Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Daniel Posner is Total Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and currently a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. His research focuses on ethnic politics, research design, distributive politics and the political economy of development in Africa. His work investigates, among other topics, the sources of ethnic identification and the political, social and economic outcomes that ethnicity affects-coalition-building, voting, collective action, public goods provision, and economic growth-with special attention to the mechanisms through which it has its impact. His methodological approach is to find creative ways to maximize leverage for making strong descriptive and causal claims, through the use of experiments (in the lab, in the field, and occurring "naturally"), new data sources (including the re-appropriation of data collected for other purposes), and the adoption of techniques from other disciplines such as satellite geography, public health, and behavioral economics.
His most recent co-authored book, Coethnicity: Diversity and the Dilemmas of Collective Action (Russell Sage, 2009) employs experimental games to probe the sources of poor public goods provision in ethnically diverse communities. His first book, Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa (Cambridge, 2005), explains why and when politics revolves around one dimension of ethnic cleavage rather than another. He has received several awards for his work, including the Luebbert Award for best book in Comparative Politics (2006 and 2010), the Heinz Eulau Award for the best article in the American Political Science Review (2008), the Michael Wallerstein Award for the best article in Political Economy (2008), the best book award from the African Politics Conference Group (2006), and the Sage Award for the best paper in Comparative Politics presented at the APSA annual meeting (2004). He has been a Harvard Academy Scholar (1995-98), a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution (2001-02), a Carnegie Scholar (2003-05) and, this year, a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (2010-11). He currently serves on the editorial boards of World Politics, PS, and the Annual Review of Political Science. He is the co-founder of the Working Group in African Political Economy (WGAPE). He received his BA from Dartmouth College and his PhD from Harvard University. Before moving to MIT, he taught for twelve years at UCLA.
Encina Ground Floor Conference Room
Stephen Stedman joined CISAC in 1997 as a senior research scholar, and was named a senior fellow at FSI and CISAC and professor of political science (by courtesy) in 2002. He served as the center's acting co-director in 2002-03. Stedman is the former director of Stanford's Ford Dorsey Program in International Policy Studies and is a director of 'Managing Global Insecurity,' a joint project with Stanford, New York University and the Brookings Institution.
Stedman's research addresses the future of international organizations and institutions, an area of study inspired by his work at the United Nations. In 2003, he was recruited to serve as the research director of the U.N. High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change. The panel was created by then U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to analyze global security threats and propose far-reaching reforms to the international system. Upon completion of the panel's report, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, Annan asked Stedman to remain at the U.N. as an assistant secretary-general to help gain worldwide support in implementing the panel's recommendations. Following the U.N. world leaders' summit in September 2005, during which more than 175 heads of state agreed upon a global security agenda developed from the panel's work, Stedman returned to CISAC.
Before coming to Stanford, Stedman was an associate professor of African studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. In 1993, he was a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, where he studied the negotiations for a new constitution. He was an election observer in Angola in 1992 and in South Africa in 1994. He has served as a consultant to the United Nations on issues of peacekeeping in civil war, light weapons proliferation and conflict in Africa, and preventive diplomacy.
Stedman has taught courses on international conflict management, war in the 20th century, and the Rwandan genocide. In 2000, Scott Sagan and he founded the CISAC Interschool Honors Program in International Security Studies. From 1997 to 2003, Stedman and his wife, Corinne Thomas, were the resident fellows in Larkin House, the second largest all-frosh residence. Stedman received his PhD in political science from Stanford in 1988.
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Stephen Stedman is a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), an affiliated faculty member at CISAC, and professor of political science (by courtesy) at Stanford University. He is director of CDDRL's Fisher Family Honors Program in Democracy, Development and Rule of Law, and will be faculty director of the Program on International Relations in the School of Humanities and Sciences effective Fall 2025.
In 2011-12 Professor Stedman served as the Director for the Global Commission on Elections, Democracy, and Security, a body of eminent persons tasked with developing recommendations on promoting and protecting the integrity of elections and international electoral assistance. The Commission is a joint project of the Kofi Annan Foundation and International IDEA, an intergovernmental organization that works on international democracy and electoral assistance.
In 2003-04 Professor Stedman was Research Director of the United Nations High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change and was a principal drafter of the Panel’s report, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility.
In 2005 he served as Assistant Secretary-General and Special Advisor to the Secretary- General of the United Nations, with responsibility for working with governments to adopt the Panel’s recommendations for strengthening collective security and for implementing changes within the United Nations Secretariat, including the creation of a Peacebuilding Support Office, a Counter Terrorism Task Force, and a Policy Committee to act as a cabinet to the Secretary-General.
His most recent book, with Bruce Jones and Carlos Pascual, is Power and Responsibility: Creating International Order in an Era of Transnational Threats (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 2009).
The extraordinary events that have been gripping the Arab world since December 2010 have demonstrated the steadfastness of Arab citizens across the region in the face of despotic regimes. But they have also demonstrated that Arab despots indeed engage in authoritarian learning. From Tunisia to Egypt to Bahrain to Libya to Morocco to Yemen to Syria (and the list goes on), Arab rulers have followed a peculiarly familiar pattern in the way they have-and are-responding to the protests calling for regime change.
