Stanford University

Tanja Aitamurto

Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Visiting Researcher
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Tanja Aitamurto was a visiting researcher at the Program on Liberation Technology at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. In her PhD project she examined how collective intelligence, whether harvested by crowdsourcing, co-creation or open innovation, impacts incumbent processes in journalism, public policy making and design process. Her work has been published in several academic publications, such as the New Media and Society. Related to her studies, she advises the Government and the Parliament of Finland about Open Government principles, for example about how open data and crowdsourcing can serve democratic processes. Aitamurto now works as a postdoctoral fellow at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Stanford.

Aitamurto has previously studied at the Center for Design Research and at the Innovation Journalism Program at Stanford University. She is a PhD Student at the Center for Journalism, Media and Communication Research at Tampere University in Finland, and she holds a Master’s Degree in Public Policy, and a Master of Arts in Humanities. Prior to returning to academia, she made a career in journalism in Finland specializing in foreign affairs, reporting in countries such as Afghanistan, Angola and Uganda. She has also taught journalism at the University of Zambia, in Lusaka, and worked at the Namibia Press Agency, Windhoek.

She also actively participates in the developments she is studying; she crowdfunded a reporting and research trip to Egypt in 2011 to investigate crowdsourcing in public deliberation. She also practices social entrepreneurship in the Virtual SafeBox (http://designinglibtech.tumblr.com/), a project, which sprang from Designing Liberation Technologies class at Stanford. Tanja blogs on the Huffington Post and writes about her research at PBS MediaShift. More about Tanja’s work at www.tanjaaitamurto.com and on Twitter @tanjaaita.

 

 

Publications:

Michael A. Seeberg

Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Visiting Researcher
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Michael Aagaard Seeberg is a CDDRL visiting researcher in winter and spring 2012, while researching on his PhD project titled “Democracy Against the Odds”. He expects to obtain his PhD from Aarhus University, Denmark in the fall 2013.

Michael Seeberg’s PhD project seek to understand the emergence of stable (though minimalist) democracy in a number of countries despite low levels of modernization, lack of democratic neighboring countries and other factors consistently related to democratic stability in the literature. Cases in point are Ghana, India, Mauritius and Mongolia. The study of deviant democracies can give us some leverage in understanding the determinants of democracy – determinants that have not really been uncovered yet. Current accounts stress the absence of ‘damaging factors’ as decisive for the successful emergence of democracy. With the project, Michael Seeberg hope to refine existing explanations of democratization while, on the other hand identify the positive drivers that also contributed to new stable democracies. The overall aim is to build a foundation for a better understanding of why some regime changes result in stable democracies whereas others are stuck as hybrid regimes or return to the set of outright autocracies.

Prior to his PhD studies, Michael Seeberg has been a visiting scholar at the University of Washington, Seattle, assistant attaché at the Danish Mission to the United Nations in New York, and a visiting scholar at the Danish Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen, Denmark. He holds an MSc in political science from Aarhus University. Concurrently with his PhD studies, Michael Seeberg is engaged in the Scouts in Denmark, where he is a member of the executive board at the YMCA Scouts, and member of the Steering Committee for the Project supporting Guiding and Scouting in Eastern and Central Europe.

 

Publications

  • "Mongolian Miracles and Central Asian Disappointments: Nomadic Culture, Clan Politics and the 16. Soviet Republic”, Politica, 2009, 41(3): 315-330.

Quality of Government. What it is - What you get - How to get it.

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Abstract:

Issues about “good governance” and anti-corruption have become central in the development and democracy agenda. While it’s clear that low-quality government institutions have negative effects on the health and wealth of societies, the criteria for what should count as good governance remain far from clear. In his new book “The Quality of Government: Corruption, Social Trust and Inequality in International Perspective”, Bo Rothstein argues that the dominant theories in this field represent serious mischaracterizations of the problem and that the standard definitions of the problem used in research as well as by many leading policy organizations are not helpful. This, he argues, has led to anti-corruption policies that are, at best, ineffective. 

Speaker Bio: 

Bo Rothstein holds the August Röhss Chair in Political Science at University of Gothenburg in Sweden where he is head of the Quality of Government (QoG) Institute. The QoG Institute consists of about twenty researchers studying the importance of trustworthy, reliable, competent and non-corrupt government institutions.

