No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Framing victims and perpetrators: Local and international reporting on the International Criminal Court case against Dominic Ongwen
Abstract
Building on research on victims and perpetrators of political violence and their depiction in the media, this article highlights the conceptual and practical challenge of specifying the process by which individuals acquire a morally ambiguous or ‘complex’ status in conflict. The authors conduct a content analysis of English-language print reporting on Dominic Ongwen’s International Criminal Court case and ambiguous status as a child soldier and victim–perpetrator. They identify important variation in how different news media frame the processes through which an individual becomes a victim–perpetrator and how these depictions relate to understandings of agency as well as transitional justice and post-conflict societal transformations. The article presents a framework for understanding how individuals are seen as ‘turning’ from one category of conflict-affected individual to another category as depicted in the news media.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
Considering the prevailing discourse about the child-soldier, whose most iconic figure is a poor, vulnerable, prepubescent, male African who carries a gun bigger than he is, this chapter investigates how child-soldiers are invariably framed as an essentially deviant and pathological child—and as such a threat to world security—in need of solution. Regardless of many historical examples of children’s participation in war, the child-soldier is assumed to be a new international emergency, an exception to the norm of the child, owing primarily to the outbreak of “new wars” in the post–Cold War era. The focus of this chapter turns to two main discourses that articulate and authorize the limits that (re)produce the child-soldier as an international problem, setting boundaries within which only certain subjects, narratives and responses are admitted: (1) the discourse of the law, that is, international legal standards that articulate children’s participation in war as something that is wrong and must be banned under international law; and (2) what I call the “discourse of the norm,” which is analyzed through the three contrasting images of the child-soldier as dangerous and disorderly, the hapless victim, and the redeemed hero, as identified by Myriam Denov ( Child Soldiers: Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010). The discourse of the norm, in particular, makes visible child-soldiers as a pathology, excluding their aspects of disorder, dysfunction, and risk from the accepted boundaries of what is to be a child and its childhood. In this case, it is not only that children’s participation in wars is wrong, but it is absolutely abnormal once their childhood has been lost together with any semblance of the “civilized world.” At the end of the day, the logic of opposite extremes—to be a child-soldier is to be an innocent victim or to be a feared monster—operates to (re)produce children as targets of international intervention (or protection) with no chance of autonomous decision-making; child-soldiers are either the objects of exploitation or the objects of salvation.
Framing studies consistently conclude that the international news media represent African conflicts negatively and stereotypically. Owing to their focus on media content, however, most framing studies fail to examine the dynamic relationship between journalists’ cognitive role (what they say they do) and their practice role (what they actually do). Using parallel content analysis, this study compares what African diaspora journalists write about African conflicts with what they say about them. The analysis reveals that they show a preference for a factual style and a governing frame, and less preference for a judgmental style, which aligns with what they say, and a slight preference for background context which marginally aligns with what they say. However, low newsroom budgets and advertising revenue could undermine their attempts to de-Westernize the portrayal of African conflicts.
Background
Globally, an estimated 300,000 children under the age of 18 participate in combat situations; those in armed groups in particular suffer prolonged exposure to psychological and physical abuse. The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) is a rebel movement known for its widespread conscription of children; yet little is known about this process once the group moved beyond northern Uganda. In this paper, we describe the processes related to abduction and indoctrination of youth by the LRA in northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo ( DRC).
Methods
In-depth interviews were conducted with formerly abducted children, their family members, community leaders, and service providers (total n = 34) in four communities in LRA-affected areas of northeastern DRC. Inductive coding of transcripts was undertaken to identify salient themes.
Results
Informants articulated a range of practices by the LRA to exert high levels of control over new recruits, including strict social isolation from recent abductees; control of communication; promoting new identity formation; and compelling children to act out strictly defined gendered roles. Witchcraft and secrecy are used to intimidate recruits and to magnify perception of the group’s power. These methods promote de-identification with one’s civilian and family life; and eventually the assimilation of a new language and identity.
Conclusion
Indoctrination of newly abducted children into the LRA occurs via a complex system of control. This study provides one of the first detailed explorations of social and psychological mechanisms through which this is achieved, and focuses particularly on the gendered differences in the indoctrination process. Results support past findings that the LRA is a strategic and well-organized organization in its approach to enlisting child soldiers. Understanding some of the ways in which the LRA controls its recruits and the psychological impact of indoctrination enables reintegration programs to more effectively address these issues and serve the complex needs of formerly abducted children.
