Tunisia: the house of cards
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It took just 29 days for President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to flee Tunisia after mass protests erupted in the country. Twenty-three years of authoritarian rule crumbling in less than a month is rather remarkable, especially considering the relative “calm” that had prevailed in Tunisia during those two decades.
Tunisia rarely hit the headlines then. No Islamists threatening to overtake the government (the Islamist al-Nahda party was outlawed in 1991). No terrorist networks causing security concerns (the exception being the sole attack on a synagogue in 2002 which catalyzed stepped up security measures). No strategic interests for the USA to speak of. And Ben Ali’s regime succeeded in marketing Tunisia as a safe tourist haven. Cities like Hammamet allowed tourists to be parachuted into newly built all-inclusive resorts that could have been anywhere in the world. There was even a custom-built, sanitized version of a traditional medinah in Yasmine Hammamet, which reminded one more of the artificiality of the world landmarks in Las Vegas than of real North African souks.
Tunisia’s sanitized image was also due to a severe crackdown on freedom of expression, as the country had one of the highest levels of media control—especially of the internet—in the world.
But what Ben Ali’s flight showed is how fragile the foundations of his rule were. So vulnerable that, in contrast to Iran and Egypt’s leaders’ resilience in the face of mass protests, he quickly offered one concession after another before completely giving up, making it clear that he was in fear for his life.
What will happen next in Tunisia is uncertain. The Tunisian opposition is divided into groups with wildly different agendas, from the Islamists of al-Nahda to the secular reformists of the Congress for the Republic headed by Moncef Marzouki. There is no political figure who can be clearly envisaged to become the next Tunisian president, and the way the balance will tip—will there be democracy, or another authoritarian regime of a merely different kind?—is unpredictable. But the clearest lessons that have emerged from Tunisia so far are that there is a real democratic potential in the Arab world and that authoritarian regimes in the region are not always what they appear to be. Those lessons are important on two fronts:
On the foreign policy front, the Tunisian uprising seems to have catalyzed US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to make the US administration’s boldest verbal statement thus far on the need for reform in the Arab world. Describing the political order of some Arab countries as “stagnant”, Clinton, on a visit to Bahrain on January 13, said that “This is a critical moment and this is a test of leadership for all of us”.
The United States is continuously criticized by democracy experts for favoring stability over the risks of democracy in the Arab world, and for backing up authoritarian leaders—whether directly or indirectly—for fear of having to deal with an unfavorable alternative (namely, an Islamist government, as in Egypt or Syria). Tunisia should be a relatively easy case for the United States in this context, a litmus test of putting one’s money where one’s mouth is. But it also shows how applauding stability can make countries like the United States blind to the democratic potential lurking beneath the façade of seemingly impenetrable regimes.
Western governments—including that of the United States—have mostly publicly congratulated the Tunisian people on their uprising, and France and other European countries refused Ben Ali entry on Friday when his plane was looking for a place to land. This reaction has been met with cynicism by Hizbullah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, a man who, since 2006, has been working to build up his credentials as the only credible Arab leader in the present time. In a speech on Sunday, Nasrallah was quick to point out the irony of Ben Ali’s lack of welcome in the very countries which he had “served” throughout the duration of his rule. So, on the regional front, the case of Tunisia unveils how quickly US opponents like Nasrallah can capitalize on short-sighted foreign policy. Nasrallah’s statement paints Western support for authoritarian Arab leaders as a house of cards that can crumble with the slightest shake—a warning to the West and Arab leaders reliant on Western support alike.
It is no coincidence that the reaction to the developments in Tunisia by other Arab regimes has mostly been to lay low. And here we can find another, more important, house of cards. Ben Ali’s regime has been exposed for the decaying entity that it is, and already copycat protests in other Arab countries—Jordan, Algeria, Egypt, and even Mauritania—have started. While a blanket domino effect across the region is not likely, reformists can take heart from Tunisia’s experience: while an authoritarian regime may appear to be indestructible, it may well be a mere house of cards.
