I'm really surprised to have found this—that IC is offering resources about Uganda and its surrounding countries on its website beyond news flashes or a simple Google Search of Joseph Kony that doesn't even tell us what we're supposed to take away from it other than the big bad Joseph Kony has been bad through and through since the 90s too.
However, the ICU site hasn't been updated since February with a blog about the ICU team going to the States as "roadies" for their Congo Tour. The link to it appears in the obscure left bottom corner of the IC main site. There's no mention of who exactly is on their team (except that they employ over 90 people). From the tone of their latest update, it doesn't seem like the Ugandans themselves update the blog directly. It's still very American.
The book resources themselves, aside from Sverker Finnstrom and Matthew Green, are not actually directly related to Uganda. There's 4 on the economics of aid (including the opposing views of Easterly and Sachs - makes me wonder which one IC agrees with), Samantha Powers' tour-de-force on genocide, a biography on Deng who's a Lost Boy of Sudan, a book by Kristy Gunn that seemingly has nothing to do with the conflict itself (as far as I can tell), and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. The problem with including this last one is that, though it's brilliantly written and should be read by everyone (I read it a few years ago), it's about Nigeria, not Uganda. It's been touted by reviewers as the quintessential African book, but Nigeria and Uganda are about 3000km apart (according to Google). How they can be essentially the same is beyond me. And I don't think Achebe himself wanted it to stand for all of Africa either. Including it here on their site shows once again that IC continually, subconsciously, subtly (perhaps not on purpose) buys into the whole idea of Africa as a place of darkness that's the same everywhere. So according to this line of thought, a novel on Nigeria can stand for Uganda just fine.
At the same time, I wonder why aren't these kinds of resources listed on Invisible Children's main site? At least ICU is attempting to direct people to other sources, like documentaries and other websites. Instead this is what you see:
I sure hope that grid comes up soon, and it'd better not be just links to IC's own videos and publications. It shouldn't be so hard to copy and paste something like ICU's, is it? At any rate, shouldn't your sources of information be FIRST thing you put up when you're attempting to represent a whole nation and its complex, long-standing conflict to an audience sitting across an ocean? What irks me about the main IC site is that there are no references to the research done by many scholars on the field, especially in the IDP camps. I don't know if they've ever tried asking for confirmation, clarification, or advice from academic authorities, but their site sure doesn't show that they are. No one on their listed team members has anywhere close to the experience of the ones we've been reading in class (see here).
The general lack of emphasis on accurate, objective, scholarly, and expert opinion astounds me. Even if IC is doing all it can to amass information from all the assessments done by NGOs on the field, it still forcing Ugandan voices through Western filters. However, that's a discussion for next time.
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