Reparations are often declared victim-centred, but in transitional societies defining who is a victim and eligible for reparations
can be politically charged and controversial. The messy reality of conflict means that perpetrators and victims do not always
fall into two separate categories. In certain circumstances, perpetrators can be victimized and victims can be responsible
for victimizing others – this article explores these complex victims. Looking in particular at the 1993 Shankill bombing in
Northern Ireland, as well as at Colombia and Peru, such victims are often seen as ‘guilty’ or ‘bad’ victims undeserving of
reparations. I argue that complex victims need to be included in reparation mechanisms to ensure accountability and to prevent
their exclusion becoming a source of victimization and future violence. I consider the alternative avenues of human rights
courts, development aid, services and community reparations to navigate complex identities of victim–perpetrators. I conclude
that complex identities can be accommodated in transitional societies’ reparation programmes through nuanced rules of eligibility
and forms of reparations.
Dominic Ongwen is an indicted war criminal and former child soldier in one of the world's most brutal rebel organisations, the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). Ongwen is at once victim and perpetrator: what justice strategy is relevant? I introduce the concept of complex political perpetrators to describe youth who occupy extremely marginal spaces in settings of chronic crisis, and who use violence as an expression of political agency. Ongwen represents a troupe of young rebels who were ‘bred’ in the shadows of illiberal war economies. Excluded from the polity, or rather never having been socialised within it, such complex political perpetrators must be recognised in the debate on transitional justice after mass atrocity, lest cycles of exclusion and violence as politics by another means continue.
This article examines the (re)presentations of militarised children in contemporary global politics. In particular, it looks at the iconic image of the 21st century's child soldier, the subject of which is constructed as a menacing yet pitiable product of the so-called new wars of the global South. Yet this familiar image is a small, one-dimensional and selective (re)presentation of the issues facing children who are associated with conflict and militarism. In this sense it is a problematic focal point for analysing the insecurity and human rights of children in and around conflict. Instead, this article argues that the image of the child soldier asserts an important influence in its effect upon global North-South relations. It demonstrates how the image of the child soldier can assist in constructing knowledge about the global South, and the global North's obligations to it, either through programmes of humanitarianism, or through war.
Individuals formerly involved in armed groups are positioned in the victim–perpetrator binary by legal systems and societies. Media participates in this process and influences the relationship between law and society by reproducing or challenging legal and social designations. We assess the relationship between the International Criminal Court's (ICC) prosecution of Dominic Ongwen, a former child soldier in Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), and media representations of Ongwen. We conduct a content analysis of 779 Ugandan, African, and international newspapers’ English-language articles published between January 2005 and October 2022. We find that media coverage focuses on Ongwen's adult roles in the group, including as an LRA leader, largely reproducing the ICC's portrayal of the accused. A minority of articles acknowledge a more complex status and increase in frequency once Ongwen's ICC trial is underway. An important faction challenges the ICC's narrative, with non-Africa-based media presenting a more complex depiction of Ongwen.
This study investigates media coverage of Afghan refugees by English-language media in Pakistan and explores how coverage is shaped by a shift in the political stance of the Pakistani state and establishment towards Afghanistan. The author examines how Afghan refugees, their forced repatriation from Pakistan, and the subsequent conflict between Pakistan and Afghanistan were framed in both long-form and short-form media coverage over three years. Using Galtung’s Peace and War Journalism Model to inform the Critical Discourse Analysis, this study finds that conflict-escalatory frames dominated media coverage, and media stance changed over time to reflect state policy on the forced repatriation of over three million Afghan refugees in Pakistan. Findings reveal that the coverage in all four publications was highly politicized and inflammatory, the voice of Afghan refugees was significantly missing from coverage, while the Pakistani government and military elite were predominantly used as news sources. Based on the findings, the author argues that pressures from the Pakistani state and military establishment are key reasons why media coverage of Afghan refugees frequently contained negative frames of terrorism and ethnonationalism. Sporadic employment of limited peace-oriented framing was, however, observed in some of the coverage.
This chapter critically assesses the dichotomy of victims/survivors and perpetrators that proliferates in the media and other public discourses about genocide and related mass atrocities, including crimes against humanity and war crimes. Drawing on over a decade of oral historical and ethnographic research on the 1994 genocide in Rwanda—in which approximately 800,000 civilians, most of whom were Tutsi, were murdered by Hutu Power extremists—this chapter argues that most people’s experiences of mass atrocities are more complex than this dichotomy permits, and often includes actions that challenge the boundaries among victim/survivor, bystander, rescuer, and perpetrator categories. It thus advocates for considering genocide-affected individuals as “complex political actors” whose actions exist along a spectrum of genocidal violence. This allows for deeper consideration of the shifting roles that people take on during periods of extreme violence, and in response to shifts in their nation’s political climate and personal circumstances.