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War as Punishment
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David Luban is University Professor and Professor of Law and Philosophy, and the Acting Director of the Center on National Security and the Law. Luban received his B.A. from the University of Chicago and Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University. He came to Georgetown in 1997 from the University of Maryland. Luban has been visiting professor and Distinguished Senior Fellow in Legal Ethics at Yale Law School, and Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor of Human Rights at Stanford Law School; he has also held visiting appointments at Dartmouth College, the University of Melbourne, and Harvard Law School. In spring 2011, he will be a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Luban has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, and won awards for his legal ethics scholarship from the New York State Bar and the American Bar Foundation.
In addition to legal ethics and philosophy, his recent scholarship concerns international criminal law, just war theory, human rights, and the US torture debate. Luban has published more than 150 articles; his books have been translated into Chinese and Japanese. They include Lawyers and Justice (1988), Legal Modernism (1993), Legal Ethics and Human Dignity (2007) and, most recently, International and Transnational Criminal Law (2010) (with Julie O'Sullivan and David P. Stewart). Luban has written for Slate.com, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times; he is a member of the group legal blog Balkinization. He is a frequent speaker at universities in the United States, and has lectured in ten other countries. Luban served on the DC Bar's legal ethics committee, and chaired the Professional Responsibility Section of the Association of American Law Schools, as well as the American Philosophical Association's committee on law and philosophy.
Graham Stuart Lounge
David Luban
Professor and Professor of Law and Philosophy, and the Acting Director of the Center on National Security and the Law
Speaker
Georgetown University
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Transforming Politics via Delegation to International Courts
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Karen Alter's current research investigates how the proliferation of international legal mechanisms is changing international relations. Her book in progress, The New Terrain of International Law: International Courts in International Politics provides a new framework for comparing and understanding the influence of the twenty-four existing international courts, and for thinking about how different domains of domestic and international politics are transformed through the creation of international courts.
Alter is author of The European Court's Political Power (Oxford University Press, 2009), and Establishing the Supremacy of European Law: The Making of an International Rule of Law in Europe. (Oxford University Press, 2001) and more than forty articles and book chapters on the politics of international law and courts. Recent publications investigate the politics of international regime complexity, how delegation of authority to international courts reshapes domestic and international relations, and politics in the Andean Community's legal system.
Professor Alter teaches courses on international law, international organizations, ethics in international affairs, and the international politics of human rights at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.
Alter has been a German Marshall Fund Fellow, a Howard Foundation research fellow and an Emile Noel scholar at Harvard Law School. Her research has also been supported by the DAAD and France's Chateaubriand fellowship. She has been a visiting scholar at the American Bar Foundation where she is an associate scholar of the Center on Law and Globalization, Northwestern University's School of Law, Harvard University's Center for European Studies, Institute d'Etudes Politiques, the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Auswartiges Politik, Universität Bremen, and Seikei University. Fluent in Italian, French and German, Alter serves on the editorial board of European Union Politics and Law and Social Inquiry and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
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Karen Alter
Professor of Political Science, Northwestern University; Northwestern Law School (courtesy appointment)
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Workshops
Francis Fukuyama in Foreign Policy Magazine: Samuel Huntington's Legacy
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This article by Francis Fukuyama is based on a 2008 piece on the website of the American Interest and the preface to the 2006 edition of Political Order in Changing Societies.
(excerpt) This argument is still very much with us. In the wake of America's flawed nation-building efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, many people have suggested the need for sequencing in development, putting state-building ahead of efforts to democratize and expand political participation.
Political Order in Changing Societies was one of Huntington's earlier works, and one that established his stature as a political scientist, but it was far from his last major contribution to comparative politics. His work on democratic transition also became a point of reference in the period after the end of the Cold War. Ironically, this stream of writing began with a 1984 article in Political Science Quarterly titled "Will More Countries Become Democratic?" Surveying the situation following the Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American democratic transitions of the 1970s and early 1980s, Huntington made the case that the world was not likely to see more shifts from authoritarianism in the near future given inauspicious structural and international conditions. This was written, of course, a mere five years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. He shifted gears quickly after the collapse of communism, however, and wrote The Third Wave, a book that gave the name to the entire period.
