THEORIZING ISSUE SELECTION IN ADVOCACY

ORGANIZATIONS: AN ANALYSIS OF HUMAN

RIGHTS ACTIVISM AROUND DARFUR AND
THE CONGO, 19982010
JONATHAN S. COLEY
Vanderbilt 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

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 process 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).
Address correspondence to: Jonathan S. Coley, PMB 351811, Nashville, TN 37235-1811; e-mail: jonathan.s.coley@
vanderbilt.edu.
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 photocopy 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.

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In this article, I attempt to explain issue selection within advocacy organizations 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 opportunities, 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 Democratic 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 NorthSouth 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 organizations solely devoted to either Darfur or the Congo, to demonstrate the disproportionate 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 disproportionate 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 activism 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 isolated 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 advocacy 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 important 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 background 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 Departments 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 relations to argue for the importance of norm entrepreneurs (certain individuals or
advocacy organizations that attempt to have their issues adopted by advocacy networks), the politics within advocacy networks, and the politics between advocacy
networks in explaining issue selection by networks of advocacy organizations.

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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 influencing 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, tractability, 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 countermobilizations 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, political 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 severity
indeed, some of these studies are almost exclusively theoretical (Bob 2009; Shiffman 2009)or have focused on single countries or organizations, making it difficult 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 selection 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 background 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). Following 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 neighboring 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

Theorizing issue selection in advocacy organizations

195

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, European 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 humanrights-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 conflicts. 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

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1.6
1.4
1.2
1
0.8
0.6
0.4
0.2
0
Human Rights Watch

Amnesty International
Congo

Darfur

FIGURE 1
Number of Statements Released by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International
per 1,000 Deaths

statements on the websites are organized by country, not by conflict, I examined 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 statements 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 eighteen 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 published more statements for Darfur than the Congo for every 1,000 deaths in
Darfur and the Congo.

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Theorizing issue selection in advocacy organizations

TABLE 1
Advocacy Organizations Focused on Darfur and the Congo
Darfur Organizations

Congo Organizations

24 Hours for Darfur

Darfur Alert Coalition
Darfur/Darfur
Darfur Fast for Life
Darfur Leaders Network
Darfur Peace and Development
Darfur Stoves Project
Help Darfur Now
Save Darfur
STAND (Students Taking Action Now: Darfur)
Sudan Tribune
Team Darfur

Congo/Women
Eastern Congo Initiative
Save the Congo

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 disparity 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

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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 organizations 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 conducted 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 historical 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 interviews 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; opportunities to pressure policymakers as a result of this labeling of genocide, the ongoing 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 Benford 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 organizations seemed to be particularly concerned about the possibility of genocidethat 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.

Theorizing issue selection in advocacy organizations

199

The frame of genocide is particularly powerful because, as Blayton (2009) documents, 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 significantly, 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 organizations 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 genocide was the advocacy organization Genocide Watch (Stanton 2011). In an interview, the organizations president described Genocide Watch as an idea factory
for other organizations and a catalytic network-building structure. The organization chairs the International Campaign to End Genocide, in which a significant number of other advocacy organizations, from Aegis Trust and International
Alert in the United Kingdom to International Crisis Group in Brussels to Genocide 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 horrors 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 Cheadle in founding the antigenocide charity Not On Our Watch.

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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. Secretary 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 genocide during an ongoing genocide in U.S. history (Totten 2006). Several months
later, on June 1, 2005, President Bush would make the same declaration (VandeHei 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 classification 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 Darfur 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, Genocide Watch similarly never declared the situation in Congo to be genocide as
it did for Darfur, instead only acknowledging the existence of genocidal massacres (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 genocide, 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 attention 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

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201

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 genocide
indeed, 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 scholars 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.

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As hinted above, many policymakers and international leaders shared in advocacy organizations concern that the atrocities in Darfur constituted genocide.
For instance, several members of USAID and the State Department during President George W. Bushs administration, such as Ambassador-at-Large for War
Crimes Pierre-Richard Prosper, had also served during the Clinton administration 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 indictment 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 Darfur (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 Darfur 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 persecution (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 interest 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

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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 understood by the foreign policy establishment following September 11, 2001. As Mamdani (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 perpetrated 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 Americans, 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 studentsthereby marginalizing and overshadowing those who continued to mobilize 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 evidence 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 complicit 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 suspect 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 general 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. peacekeeping 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

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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 furthered 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 deciding 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 opportunity. 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 following declarations of genocide, with both organizations issuing more statements
around the times that the United Nations was making decisions about peacekeeping troops and the ICC. As one example, Human Rights Watch issued fifteen statements 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, former 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 organization Enough Project, which was itself housed in the Center for American Progress, 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).

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It seems clear, then, that political opportunities factor into advocacy organizations decisions to focus on certain issues, such as the conflict in Darfur. Yet previous 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 severity 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 International, 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 dollars
from 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

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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 nonprofits and advocacy organizations. Humanity United has only funded one organization primarily focused on the Congo, Congo/Women, and few other foundations 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 population 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 certain 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 provoke 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

Theorizing issue selection in advocacy organizations

207

whether the rebels Kuperman discusses provoked the war with the goal of inviting a disproportionate response and gaining support from the international community, 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 organizations still focuses on questions of their influence and impact (Andrews and Edwards
2004). By drawing on concepts from social movement studies, and conducting a comparative 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 organizations. 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, advocacy 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 organizations. A few other studies have raised these concepts as possible explanations of
issue selection (Bob 2005, 2009; Carpenter 2010, 2011; Shiffman 2009), but these concepts had until now not been tested, or at least not tested across multiple cases or

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contexts. In regards to framing, advocacy organizations seemed to be more interested 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 community 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 advocacy organizations specifically, issue selection is an important topic of consideration 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 suggests that further debate about whether all issues facing the international community 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, Frederick 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.

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209

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 International Rescue Committees study for sampling regions that were not representative of
the region as a whole (Bohannon and Travis 2010). Nevertheless, most advocacy organizations did accept International Rescue Committees mortality estimate, which still
leaves open the question of why advocacy organizations focused on the conflict in Darfur rather than the Congo.
4. This raises the possibility that issue selection can be explained in part by path dependency (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 interested 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 attention 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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