Abstract
At the end of February 2012, the number of mobile subscribers topped 1 billion in China, an average of around four out of every five people, and this number never stops increasing. What are the consequences of such popularity of a communication technology in China, the largest authoritarian state in the world? Among many things, the ubiquity of mobile phones in China, as in other authoritarian states, dramatically changes the way people experience and cope with everyday communication activities, offering unprecedented opportunities for them to expose discontent, air grievances, and coordinate online/offline collective resistance—in short, nourishing changes in political culture and power structure.

My study explores how people appropriate and use their mobile phones to initiate, organize, and mobilize collective resistance and popular protests in contemporary China. Specifically, my presentation will focus on mobile phone rumor as an emerging form of public resistance at the grassroots level in contemporary China. By focusing on several concrete case studies with 80+ in-depth interviews, my study observes that the low-cost and user-friendly mobile device lowers the average protest threshold, creating an opportunity for people, especially those without complicated communication skills, to organize or participate in resistance. The mutual visibility of meta-communication through mobile network greatly increases both credibility of information and sense of security for participation. Additionally, the synchronous mobile communication accumulates rumor discourse into resistance in a very short time. As a kind of contentious politics, rumor communication via mobile phones shows the opposition to government censorship and control of communications, and most important, the resistance against the use of the accusation of “rumor” by authorities to stifle any different voices.

Finally, I will highlight that both the Party-state mass media and the Internet in China tend to focus our gaze too much on “public” communications flows and their related public sphere, ignoring invisible but relevant interpersonal communication as well as the fact that the motivation and actions of human beingsare rooted in the experiences of everyday life.

Jun Liu just finished his Ph.D. study at University of Copenhagen and is currentlya visiting researcher in Stanford University. His research interest covers the relationship between media, contemporary culture, and political and social change in China with particular attention to the importance of new media andcommunications technologies including the Internet and mobile phones. He has a Ph.D. in Chinese studies. He has articles published and forthcoming in several academic journals, including Modern Asian Studies and the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.

Abstract:

It has long been recognized that corruption and clientelism feed upon each other. However, how public malfeasance affects citizens' willingness to engage in patron-client relations remains unexplored. This article shows that perceptions, experiences, and information about political corruption influence a citizen's likelihood to sell his or her vote, and the types of gifts, favors, or public services he or she is willing to trade for it. The context of the article is Mexico's presidential and local elections. To circumvent methodological challenges posed by social desirability bias and reverse causation, the article presents evidence from a list experiment embedded in a national representative survey conducted close to the 2012 presidential election, and evidence from a field experiment conducted close to the 2009 municipal elections. I conclude that, given favorable circumstances, governmental corruption breeds forms of political behavior that are detrimental to the proper functioning of democracy, such as vote buying.

About the Speaker:

Ana L. De La O is assistant professor of Political Science at Yale University. She is affiliated with the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, the Institution of Social and Policy Studies, and the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. Her research relates to the political economy of poverty alleviation, clientelism and the provision of public goods. She recently completed a book manuscript that explores the causes and political consequences of the proliferation of Conditional Cash Transfers in Latin America. Her work has been published in academic journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, and the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. She earned her PhD in Political Science from M.I.T.

The Program on Social Entrepreneurship at Stanford University's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law invites you to a special event and reception to meet the second class of Social Entrepreneurs-in-Residence at Stanford.

Hailing from Malaysia, South Africa and the San Francisco Bay Area, this group is working to advance the rights of women, minority groups and refugees around the world.

Please join us for this special occasion to meet this innovative group, learn more about their work and celebrate their arrival to Stanford.

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Speaker Bio:

David Blair is an Air Force officer with a background in Special Operations who has served as an instructor pilot and subject matter expert on illicit terror networks in Iraq, Afghanistan and other locations. Applying Social Network Analysis, he is now conducting research as a PhD candidate at Georgetown University on the application of principles from the intelligence community, such as data fusion and dark network assessment, to illicit markets in general and human trafficking in particular. David is a graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School and the US Air Force Academy.

