Abstract:
Centralized digital infrastructure has created a dangerous environment for both activist movements and consumers. Intermediation impacts the character of conversation and limits innovation throughout countless ecosystems. Decentralized alternatives could address many of these problems, but most have failed to gain widespread adoption.

I will survey the recent history of these technologies and reasons for their failures, discuss the possibilities in a world where decentralization was the norm, and introduce Tent, an open protocol, which makes many of these possibilities a reality today.

Daniel Siders is a software architect and one of the architects of the Tent protocol. An eighteen year veteran of the software industry, he later studied gender, social science, and emergent norms in disaster environments. Prior to his work on Tent he consulted for large brands and media agencies on the appropriate analysis and application of consumer data in targeting campaigns and storage of such data in closed corporate networks. Since creating Tent he runs the organization the maintains the protocol and co-founded the first Tent hosting company.

Abstract:

Political parties that represent old regime interests in moments of democratization are normally thought exclusively to play a "negative" role, blocking democracy and only conceding it when sufficiently challenged. Summarizing research for a book on the historical rise of democracy in Europe, this presentation will focus on British and German democratization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to make the case that under certain conditions, old regime conservative parties play a decisive and counter-intuitive role that makes democratization more settled over the long run.

Speaker Bio:

Daniel Ziblatt is Professor of Government at Harvard University. He has been named a Sage Publications Fellow for a project on "Conservative Political Parties and Democratization in Europe" and in 2012-2013 is on leave at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

His research and teaching interests include democratization, state-building, development, comparative politics and comparative historical analysis, with a particular interest in Europe. He is the author of Structuring the State: The Formation of Italy and Germany and the Puzzle of Federalism (Princeton University Press, 2006), the winner of three prizes from the American Political Science Association, including the 2007 Prize for the Best Book published on European Politics. He is co-editor of a 2010 special double issue of Comparative Political Studies entitled "The Historical Turn in Democratization Studies." Recent papers have appeared in American Poiltical Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, and World Politics.  His most recent papers have received APSA's 2011 Mary Parker Follett Prize from the Politics and History Section of APSA, APSA's  2009 Luebbert Prize for the best paper published  in comparative politics, the 2008 Sage prize for best paper presented in comparative politics at the APSA meeting, and two  prizes in 2010 from the Comparative Democratization Section of APSA.  Ziblatt has been a DAAD Fellow in Berlin, an Alexander von Humboldt visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute in Cologne and the University of Konstanz, Germany, and visiting professor at the Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris in 2010. He is currently completing a new book entitled Conservative Political Parties and the Birth of Modern Democracy in Europe, 1848-1950 (Cambridge University Press) that offers a new interpretation of the historical democratization of Europe.

Abstract:

Marking the publication of Lina Khatib's latest book Image Politics in the Middle East: The Role of the Visual in Political Struggle, this seminar focuses on the evolution of political expression in the Middle East over the past decade, highlighting the visual dimension of power struggles between citizens and leaders in Lebanon, Iran, Egypt, Libya, and Syria.

About the speaker:

Lina Khatib is a co-founder and Program Manager of the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. She joined Stanford University in 2010 from the University of London where she was an Associate Professor. Her research is firmly interdisciplinary and focuses on the intersections of politics, media, and social factors in relation to the politics of the Middle East. She is also a consultant on Middle East politics and media and has published widely on topics such as new media and Islamism, US public diplomacy towards the Middle East, and political media and conflict in the Arab world, as well as on the political dynamics in Lebanon and Iran. She has an active interest in the link between track two dialogue and democratization policy. She is also a Research Associate at SOAS, University of London, and, from 2010-2012, a Research Fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School.

Lina is a founding co-editor of the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, a multidisciplinary journal concerned with politics, culture and communication in the region, and in 2009 co-edited (with Klaus Dodds) a special issue of the journal on geopolitics, public diplomacy and soft power in the Middle East. She also edited the Journal of Media Practice from 2007-2010. She is one of the core authors of the forthcoming Arab Human Development Report (2012) published by the UNDP.

She has written two books, Filming the Modern Middle East: Politics in the Cinemas of Hollywood and the Arab World (IB Tauris 2006), which is a study of the link between international relations and film, focusing on 25 years of cinematic representation of politics in the region (1980-2005), from the Arab-Israeli conflict to the Gulf War to Islamic fundamentalism, and Lebanese Cinema: Imagining the Civil War and Beyond (IB Tauris 2008). The book takes a socio-political approach to the study of Lebanese cinema over the last thirty years, focusing on the issues of Lebanese national identity, history, sectarian conflict, and memory of the Civil War.

