Ben Affleck and his engagement in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in order to understand how celebrities intersect with and popularize representations of poverty, conflict, and development in Africa. We conclude that the celebritization of African conflicts in the DRC—as understood from the interventions of Affleck—remain linked to the needs of marketing causes, celebrities, and products, and considerably removed from the voices of Congolese on whose stories these interventions rely. As a result, the constraints of celebrity humanitarianism in an age of media saturation limit the possibilities that individual celebrities might have in engaging in alternative, more complex, and less sound-bite friendly discourses.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.