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Can ICT Improve Clean Water Delivery Systems in Slums? Lessons from Kibera
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Water is scarce, costly, and contaminated in Kibera, Nairobi -- one of Africa's largest urban slums. On good days, the women and children spend just under an hour finding clean water in their community. On bad days, the price of water increases tenfold and the search takes all day. Often, people ask jokingly whether it is water or cholera they are buying.
Many slums like Kibera lack access to clean drinking water, but they don't lack access to mobile phones. This is the insight behind M-Maji, a start-up non-profit project that uses mobile phones to empower communities with better information about water availability, price, and quality. This seminar will introduce the M-Maji system, and describe some of the challenges to designing for such a complex social environment.Background: M-Maji emerged from the Designing Liberation Technologies course in the Stanford d.school, which focused on using mobile phone technology for health improvement in Kibera. M-Maji has since received funding to run a pilot from the Program on Liberation Technologies and the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society at Stanford
Sunny Jeon is the principal investigator to M-Maji research, and is currently making frequent trips to Kenya to prepare for a randomized impact evaluation of their water program. He is also a Ph.D. Candidate in the Stanford Department of Political Science, where he is working on a dissertation project that studies the economic and political returns to ethnic diversity.
Katherine Hoffman is a co-terminal student completing a B.A. in International Relations and Economics and an M.A. in International Policy Studies with a focus on Global Health. She has been involved with M-Maji since it began in Spring quarter, and has just returned from a trip to Kenya in December to begin laying the groundwork for the project implementation.
Her primary interests include economic development and health improvement in low-resource settings. Past experience includes internships at the Bonn International Center for Conversion in Bonn, Germany and at the Institute for Financial Management in Chennai, India; she has also volunteered at the Center for the Working Girl in Quito, Ecuador and studied abroad for a quarter in Moscow.
Wallenberg Theater
Katherine Hoffman
M.A. Candidate, International Policy Studies, Global Health
Speaker
Stanford University
Sunny Jeon
Ph.D. Candidate,Political Science
Speaker
Stanford University
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Blogs and Bullets: Social Media and the Struggle for Political Change
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Moderator: Sheldon Himefarb, United States Institute of Peace
From WikFileaks revelations to claims of "Twitter revolutions," the role of new media in shaping global political action is one of the most discussed but least understood phenomena confronting scholars, policymakers, advocates, and the private sector. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has made "digital democracy" a cornerstone of U.S. diplomacy; grassroots organizations like Ushahidi are crowdsourcing everything from protest to disaster relief; and corporations like Cisco and Google are increasingly making news for their role in international development and commerce.
Everyone seems to agree new and social media matter. Less clear is how, when, and why.
In a continuing effort to find answers to these questions, George Washington University, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and the Liberation Technology Program of Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law present a panel to discuss the latest approaches to understanding the role of new media in fostering peace, conflict, and political change. The panel will consider research work in progress, stories from the front lines of diplomacy 2.0, and private sector approaches to facilitating new social media.
Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center
Marc Lynch
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George Washington University
Clay Shirky
Speaker
New York University
Olivia Ma
News Manager
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YouTube
Larry Diamond
CDDRL
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C147
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
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ldiamond@stanford.edu
Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science and Sociology
Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is also professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford, where he lectures and teaches courses on democracy (including an online course on EdX). At the Hoover Institution, he co-leads the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and participates in the Project on the U.S., China, and the World. At FSI, he is among the core faculty of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which he directed for six and a half years. He leads FSI’s Israel Studies Program and is a member of the Program on Arab Reform and Development. He also co-leads the Global Digital Policy Incubator, based at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center. He served for 32 years as founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.
Diamond’s research focuses on global trends affecting freedom and democracy and on U.S. and international policies to defend and advance democracy. His book, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, analyzes the challenges confronting liberal democracy in the United States and around the world at this potential “hinge in history,” and offers an agenda for strengthening and defending democracy at home and abroad. A paperback edition with a new preface was released by Penguin in April 2020. His other books include: In Search of Democracy (2016), The Spirit of Democracy (2008), Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (1999), Promoting Democracy in the 1990s (1995), and Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria (1989). He has edited or coedited more than fifty books, including China’s Influence and American Interests (2019, with Orville Schell), Silicon Triangle: The United States, China, Taiwan the Global Semiconductor Security (2023, with James O. Ellis Jr. and Orville Schell), and The Troubling State of India’s Democracy (2024, with Sumit Ganguly and Dinsha Mistree).