The complications which played out in ascribing an identity: victim, perpetrator or both, in Lord’s Resistance Army’s (LRA) child abduction victim turned Warlord, Dominic Ongwen, calls for the rethinking of the international criminal justice system. While law operates in black and white, politics is fraught with and at times thrives in proverbial grey areas. In order for justice to be done, the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) geography and logic must be shifted epistemologically from the Global North to the sites where these atrocities were committed. The Roman-Dutch law logic, which largely informes the ICC’s jurisprudence, makes little existential logic to the thousands of the victims of the LRA’s over three decades of operations spanning over four countries. I argue against the token involvement of victims of human rights abuse by advocating for the deployment of local justice systems such as mato oput, as they not only resonate with the victims but also with the perpetrators, both herein termed survivors. Had mato oput been instituted first, the victim turned perpetrator complexity would have been addressed as the agent would have been cleansed, pardoned, and reintegrated into the community.
Visual representations of children are ubiquitous in international relations, they illustrate, indicate, and indict, but we rarely stop to consider the implications of their presence. Such images reproduce stereotypical conceptions of childhood: starving children as paragons of innocence, teens clutching AK-47s as delinquent or posing a risk, and dead children as the ultimate condemnation of circumstance. Such images present children as iconic, a synecdoche for understanding a political event; they illustrate without reflection. This chapter asks what a more critical engagement with images of children and childhood might offer IR. It outlines a critical framework for considering such images to draw out the possibilities and tensions inherent in the circulation of evocative images of children in international relations. It outlines a way for those interested in engaging with the visual politics of childhood to consider the complex ways frames and discourses reproduce global inequalities, stereotypes about conflict and disaster, and allow a more meaningful engagement with representations of childhood in international relations.
Among the conceptual challenges that new thinking about children and childhood raises for International Relations is how to reconcile subjecthood and (in)security. While the rise of resilience as a paradigmatic alternative to security holds promise for the recovery and foregrounding of subject positions too easily occluded by simplistic renderings of victimhood, it has drawn criticism for downloading the responsibility to abide onto those affected by adverse circumstances. Worse, it risks erasure of trauma in its tendency toward valorization of individualized triumph over adversity, one implication of which is that bona fide subjecthood is somehow earned through indomitability to overcome hardship, deprivation, and even violence. Though problematic in all cases, this may appear especially so when it comes to children, whose disempowerment makes them uniquely vulnerable. Exploring the challenge this poses for International Relations, the central argument of this chapter is that there is a need to hold security and resilience mutually in tension whilst keeping children’s subjecthood and vulnerability both conspicuously foregrounded.
Based on the authors’ understanding regarding the effect of ethnocentric coverage, on one hand, and the tendency of the media to cover female perpetrators differently, on the other, the current study aimed to examine how leading Israeli news websites ( N = 1,832) covered female versus male perpetrators during the October 2015 wave of violence. Their goal was to examine if differences between the coverage of female and male perpetrators exist, or if all perpetrators are grouped together and depicted as a single common enemy. In other words, they sought to understand the intersection of two journalistic tendencies: (1) does the ethnocentric frame hold consistently, or (2) do gender considerations overpower the consistent ethnocentric frame? Findings indicate that there were significant differences in how male and female perpetrators were covered by the media. Articles regarding female perpetrators included more information about their personal, familial and mental states than for males. Moreover, more information was given regarding female perpetrators’ motives, which were mostly ideological. Unlike in previous studies, the authors failed to find an emphasis on female perpetrators’ physical appearance. A possible explanation may come from the dominance of the ethnic framing exemplified by the Israeli media.
This chapter examines how the Daily Nation and the People Daily newspapers in Kenya covered the International Criminal Court (ICC) cases. The research findings show that these two dailies seemed to portray two key prominent political leaders (President Uhuru Kenyatta and his Deputy William Ruto) as ‘worthy victims’ whose rights were grossly violated for being tried at the ICC and the thousands of ordinary Kenyans directly affected by the 2007/2008 post-election violence as ‘unworthy victims’ with little or no mention of the violation of their rights. Using Herman and Chomsky’s Propaganda Model, this chapter explores how the political elite successfully used the media to play a propaganda role of portraying the ICC as the perpetrator and enemy thereby denying the thousands of real victims justice.
