The Fabric of NGOs

Please join us in a discussion of the role of NGOs in the field of human rights, and of the important role they play in the world today. Our speakers represent both the activist and grant-making sides of the NGO world.

Speaker Bios

Nick Deychakiwsky

Program Officer, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation

Nick Deychakiwsky is a Program Officer at the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation managing its Civil Society – United States and Global Philanthropy & Nonprofit Sector program areas.  Between 2000 and 2006 he oversaw the Mott Foundation’s grantmaking in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.  During the 1990s Nick lived in Ukraine, holding managerial positions at the International Management Institute – Kyiv, the Council of Advisors to the Parliament of Ukraine, the International Renaissance (Soros) Foundation, and the Eurasia Foundation. 

Maurice I Middleberg

Executive Director, Free the Slaves

Maurice Middleberg is the Executive Director of Free the Slaves, a global leader in the fight to eradicate modern day slavery. The mission of Free the Slaves is to liberate slaves and change the condiitons that allow slavery to exist. Free the Slaves fosters long-term solutions to slavery, that encompasses building local capacity to fight slavery; community-based education and mobilization, strengthening legal protections and anti-slavery policies, and building critical assets in vulnerable households. Free the Slaves currently has programs in Brazil, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Haiti, India and Nepal. Mr Middlberg's career spans more than thrity years, and covers global health, social justice and international development. He has held senior and executive positions at CARE, the Global Health Council, EngenderHealth and IntraHealth, and has worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development. A political scientist by training, he has held academic appointments at Columbia and Emory Universities. 

Is communication technology conducive to collective violence? Recent studies have provided conflicting answers to the same question. While some see the introduction of cellular communication as a contributing factor to civil conflict in Africa (Pierskalla and Hollenbach APSR 2013), others ascribe an opposite effect to mobile communications in Iraq (Shapiro and Weidmann IO forthcoming). During the talk, I will further explore the logic behind "Why the revolution will not be tweeted", and argue that the answer lies in contagion processes of collective action at the periphery, not the hierarchical schemes of central coordination as was argued before. To provide evidence, I will draw on historical accounts of social revolutions, a GIS study of the Syrian Civil War, a convenience survey sample from the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, as well as network experiments of collective risk-taking in a controlled setting.

Speaker Bio

Navid Hassanpour

This event is part of the Liberation Technology Seminar Series. 

Abstract

Civil society is under siege in many parts of the world.  Governments have arrested human rights activists, closed humanitarian NGOs, and banned peaceful protests. Simply stated, governments are criminalizing dissent and confining civic space.  Join Doug Rutzen for a discussion of the global backlash against civil society and ongoing efforts to protect the freedoms of association and assembly around the world.

Speaker Bio

Douglas Rutzen

Doug Rutzen is President and CEO of the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, which has worked on the legal framework for civil society in 100 countries.  Doug also teaches “global revolutions, social change, and NGOs” at Georgetown law school.  On the margins of the 2013 UN General Assembly, Doug joined President Obama on a panel discussing civil society.  Under Doug’s leadership, ICNL received a MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions, the organizational analogue to MacArthur's "genius award" for individuals.  Earlier this year, the Nonprofit Times named Doug as one of the most influential nonprofit leaders in the United States.

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Abstract:

Arab workers participated prominently in the popular uprisings of 2011.  They shared the outrage of many of their compatriots over daily abuse by internal security forces, widespread corruption, and foreign policies subservient to U.S. interests. Their participation in those uprisings was also informed by struggles against the neoliberal economic restructuring of the region since the 1970s, which resulted in an indecent chasm between rich and poor, deteriorating working conditions and public social services, and high youth unemployment.

Egypt experienced a strike wave of unprecedented magnitude in the 2000s. Tunisia, with one exception, experienced less intense contestation by workers and others. Egyptian workers’ have had very limited influence on national politics in the post-Mubarak era.  Democratic development seems unlikely in the near future.  The Tunisian national trade union federation and its affiliates were the central force in installing procedural democracy. The nature of workers’ social movements in the 2000s partially explains these divergent outcomes.

Speaker Bio:

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Joel Beinin is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History. He received his A.B. from Princeton University in 1970, his M.A. from Harvard University in 1974, and his A.M.L.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1978 and 1982. He also studied at the American University of Cairo and and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He lived in Egypt in 1969, 1980-81, 1985, 1986, 1994, 2004-05, and 2006-08 and in Israel in 1965-66, 1970-73, 1987, 1988, 1993, and 1993. He has taught Middle East history at Stanford University since 1983. From 2006 to 2008 he served as Director of Middle East Studies and Professor of History at the American University in Cairo. His research and writing focuses on workers, peasants, and minorities in the modern Middle East and on Israel, Palestine, and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Beinin has written or edited nine books, most recently Social Movements, Mobilization, and Contestation in the Middle East and North Africa; co-edited with Frédéric Vairel (Stanford University Press, 2011) and The Struggle for Worker Rights in Egypt (Solidarity Center, 2010). His articles have been published in leading scholarly journals as well as The Nation, Middle East Report, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Le Monde Diplomatique, and others. He has appeared on Al-Jazeera TV, BBC radio, National Public Radio, and many other TV and radio programs throughout North America, and in France, Egypt, Singapore, and Australia, and has given frequent interviews to the global media. In 2002 he served as President of the Middle East Studies Association of North America.

This event is co-sponsored by the Arab Studies Institute.

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