Lina has recently finished writing a book titled Image Politics in the Middle East: The Role of the Visual in Political Struggle for IB Tauris. The book examines the power struggles among states, other political actors, and citizens in the region that are expressed through visuals, and focuses on case studies from Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Libya, and Iran, with a focus on the role of the image as a political tool in the Arab Spring. She has also recently led a multidisciplinary research project on US public diplomacy in the digital age, in collaboration with the University of Oxford and the University of Wolverhampton, the outcome of which will appear in the Middle East Journal in 2012.

Before joining the academic field, Lina worked in broadcast journalism in Lebanon. She is a frequent commentator on the Middle East in the media with appearances on Al-Jazeera (Arabic and English), CNN, BBC, Sky News and other media outlets across the globe.

Abstract:

The sanguinary Sri Lankan civil war was brought to a close in May 2009. The means adopted to bring an end to this conflict have come under considerable external criticism on the grounds of the indiscriminate use of force. Regardless of how the conflict was terminated, its end should have enabled the regime in Sri Lanka to reassure the minority Tamil community that their interests would not be overlooked in its wake. Instead the country has witnessed waves of ethnic triumphalism and dissenters have faced intimidation. Unless these trends are reversed, despite the existence of the formal trappings of democracy, the future of Sri Lanka as a viable democratic state could well be in jeopardy.

Speaker Bio:

Sumit Ganguly is a professor of political science and holds the Rabindranath Tagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilizations at Indiana University, Bloomington. He has previously taught at James Madison College of Michigan State University, Hunter College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York and the University of Texas at Austin. Professor Ganguly has been a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, a Visiting Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University, a Guest Scholar at the Center for Cooperative Monitoring in Albuquerque and a Visiting Scholar at the German Institute for International and Area Studies in Hamburg.

He was also the holder of the Ngee Ann Chair in International Politics at the Rajaratnam School for International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore in the spring term of 2010.  Additionally, he is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. Professor Ganguly serves on the editorial boards of Asian Affairs, Asian Security, Asian Survey, Current History, the Journal of Democracy, International Security and Security Studies. A specialist on the contemporary politics of South Asia is the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of 20 books on the region.  

His most recent books are India Since 1980 (with Rahul Mukherji), published by Cambridge University Press and Asian Rivalries: Conflict, Escalation and Limitations on Two-Level Games (with William Thompson) published by Stanford University Press. He is currently at work on a new book, Deadly Impasse: India-Pakistan Relations at the Dawn of a New Century for Cambridge University Press.

His article on corruption in India was just published in the January 2012 issue of the Journal of Democracy, and he is currently writing a new book with Bill Thompson entitled The State of India (for Columbia University Press) which seeks to assess India's prospects and limitations of emerging as a great power

The Program on Human Rights at CDDRL, the Center for African Studies and Student Anti-Genocide Coalition STAND are honored to host Steve Hege for this special seminar.

Steve Hege will present the most recent findings of the United Nations Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of Congo. The report, which was leaked to the public earlier this fall, has garnered significant international attention because of its role in implicating Rwanda and Uganda in the conflict in eastern Congo. According to the report, Rwanda Defense Minister Gen. James Kabarebe is directing M23 rebels in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, and Rwanda and Uganda have contributed troops to support the rebels against government forces. The report further asserts that Rwandan mineral traders are helping to fund the insurgency.

The event will feature a presentation of these findings by Hege, followed by time for questions as well as discussion.

Bio:
Steve Hege has worked as a member of the United Nations Group of Experts on the DRC since 2010 and is currently the group's coordinator. An expert on armed groups in eastern Congo, he has previously worked for the UN mission in Congo (MONUC), Jesuit Refugee Service, and Refugee International. In addition to his extensive experience in the DRC, Hege has also conducted extensive research on conflict in other parts of the world, including Colombia, the Philippines, and Nepal.

The event will be moderated by Caitlin Monroe. Ms Monroe is a masters student in African studies who focuses on Congo and the African Great Lakes region. She wrote her undergraduate history honors thesis on land conflict and historical memory in North Kivo, DRC, and she is a member of the Student Anti-Genocide Coalition STAND.