Our project seeks to create an anti-genocide community website designed to empower local activists with the tools to create community-based education, create user-generated content and establish strong shared connections among activists. This is a crucial step toward the establishment of a permanent anti-genocide constituency that will change the way the world responds to genocide.

Tools and technologies used on the site will include a library of images and stories for use in user-generated videos and slideshows, a “photo declaration” and anti-genocide pledge, an e-vite system with graphical impact tracking, user profiles with connections to other social networks (MySpace, Facebook, etc.) and local events, a community blog and community-rated actions (utilizing tagging and ranking), and integration into existing anti-genocide tools such as a congressional scorecard and advocacy hotline.

Our project is aimed at pooling the collective knowledge for social change present in our activists.

Background

The Genocide Intervention Network was founded to empower individuals and communities with the tools to prevent and stop genocide. In particular, the genesis of our organization was enabling individual citizens to directly contribute (through donations and fundraisers) to peacekeeping and civilian protection on the ground in Darfur, Sudan. Coupled with traditional member-driven advocacy and community-based education, the Genocide Intervention Network seeks to help build the permanent anti-genocide constituency — thus our motto, “have a hand in stopping genocide.”

In her landmark book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, scholar Samantha Power investigates the repeated failures of US politicians to act in the face of brutal mass atrocities and genocide. In case after case, she found that political leaders were able to stand silent because there was no political will for action — it was safer to do nothing and apologize later. GI-Net envisions a world in which the international community recognizes its responsibility to protect civilians from genocide, and a permanent anti-genocide constituency drives world leaders to action.

While our primary focus is on Darfur, there are many other genocides, potential genocides and mass atrocities calling for a concerted action from the world — Burma, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire and Chechnya, just to name a few. Rather than perpetuate the history of ad-hoc groups of activists that disband when a conflict is resolved, GI-Net seeks to instill the idea of a larger anti-genocide movement in the minds of activists working on each individual conflict.

The Need for a User-Driven Community

One of the most common requests we fulfill from our members is: “I’m hosting a fundraiser for Darfur. Do you have pictures I can show? And what should I say?”

We believe the most effective way to mobilize activists around an issue is local community-based education, and so we put significant resources into creating tools for equipping our members. We sponsor a Darfur congressional scorecard rating members of Congress on their record; we fund a national anti-genocide hotline, giving people the latest action items and connecting them directly to the relevant leaders; we publish regular Darfur news briefs summarizing the latest news, and a directory of organizations working on the issue; we list “ten things you can do right now to stop genocide” — far and away the most visited page on our website — which often features actions from other Darfur-focused organizations such as Save Darfur, Africa Action, Physicians for Human Rights, Amnesty International and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. We see ourselves as a broad anti-genocide organization, and as such enthusiastically encourage our members to support actions taken by other organizations working on the issue — we are not a closed system that only points back at our website and membership rolls.

We want to put the power in the hands of anti-genocide advocates to find their own voices in their activism. Instead of simply sending community leaders another CD of images from Darfur, we want to encourage activists to tell their own stories, to connect those with stories from Darfur, and to describe in their own words why standing against genocide is so important to them.

Technical and Theoretical Principles

We are relying on a history of “network-centric” and user-driven advocacy campaigns (e.g. SorryEverybody.com/WereNotSorry.com, the MoveOn.org virtual marches and photo petitions, the anti-Hummer campaign) for our belief in the power of the individual. An extreme lack of materials exists, for example, on Darfur — what is available is from national organizations and in many cases, only to their own members.

We know there is extraordinary activist knowledge waiting to be amplified — because we saw it first-hand. When we began to coordinate Darfur activists through the Genocide Intervention Network and our STAND student campaigns via "social networking to stop genocide," we found dozens of MySpace groups and hundreds of Facebook groups already dedicated to the cause. We want to give these activists the tools to be effective — and then get out of their way.

We are also mindful of our role as mobilizing third-party advocates from relatively privileged positions in the United States and the Global North. We take to heart Ethan Zuckerman’s instruction that it’s “less about speaking and more about pointing.” There are incredible voices coming from survivors of genocide and mass atrocities, voices that often aren’t heard even within activist communities. In addition, the activists’ testimonials themselves — why they are involved, why they think the issue is important — are also critical to hear if we want to truly build a self-aware network to stop genocide.

In terms of specific campaigns, Human Rights First’s “Stand In for Darfur ” was a significant step toward bringing the voices of Darfur to the rest of the world. The ideas behind ForwardTrack and recent implementations such as Oh! Speakup! inspired the effort to enable the network to see its own growth. The Save Darfur Coalition’s local groups, built on the Democracy In Action platform, were a turning point in transforming the Darfur movement from a series of national rallies into a web of community discussions.

Finally, our own experience in social networking has demonstrated to us the value of letting our members speak for themselves. Ultimately the message is not ours, its theirs, and while we’d like a few more names on our membership rolls along the way, activists inspired in one area are reliably shown to be more committed across the board. We’re not afraid of telling activists to make their own choice about which action to support this week — even if it doesn’t end up being our own. The anti-genocide movement is bigger than any one organization, and we see our role as a catalyst and not as a gatekeeper.