Actually, the news from Africa is both good and bad. The good news is, there are enough people who care about conflicts on the continent for there to have been a pretty heated debate this week between John Prendergast of the Enough Project and Ugandan journalist Angelo Izama. The bad news is, there will always be a difference in views between Western NGOs who believe in the power of popular movements to make a difference in conflict situations and the people living in and with the conflicts who want to make sure their opinions are incorporated into the resolution.

Well, whatever. Not many people were at this debate, and even fewer people were probably able to follow the two panelists’ back-and-forth on international NGO politics, a field constantly facing ethical and technical challenges, as well-intentioned, sympathetic people try to effect positive change in places where they will always be outsiders.

What does this mean for Stanford students? As members of a university community, we are in a prime activism position, because a) most of us are newly exposed to a world beyond our hometown, state, or country and b) there are multiple opportunities for us to get involved, from petition-writing to awareness-raising.

But, Izama asks, are any of the noble ventures that members of American popular movements undertake, such as ending trade in conflict minerals, actually making a difference? Are they, in fact, harming the efforts of locals to develop their own solutions to complicated political and socioeconomic issues that foreigners will never completely understand? For example, when campaigners across the U.S. and the Western world call for sanctions on Zimbabwe’s government because of political uncertainty, is this really helping the people of Zimbabwe achieve transparent governance? Might it not precipitate a further collapse of an economy whose inflation reached 89 percent in 2008?

This debate can never be resolved, because as of now, a tool for quantitatively measuring how political or military conflicts are resolved hasn’t appeared on the market. We can’t know for sure whether divestment campaigns on American campuses in the 1980s really did help end apartheid in South Africa, or whether pressure from Western policymakers on the trade in blood diamonds was the primary factor in ending Liberia’s civil war in 2003. What we do know for sure, as Eritrean/Kenyan Hiyabel Tewoldemedhin ’11 put forth so eloquently in reflecting on the debate, is that “advocacy groups can be helpful in bringing attention to a specific issue, but their priorities should not necessarily automatically become the priorities of such a powerful entity as the U.S. government.” In other words, the role of NGOs is to promote awareness about a certain issue, leaving the policymaking up to the policymakers.

So what do we, as young activists eager to feel that we are doing something that makes a “difference” (a vague term I hesitate to use) in the world, do to ensure that we achieve positive change without subscribing to an oversimplified view of multifaceted political issues? We stop and think. If it were you and your friends conscripted into the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda, or lying on the ground in Eastern Congo after being gang-raped by your own country’s army, you’d want the people offering you help to be as informed as possible of your situation and its causes before they decide on a solution to your plight. Before you donate that $10 or two hours of your time to send a Kenyan girl to school, or to provide mosquito nets to Nigerians, let’s hope you’ve done a little research on traditional education systems in British-ruled colonies such as Kenya, or the implications of climate on malaria epidemics. As Hiyabel pointed out to me, “Stanford teaches us to question everything we hear”—and that should include what we hear about foreign conflicts, which deserve the same barrage of pointless pontificating by pundits, historical research by academics and in-depth analysis by those of us who enjoy debating the efficiency of NGO interventions, as our own domestic issues.

Nina Papachristou ‘14

Daily Fellow