Rothstein took is PhD at Lund University in 1986 and served as assistant and associate professor at Uppsala University 1986 to 1994. He has been a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York, Cornell University, Harvard University, Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Study, the Australian National University and the University of Washington in Seattle. In 2006, he served as Visiting Professor at Harvard University.

His latest book, The Quality of Government: Corruption, Inequality and Social Trust in International Perspective is published by University of Chicago Press in 2011. Among his earlier books in English are Social Traps and the Problem of Trust, and Just Institutions Matters: The Moral and Political Logic of the Universal Welfare State (both Cambridge University Press 1998) and The Social Democratic State (Univ. of Pittsburgh Press 1996). His articles have appeared in scholarly journals such as World Politics, Governance, Comparative Politics, Scandinavian Political Studies, American Behavioral Scientist, European Journal of Political Research and Comparative Political Studies. He is also a regular contributor to the Swedish debate about public policy and has published more than 100 op-ed articles in all major Swedish daily newspapers.

Beginning in January 2012, Rothstein will be in residence at Stanford and affilliated with the Scandinavian Consortium for Organizational Research (SCANOCOR) and the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences at Stanford. 

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Bo Rothstein August Röhss Chair in Political Science Speaker University of Gothenburg
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Henrik Larsen

Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Visiting Researcher
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Henrik Boesen Lindbo Larsen is a CDDRL visiting researcher 2011-12, while researching on his PhD project titled NATO Democracy Promotion: the Geopolitical Effects of Declining Hegemonic Power. He expects to obtain his PhD from the University of Southern Denmark and the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) in 2013.

Henrik Larsen’s PhD project views democracy promotion as a policy resulting from power transitions as mediated through the predominant narratives of great powers. It distinguishes between two main types of democracy promotion, the ability to attract (enlargement, partnerships) and the ability to impose (out-of-area missions, state-building). NATO’s external policies are increasingly pursued with a lower intensity and/or with a stronger geographical demarcation.

Prior to his PhD studies, Henrik Larsen held temporary positions for the UNHCR in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congoand with the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Denmark working with Russia & the Eastern neighborhood. He holds an MSc in political science from the University of Aarhus complemented with studies at the University of Montreal, Sciences Po Paris and the University of Geneva. He has been a research intern at École Militaire in Paris and he is member of the Danish roster for election observation missions for the OSCE and the EU.

 

Publications

  • "Libya: Beyond Regime Change”, DIIS Policy Brief, October 2011.
  • "Cooperative Security: Waning Influence in the Eastern Neighbourhood" in Rynning, S. & Ringsmose, J. (eds.), NATO’s New Strategic Concept: A Comprehensive Assessment, DIIS Report 2011: 02.
  • "The Russo-Georgian War and Beyond: towards a European Great Power Concert", DIIS Working Paper 2009: 32 (a revised version currently under peer review). 
  • "Le Danemark dans la politique européenne de sécurité et de défense: dérogation, autonomie et influence" (Denmarkin the European Security and Defense Policy: Exemption, Autonomy and Influence) (2008), Revue Stratégique vol. 91-92.

A Critique of Repressive Approaches to Combat Human Trafficking

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Alison Brysk is the Mellichamp Chair in Global Governance, Global and International Studies at UC Santa Barbara. She has authored or edited eight books on international human rights including the book From Human Trafficking to Human Rights. Professor Brysk has been a visiting scholar in Argentina, Ecuador, France, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands, South Africa, and Japan, and in 2007 held the Fulbright Distinguished Visiting Chair in Global Governance at Canada's Centre for International Governance Innovation.

 

Dr. Mohammed Mattar is the executive director of the Protection Project. He has worked in over 50 countries to promote state compliance with international human rights standards and has advised governments on drafting and implementing anti-trafficking legislation. He participated in drafting the United Nations model law on trafficking in persons and he authored the Inter-Parliamentarian Handbook on the appropriate responses to trafficking in persons. Dr. Mattar currently teaches courses on international and comparative law at Georgetown University, Johns Hopkins University (SAIS) and American University, and has authored numerous publications for law reviews and the United Nations on international human rights and Islamic law, trafficking in persons and reporting mechanisms.