The more a country depends on aid, the more distorted are its incentives to manage its own development in sustainably beneficial ways. Cambodia, a post-conflict state that cannot refuse aid, is rife with trial-and-error donor experiments and their unintended results, including bad governance—a major impediment to rational economic growth. Massive intervention by the UN in the early 1990s did help to end the Cambodian civil war and to prepare for more representative rule. Yet the country’s social indicators, the integrity of its political institutions, and its ability to manage its own development soon deteriorated. Based on a comparison of how more and less aid-dependent sectors have performed, Prof. Ear will highlight the complicity of foreign assistance in helping to degrade Cambodia’s political economy. Copies of his just-published book, Aid Dependence in Cambodia, will be available for sale. The book intertwines events in 1990s and 2000s Cambodia with the story of his own family’s life (and death) under the Khmer Rouge, escape to Vietnam in 1976, asylum in France in 1978, and immigration to America in 1985.

Sophal Ear was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2011 and a TED Fellow in 2009. His next book—The Hungry Dragon: How China’s Resources Quest is Reshaping the World, co-authored with Sigfrido Burgos Cáceres—will appear in February 2013. Prof. Ear is vice-president of the Diagnostic Microbiology Development Program, advises the University of Phnom Penh’s master’s program in development studies, and serves on the international advisory board of the International Public Management Journal. He wrote and narrated “The End/Beginning: Cambodia,” an award-winning documentary about his family’s escape from the Khmer Rouge. He has a PhD in political science, two master’s degrees from the University of California-Berkeley, and a third master’s from Princeton University.

Abstract:

Turkey redefined its geographical security environment over the last decade by deepening its engagement with neighboring regions, especially with the Middle East. The Arab spring, however, challenged not only the authoritarian regimes in the region but also Turkish foreign policy strategy. This strategy was based on cooperation with the existing regimes and did not prioritize the democracy promotion dimension of the issue. The upheavals in the Arab world, therefore, created a dilemma between ethics and self-interest in Turkish foreign policy. Amid the flux of geopolitical shifts in one of the world’s most unstable regions, Turkish foreign policy-making elites are attempting to reformulate their strategies to overcome this inherent dilemma. The central argument of the present paper is that Turkey could make a bigger and more constructive impact in the region by trying to take a more detached stand and through controlled activism. Thus, Turkey could take action through the formation of coalitions and in close alignments with the United States and Europe rather than basing its policies on a self-attributed unilateral pro-activism.

Ziya Öniş is Professor of International Relations and the Director of the Center for Research on Globalization and Democratic Governance (GLODEM) at Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey. He received his BSc. and MSc. in Economics from London School of Economics, and his Ph.D. in Development Economics from University of Manchester.  He also taught at Boğaziçi University (Istanbul), Işık University (Istanbul), and University of Manchester. He has written extensively on various aspects of Turkish political economy. His most recent research focuses on the political economy of globalization, crises and post-crises transformations, Turkey’s Europeanization and democratization experience and the analysis of new directions in Turkish foreign policy. Among his most recent publications are  “Beyond the Global Economic Crisis: Structural Continuities as Impediments to a Sustainable Recovery” (All Azimuth, 2012), “Power, Interests and Coalitions: The Political Economy of Mass Privatization in Turkey” (Third World Quarterly, 2011), “Europe and the Impasse of Center-Left Politics in Turkey: Lessons from the Greek Experience” (Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, 2010), Turkey and the Global Economy: Neo-liberal Restructuring and Integration in the Post-Crisis Era (2009), and Turkish Politics in a Changing World: Global Dynamics and Domestic Transformations (2007)

The event is organized as part of the Annual Koç Lecture Series, a three-year project organized under the framework of the Mediterranean Studies Forum’s Turkish Studies Initiative and in collaboration with Stanford Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and the Sohaib & Sara Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies. It is also co-sponsored by the CDDRL Program on Arab Reform and Democracy.