This article focuses on the framing of Boko Haram, a transnational terrorist group, in legacy and social media platforms. The discussion is predicated on the understanding that in spite of its popularity as a research tool, the concept of framing is still problematic. One area of contention has been the reliability and validity of framing analysis. Drawing on Robert Entman’s seminal definition, this study investigates the viability of two innovative framing approaches and explores the intersection of the framing of Boko Haram in four Nigerian newspapers and Twitter. The authors argue that, while newspapers continue to dominate the media space, it is important to acknowledge the growing relevance of social media in shaping and influencing the opinion of their users. The study’s findings support the viability of these approaches and come to the conclusion that exploring the differences between the platforms can unearth different versions of reality.
In Buried in the Heart, Erin Baines explores the political agency of women abducted as children by the Lord's Resistance Army in northern Uganda, forced to marry its commanders, and to bear their children. Introducing the concept of complex victimhood, she argues that abducted women were not passive victims, but navigated complex social and political worlds that were life inside the violent armed group. Exploring the life stories of thirty women, Baines considers the possibilities of storytelling to reclaim one's sense of self and relations to others, and to generate political judgement after mass violence. Buried in the Heart moves beyond victim and perpetrator frameworks prevalent in the field of transitional justice, shifting the attention to stories of living through mass violence and the possibilities of remaking communities after it. The book contributes to an overlooked aspect of international justice: women's political agency during wartime.
This article sets the stage for a special issue exploring group-level dynamics and their role in producing violence. My analytic focus is socialization, or the process through which actors adopt the norms and rules of a given community. I argue that it is key to understanding violence in many settings, including civil war, national militaries, post-conflict societies and urban gangs. While socialization theory has a long history in the social sciences, I do not simply pull it off the shelf, but instead rethink core features of it. Operating in a theory-building mode and drawing upon insights from other disciplines, I highlight its layered and multiple nature, the role of instrumental calculation in it and several relevant mechanisms – from persuasion, to organized rituals, to sexual violence, to violent display. Equally important, I theorize instances where socialization is resisted, as well as the (varying) staying power of norms and practices in an individual who leaves the group. Empirically, the special issue explores the link between socialization and violence in paramilitary patrols in Guatemala; vigilantes in the Bosnian civil war; gangs in post-conflict Nicaragua; rebel groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo, El Salvador, Sierra Leone and Uganda; post-conflict peacekeepers; and the US and Israeli military. By documenting this link, we contribute to an emerging research program on group dynamics and conflict.
How do people come to participate in violent display? By ‘violent display’, I mean a collective effort to stage violence for people to see, notice, or take in. Violent displays occur in diverse contexts and involve a range of actors: state and non-state, men and women, adults and children. The puzzle is why they occur at all given the risks and costs. Socialization helps to resolve this puzzle by showing how actors who have consciously adopted or internalized group norms might take part, despite the risks. Socialization is more limited in explaining how and why actors who are not bound by group norms also manage to put violence on display. To account for these other pathways, I propose a theory of ‘casting’. Casting is the process by which actors take on roles and roles take on actors. Roles enable actors to do things they would not normally do. They give the display its form, content, and meaning. Paying attention to this process reveals how violent displays come into being and how the most eager actors as well as unwitting and unwilling participants come to take part in these grisly shows. To explore variation in the casting process, I investigate violent displays that occurred in two different contexts: the Bosnian war and Jim Crow Maryland. Data come from interviews, trial testimonies, and primary sources.
The reality of child soldiers who join rebel forces once they reach adulthood presents complex legal questions in the face of contemporary international criminal law principles which, on the one hand, afford protection to all children, and on the other, unequivocally call for the prosecution and punishment of those who are guilty of committing serious crimes. Currently, the case of Dominic Ongwen before the icc raises contentious issues, including whether or not international criminal law permits the consideration of factors, such as the impact of the experiences as a child soldier on future conduct, when he is prosecuted for allegedly committing crimes during adulthood. This article specifically examines whether Ongwen's experiences as a child soldier could serve as a possible defence and/or as a mitigating factor.
Tragically, violence and armed conflict have become commonplace in the lives of many children around the world. Not only have millions of children been forced to witness war and its atrocities, but many are drawn into conflict as active participants. Nowhere has this been more evident than in Sierra Leone during its 11-year civil war. Drawing upon in-depth interviews and focus groups with former child soldiers of Sierra Leone's rebel Revolutionary United Front, Myriam Denov compassionately examines how child soldiers are initiated into the complex world of violence and armed conflict. She also explores the ways in which the children leave this world of violence and the challenges they face when trying to renegotiate their lives and self-concepts in the aftermath of war. The narratives of the Sierra Leonean youth demonstrate that their life histories defy the narrow and limiting portrayals presented by the media and popular discourse.