During 2002–03, Diamond served as a consultant to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and was a contributing author of its report, Foreign Aid in the National Interest. He has advised and lectured to universities and think tanks around the world, and to the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other organizations dealing with governance and development. During the first three months of 2004, Diamond served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. His 2005 book, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, was one of the first books to critically analyze America's postwar engagement in Iraq.
Among Diamond’s other edited books are Democracy in Decline?; Democratization and Authoritarianism in the Arab World; Will China Democratize?; and Liberation Technology: Social Media and the Struggle for Democracy, all edited with Marc F. Plattner; and Politics and Culture in Contemporary Iran, with Abbas Milani. With Juan J. Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset, he edited the series, Democracy in Developing Countries, which helped to shape a new generation of comparative study of democratic development.
Download full-resolution headshot; photo credit: Rod Searcey.
Former Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Faculty Chair, Jan Koum Israel Studies Program
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Information Access under Poor Connectivity
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Abstract
Consider three different worlds of poor network connectivity:
- Scenario 1: A user in Africa uses a cheap mobile device with voice and SMS as the only data connectivity channel (140 bytes per message and each SMS costs money).
- Scenario 2: A university in India has good connectivity which is shared simultaneously by 400 users. (Per user share = 2 Kbps)
- Scenario 3: A school in Kenya has a computer but no Internet.
In this talk, I will describe a range of techniques we have developed to enhance information access in these three scenarios of poor connectivity. In Scenario 1, we have built an entire SMS-based protocol stack for mobile applications being used in India, Mexico and Ghana as well as a live SMS search engine in Kenya. We are also rolling out a data-over-GSM voice stack to support data connectivity over cellular voice.
In Scenario 2, I will describe why some of the fundamentals of network protocols break down in these regimes and why we need a completely new Web architecture for these types of networks. We have deployed early versions of our system in a few schools and universities in India, Kenya.
In Scenario 3, I will describe how we can use vertical search engines to deliver a vertical slice of the Web in a hard-disk and provide an offline searchable and browse-able Internet. This system has been used in schools in India and Kenya as an educational tool for students and teachers.
This is joint work with several others with Jay Chen being a primary leader for many of these projects.
Lakshminarayanan Subramanian is an Assistant Professor in the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU.
His research interests are in the areas of networks, distributed systems and computing for development. He co-leads the Networks and Wide-Area Systems(NeWS) group (which investigates software solutions for distributed systems, wireline and wireless networking, operating system, security and privacy, technologies and applications for the developing world) and the CATER Lab at NYU ( which focuses on developing and deploying low-cost, innovative technology solutions to some of the problems in developing regions in terms of communication, healthcare and microfinance).
Recently, he has co-established a new Center for Technology and Economic Development (CTED) at NYU Abu Dhabi which brings together students from several disciplines (CS, economics, healthcare, education, policy). He is the recipient of several awards including the NSF CAREER Award (2009), IBM Faculty Award (2009, 2010) and C.V. Ramamoorthy Award. He has been at the forefront of several technological innovations for development that have been used in several countries around the world.
Wallenberg Theater
Lakshminarayanan Subramanian
Assistant Professor in the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
Speaker
University of New York
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Public Diplomacy 2.0: An Exploratory Case Study of the Digital Outreach Team
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The internet is enabling new approaches to public diplomacy. The Digital Outreach Team at the US Department of State is one such initiative, aiming to engage directly with citizens in the Middle East through posting messages about US foreign policy on popular Arabic, Urdu, and Persian language internet forums. This permits them to present the US administration's views on issues related to American foreign policy in a transparent manner. This case study assesses the process and reach of this new method of internet diplomacy. Does this method provide a promising new conception of public diplomacy for the USA and other nations to move from a more one-way information flow to a more interactive, and individualized, approach to connecting with the Middle East? Is this a useful complement to more traditional forms of public diplomacy? What are the strategic challenges faced by public diplomacy 2.0?
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CDDRL Working Papers
The Game of Electoral Fraud and the Ousting of Authoritarian Rule
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American Journal of Political Science