Bechtel Conference Center

Alison Brysk Mellichamp Professor of Global Governance in the Global and International Studies Program Speaker UCSB
Dr. Mohammed Mattar Executive Director of the Protection Project Speaker Johns Hopkins University
Helen Stacy Director Host Program on Human Rights
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Human Trafficking
Sanela Diana Jenkins Human Rights Speaker Series on Human Trafficking

Repressing the Internet, Western-Style

Authors
Evgeny Morozov
News Type
Commentary
Date
Paragraphs
In a piece for the Wall Street Journal on August 13, visiting scholar Evgeny Morozov cautions Western nations to be mindful of the dangerous precedent they set to authoritarian regimes when monitoring Internet content. While recent events in Norway and London may compel governments to employ surveillance tools, Morozov argues that Beijing and Tehran will be vindicated by their own repressive policies.

Did the youthful rioters who roamed the streets of London, Manchester and other British cities expect to see their photos scrutinized by angry Internet users, keen to identify the miscreants? In the immediate aftermath of the riots, many cyber-vigilantes turned to Facebook, Flickr and other social networking sites to study pictures of the violence. Some computer-savvy members even volunteered to automate the process by using software to compare rioters' faces with faces pictured elsewhere on the Internet.

The rioting youths were not exactly Luddites either. They used BlackBerrys to send their messages, avoiding more visible platforms like Facebook and Twitter. It's telling that they looted many stores selling fancy electronics. The path is short, it would seem, from "digital natives" to "digital restives."

As social media's role in the London riots is explored, British politicians are considering whether temporarily banning or censoring sites like Twitter and Facebook would quell or enflame the tensions, Cassell Bryan-Low reports from London.

Technology has empowered all sides in this skirmish: the rioters, the vigilantes, the government and even the ordinary citizens eager to help. But it has empowered all of them to different degrees. As the British police, armed with the latest facial-recognition technology, go through the footage captured by their numerous closed-circuit TV cameras and study chat transcripts and geolocation data, they are likely to identify many of the culprits.

Such regimes are eager to see what kind of precedents will be set by Western officials as they wrestle with these evolving technologiesAuthoritarian states are monitoring these developments closely. Chinese state media, for one, blamed the riots on a lack of Chinese-style controls over social media. Such regimes are eager to see what kind of precedents will be set by Western officials as they wrestle with these evolving technologies. They hope for at least partial vindication of their own repressive policies.

Some British politicians quickly called on the BlackBerry maker Research in Motion to suspend its messaging service to avoid an escalation of the riots. On Thursday, Prime Minister David Cameron said that the government should consider blocking access to social media for people who plot violence or disorder.

After the recent massacre in Norway, many European politicians voiced their concern that anonymous anti-immigrant comments on the Web were inciting extremism. They are now debating ways to limit online anonymity.

Does the Internet really need an overhaul of norms, laws and technologies that gives more control to governments? When the Egyptian secret police can purchase Western technology that allows them to eavesdrop on the Skype calls of dissidents, it seems unlikely that American and European intelligence agencies have no means of listening the calls of, say, a loner in Norway.

We tolerate such drastic proposals only because acts of terror briefly deprive us of the ability to think straight. We are also distracted by the universal tendency to imagine technology as a liberating force; it keeps us from noticing that governments already have more power than is healthy.

The domestic challenges posed by the Internet demand a measured, cautious response in the West. Leaders in Beijing, Tehran and elsewhere are awaiting our wrong-headed moves, which would allow them to claim an international license for dealing with their own protests. The yare also looking for tools and strategies that might improve their own digital surveillance.

After violent riots in 2009, Chinese officials had no qualms about cutting off the Xinjiang region's Internet access for 10 months. Still, they would surely welcome a formal excuse for such drastic measures if the West should decide to take similar measures in dealing with disorder. Likewise, any plan in the U.S. or Europe to engage in online behavioral profiling—trying to identify future terrorists based on their tweets, gaming habits or social networking activity—is likely to boost the already booming data-mining industry. It would not take long for such tools to find their way to repressive states.

But something even more important is at stake here. To the rest of the world, the efforts of Western nations, and especially the U.S., to promote democracy abroad have often smacked of hypocrisy. How could the West lecture others while struggling to cope with its own internal social contradictions? Other countries could live with this hypocrisy as long as the West held firm in promoting its ideals abroad. But this double game is harder to maintain in the Internet era.

In their concern to stop not just mob violence but commercial crimes like piracy and file-sharing, Western politicians have proposed new tools for examining Web traffic and changes in the basic architecture of the Internet to simplify surveillance. What they fail to see is that such measures can also affect the fate of dissidents in places like China and Iran. Likewise, how European politicians handle online anonymity will influence the policies of sites like Facebook, which, in turn, will affect the political behavior of those who use social media in the Middle East.