The issue of child soldiers has become an issue of global concern. More than 250,000 soldiers under the age of 18 are fighting in conflicts in over 40 countries around the world. While there is ample descriptive evidence of the conditions and factors underlying the rise of child soldiery in the developing world, most of the literature has portrayed this as a uniquely male phenomenon, ultimately neglecting the experiences and perspectives of girls within fighting forces. Drawing upon the findings of three studies funded by the Canadian International Development Agency's Child Protection Research Fund, this paper traces the perspectives and experiences of girls as victims and participants of violence and armed conflict in Angola, Sierra Leone, Mozambique, and Northern Uganda. The three studies collectively reveal three salient themes. First, whether in the heat of conflict or within post-war programming, girls are, for the most part, rendered invisible and marginalised. Second, in spite of this profound invisibility and marginalisation, girls are fundamental to the war machine—their operational contributions are integral and critical to the overall functioning of armed groups. Third, girls in fighting forces contend with overwhelming experiences of victimisation, perpetration, and insecurity. In the aftermath of conflict, girls arguably bear a form of secondary victimisation through socio-economic marginalisation and exclusion, as well as the ongoing threats to their health and personal security.
The Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) has forcibly recruited tens of thousands of youth from northern Uganda, Southern Sudan, and more presently the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic. The longer that abducted youth spend inside the armed group, the more likely they will assume positions of command. These roles are differentiated on the basis of sex and gender expectations: young men are more likely to become active combatants and young women are more likely to become forced “wives” and mothers. As a result, forcibly recruited male and female youth are assumed to hold different degrees of responsibility. Comparing the life stories of an abducted male and female youth who became LRA commanders, I argue that each made choices within a state of coerced militarized masculinity. The question of responsibility must be located in the context of a present-day grey zone, and must unsettle gendered assumptions about men and women, and guilt and innocence. Transitional justice has only begun to grapple with the ambiguity of gender, responsibility, and the grey zone.
In human rights discourse, victims and perpetrators are usually referred to as two completely separate and homogenous sets of people. This article challenges this discrete and binary approach to these concepts. Through an analysis of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, especially its final report, the article demonstrates that the reality of many post-conflict situations is more complex. More often than not, within the group of victims, not all victims are the same. Similarly, within the group of perpetrators, not all perpetrators are the same; and the two groups are rarely separate and distinct: some individuals are both victims and perpetrators. The article concludes with some thoughts on the implications of this research for understanding the challenges of reconciliation in South Africa.
This article uses Primo Levi's concept of “the grey zone” to explore Knut Rød's involvement in the transfer of 532 Norwegian
Jews from Oslo to Auschwitz in 1942. Rød, the police chief in charge of the operation, was subsequently exonerated of any
crime on the grounds that he had simultaneously used his position to help members of Milorg – the Norwegian Resistance. The legal and moral basis of this verdict has been questioned by the artist Victor Lind in a
series of artworks, including his “countermonument” The Perpetrator (2005).
Dominic Ongwen: ‘It is very difficult to balance all that
- K Anderson
The Ongwen judgement and its significance for dual victim perpetrator status before the international criminal court. Centre for African Justice, Peace and Human Rights
- Riise Macleod
Shamima Begum loses appeal against removal of British citizenship . The Guardian, 22 February
- H Siddique
Watching the ICC Judgement of LRA commander Dominic Ongwen with Ugandan victims of enforced marriage
- J Atingo
The Ongwen judgement and the ICC: A missed opportunity for former child soldiers? International Law Blog
- Els Pieters
- N Kirabira
What the media circus surrounding Shamima Begum can teach us about gender and nation
- H Farnham
A naive victim or a willing ISIS devotee? Deserving or losing your human rights
- F Garvill
Uganda’s long road to accountability: The Kwoyelo Verdict and lessons for future international crimes prosecutions
- S K Kasande
The complex combatant: Constructions of victimhood and perpetrator-hood in Gulu District, Northern Uganda. Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection, 2458. School for International Training
- K Fox
Situational Brief. Kampala: Justice and Reconciliation Project
- O Nyeko
- H Aloyocan
Ex-rebel gets 40-year jail term in landmark Ugandan case
- A Soy
- N Booty
A long journey: The story of Ishmael Beah
- Unicef
Failed promises: No lessons learnt as still no journalists from situation countries at ICC trials
- T Verfus