A. Lawrence Chickering is a political and social entrepreneur and writer whose work has focused on empowering citizens to increase their roles in public institutions from government schools to foreign policy—while also contributing to economic and social progress.

To this end, Chickering has founded or co-founded several public policy organizations that promote “transpartisan” reforms in both the U.S.and globally. His most recent organization, Educate Girls Globally (EGG), works with the government in the tribal state of Rajasthan inIndia, promoting cultural change not only in traditional communities, but also in government bureaucratic cultures.

Chickering has focused his recent writing on the challenges of policy toward the “weak states” that have become the new priority concerns of foreign policy.  At a time when the new threats to security come from non-state actors, he believes that both development and counterinsurgency warfare (COIN) need civil society organizations (CSOs) to play a greatly expanded role in promoting change by empowering citizens.

In a series of articles he has written for the Small Wars Journal (SWJ), Chickering has raised questions about the government’s capacity to reform its institutions and policies, and embrace CSOs as active partners.  A major problem, he argues, is that the foreign policy community, both inside and outside the government, knows almost nothing about civil society and how it can promote change from “inside” societies.  That explains why foreign policy continues to be directed entirely toward governments, assuming that weak states are strong, and asking them to do things they have no capacity to do.

Chickering stresses the importance of empowering people rather than only helping them.  EGG provides no financial incentives.  Both its school reform and community projects result from empowerment alone.  Together with working in government schools, this allows EGG to operate at very large, strategic scales and low costs.  This commitment, however, conflicts with the overwhelming objectives of donor and philanthropic organizations. 

Chickering believes that the troubled transition from dictatorship to democracy, now underway in Egypt and other countries, could have been largely prevented by an indigenous civil society strategy promoting trust, expanding participation in government, and building human infrastructure for transition.  He also believes that a strong civil society strategy is the essential, missing element in efforts to bring peace to the Middle East. 

To show what is possible in this arena, EGG is currently negotiating with the U.S. Central Command to implement a demonstration project in Afghanistan.  The experience in Rajasthan shows how the model empowers people to take responsibility for their own security, in addition to other forms of progress. 

Chickering’s coauthored book, Strategic Foreign Assistance: Civil Society in International Security, and his more recent SWJ writings, present the most complete statements of his thinking about how civil society initiatives can be used to promote economic, social, and political change in these tribal societies. He believes that new ways of thinking about foreign and national security policy need to be built on a combination of civil society initiatives and new thinking about the strategic uses of communication to influence people’s perceptions. 

Chickering has authored two “transpartisan” books on American politics. His book Beyond Left and Right (1993) drew wide praise across the U.S. political spectrum, and his 2008 book Voice of the People, coauthored with James S. Turner, includes two chapters on foreign policy.

Mr. Chickering is a graduate of StanfordUniversity and theYale Law School. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and son.

Abstract

Running across freeways with labor organizers, speaking with taxi drivers and laborers, and visiting rural areas of Egypt convinced me during my fieldwork that neither social media technologies nor the youth that use them caused or directly led a revolution where people from every walk of life took to the street. Indeed, only 15% of Egyptians and other Arab Spring countries have Internet access and a small percent of them are active on social media. These dynamics replay themselves in the many countries and cultures that I have worked within - from Kyrgyzstan, to Native America, to India. Indeed, while re-telling a story that places heroic youth and wonderfully liberating technologies at the center ignores the masses, dismissing social media’s dramatic impact on journalism and high-end organizing in turn is equally shortsighted. This talk will bring up different arguments (sometimes in conflict with one another) of how networks of the street and networks of the Internet work with one another, placing working classes and community organizers side-by-side with social media users.

Dr. Ramesh Srinivasan, Assistant Professor at UCLA in Design and Media/Information Studies, studies and participates in projects focused on how new media technologies impact political revolutions, economic development and poverty reduction, and the future of cultural heritage. He recently wrote a front page article on Internet Freedom for the Huffington Post, an Op/Ed in the Washington Post on Social Media and the London Riots, an upcoming piece in the Washington Post on Myths of Social Media, and was recently on NPR discussing his fieldwork in Egypt on networks, actors, and technologies in the political sphere. He was also recently in the New Yorker based on his response (from his blog: http://rameshsrinivasan.org) to Malcolm Gladwell’s writings critiquing the power of social media in impacting revolutionary movements. He has worked with bloggers who were involved in overthrowing the recent authoritarian Kyrgyz regime, non-literate tribal populations in India to study how literacy emerges through uses of technology, and traditional Native American communities to study how non-Western understandings of the world can introduce new ways of looking at the future of the internet. He holds an engineering degree from Stanford, a Masters degree from the MIT Media Lab, and a Doctorate from Harvard University. His full academic CV can be found at http://rameshsrinivasan.org/cv

Andrew McLaughlin is Executive Director of Civic Commons, and a Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School, teaching a course on freedom of speech in the Internet age. Previously, Andrew served on President Obama's senior White House staff as Deputy Chief Technology Officer of the U.S.; as a member of the Obama-Biden transition team; as Director of Global Public Policy at Google; and as Vice President and Chief Policy Officer of ICANN, the Internet's technical coordinatingorganization.