Should America and Europe abandon any pretense of even wanting to promote democracy abroad? Or should they try to figure out how to increase the resilience of their political institutions in the face of the Internet? As much as our leaders might congratulate themselves for embracing the revolutionary potential of these new technologies, they have shown little evidence of being able to think about them in a nuanced and principled way.

 

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Joseph Chung-lin Ma

CDDRL
616 Serra St.
Encina Hall
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Visiting Scholar 2010

Joseph Chung-lin Ma is a visiting scholar at CDDRL (Jan-Dec, 2010). He is currently serving as the Director at the Passport Administration Division, Bureau of Consular Affairs, Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Prior to his current assignment in San Francisco, he was Director of Political Affairs at the Taipei Mission in Sweden.

Mr. Ma received his B.A. from the Department of Diplomacy at National Chengchi University and a M.A. from Chinese Culture University.

Russia's Negative Influence on Democracy in the Post-Soviet Space

When the People Speak: Deliberative Democracy and Public Consultation

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This talk provides an overview of deliberative democracy projects conducted by the Center for Deliberative Democracy and its partners in China, Northern Ireland, Brazil, Bulgaria, Greece, Poland and other countries as well as on a European-wide basis. The projects all involve scientific random samples deliberating about policy choices and providing the before and after results as an input to policy making. The talk will focus particularly on the challenges of conducting such projects when they are intended as a precursor to further democratization or when there is ethnic conflict.

James S. Fishkin holds the Janet M. Peck Chair in International Communication at Stanford University where he is Professor of Communication and Professor of Political Science. He is also Director of Stanford's Center for Deliberative Democracy and Chair of the Dept of Communication.

He is the author of a number of books including Democracy and Deliberation: New Directions for Democratic Reform (1991), The Dialogue of Justice (1992 ), The Voice of the People: Public Opinion and Democracy (1995). With Bruce Ackerman he is co-author of Deliberation Day (Yale Press, 2004). His new book When the People Speak: Deliberative Democracy and Public Consultation will be published by Oxford University Press in fall 2009.

He is best known for developing Deliberative Polling® - a practice of public consultation that employs random samples of the citizenry to explore how opinions would change if they were more informed. Professor Fishkin and his collaborators have conducted Deliberative Polls in the US, Britain, Australia, Denmark, Bulgaria, China, Greece and other countries.

Fishkin has been a Visiting Fellow Commoner at Trinity College, Cambridge as well as a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, a Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington and a Guggenheim Fellow.

Fishkin received his B.A. from Yale in 1970 and holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale as well as a second Ph.D. in Philosophy from Cambridge.

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

James S. Fishkin

Encina Hall, E102
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 723-4611
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Janet M. Peck Professor of International Communication
Professor of Political Science (by courtesy)
Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
fishkin_2.jpg PhD

James S. Fishkin holds the Janet M. Peck Chair in International Communication at Stanford University, where he is a Professor of Communication and Professor of Political Science (by courtesy). He is also Director of the Deliberative Democracy Lab at CDDRL (formerly the Center for Deliberative Democracy).

He is the author of a number of books, including Democracy and Deliberation: New Directions for Democratic Reform (Yale University Press, 1991), The Dialogue of Justice (Yale University Press, 1992 ), The Voice of the People: Public Opinion and Democracy (Yale University Press 1995). With Bruce Ackerman, he is the co-author of Deliberation Day (Yale University Press, 2004). And more recently, When the People Speak: Deliberative Democracy and Public Consultation (Oxford University Press, 2009 and Democracy When the People Are Thinking (Oxford University Press, 2018).

He is best known for developing Deliberative Polling® — a practice of public consultation that employs random samples of the citizenry to explore how opinions would change if they were more informed. Professor Fishkin and his collaborators have conducted Deliberative Polls in the US, Britain, Australia, Denmark, Bulgaria, China, Greece, Mongolia, Uganda, Tanzania, Brazil,  and other countries.

Fishkin has been a Visiting Fellow Commoner at Trinity College, Cambridge, as well as a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Fishkin received his B.A. from Yale in 1970 and holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale as well as a second Ph.D. in Philosophy from Cambridge.

Director, Deliberative Democracy Lab
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