1. Ignore the protests
One of the first reactions to budding protests is simply to ignore them and their potential. Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia completely dismissed the protests when they first started in December 2010, and so did King Mohammed VI of Morocco. Muammar Qaddafi of Libya went even further in the early days by actually joining the protests himself.
2. Offer cosmetic concessions
As the pace of protests picks up, we have seen Arab rulers offer their people a range of largely cosmetic concessions. The rulers of Bahrain, Oman, and Saudi Arabia have responded by throwing money at their people, while those of Jordan and Yemen have dissolved their governments, and the latter ruler, like Ben Ali and Mubarak before him, promised not to run for reelection.
3. Engage in denial
"Egypt is not Tunisia". "Syria is not Egypt". "Yemen is not Tunisia or Egypt". And the statements by Arab rulers go on in trying to convince themselves and their people that the regime change that happened "over there" will not happen "over here". The denial continues even after the leaders start losing those they had thought were on their side, from ambassadors to ministers to army generals, and that's not to mention those international "friends" who call upon them to step down.
4. Quell the protests by force
All Arab rulers who have witnessed protests calling for democracy have responded to those protests through violence. Some, like in Egypt, Yemen, and Jordan, pretended that the violence was "spontaneous" and not orchestrated by the government as they relied on plain-clothed thugs to do the dirty work. While others, like in Libya and Bahrain, sent their (mercenary) armies to quell the protests by force.
5. Warn of civil war
Both Qaddafi and Ali Abdallah Saleh of Yemen have warned that civil war may break out if their regimes crumble. The tragedy is that their warnings have an element of truth, but that's mainly because the civil wars they have warned of are largely to do with that fact that the wars would be catalyzed by them and their (private) armies and allies as they strive to regain power or as a consequence of their "divide and rule" strategies.
6. Blame the media
It would have been amusing had it not been so tragic that so many Arab rulers have blamed the protests on the media, from the social media to satellite television. Qaddafi called the foreign media "dogs", while the Emir of Bahrain put the blame on television-the Iranian Arabic-language channel Al-Alam and Hizbullah's channel Al-Manar-and in Egypt the blame was directed at Al-Jazeera. Egypt, Syria, and Libya have also engaged in various degrees of internet shut down. It is as if the social, economic, and political problems the people are protesting against would disappear if only the media would stop talking about them.
7. Speak about foreign plots
The Emir of Bahrain proudly spoke of successfully foiling a "foreign plot" in an attempt at justifying the violent suppression of protests. So did Mubarak back in February and Qaddafi has also blamed "outsiders" for the unrest. That's because, of course, no indigenous problems ever existed in those countries. Ever.
8. Or al-Qaeda
Ali Abdallah Saleh and Qaddafi have both invoked al-Qaeda to instill fear in the protesters and the international community. Saleh presented himself as the only alternative to an al-Qaeda takeover of Yemen while Qaddafi went even further by warning that he would collaborate with al-Qaeda if all else fails.
What the above demonstrates vividly is two things:
1. Arab rulers seem to belong to the same authoritarian club.
Similar actions, reactions, and strategies can be seen across the board. The stunning irony is that the Arab leaders engaging in this authoritarian learning seem to be doing this blindly, without seeing that those strategies, after having been repeated time and time again elsewhere, are no longer fooling anybody, and while completely ignoring the fate of Ben Ali and Mubarak and the possibility of it happening to them. That's the power of denial (and ego). Arab rulers are showing that they are, par excellence, detached not only from the societies they rule but also from realities on the ground altogether as they refuse to acknowledge that the rules of the game have changed.
This is to do with a number of factors: First, those leaders have, for the most part, ruled over several decades without seeing their authority challenged. So they are likely to underestimate the degree of dissent against them, and overestimate the likelihood of their survival in power. Second, non-democratic leaders normally rely on two ruling mechanisms, "the sword and the gold" (in the words of Yemeni scholar Abdul Nasser Al Muwaddah in a recent paper). They either try to co-opt dissidents by offering them monetary gains (and that is why having complete authority over public funds is so important), or quell them by brute force.
Third, neoclassical realism says that state policy is often affected by the success or failure of outcomes of decisions made earlier by leaders. When a regime like Syria's succeeds in quelling dissidents by wiping more than 20,000 citizens off the map in a past decade, its decisions in the present tense are likely to be influenced by this perceived success. Fourth, the same school of international relations says that leader decisions tend to become more and more ambitious in scope when there are no internal or external checks on their authority. As most Arab despots have had no viable internal opposition movements and have been directly or indirectly supported by the West, they have largely been able to do what they want.
Fifth, leaders are able to invoke scare factors (like al-Qaeda) when they see themselves as being immune to those factors. Invoking al-Qaeda suggests back dealing done by Saleh and Qaddafi with the group, which is not surprising considering both leaders' legacies in ruling their countries. Sixth, the easiest way to absolve oneself from responsibility is to put the blame on "others". The Lebanese did that for years when they called their civil war "the war of others on our land". This kind of conspiracy theory can work because sometimes, when a named foreign "other" is persistently pointed at, they may well become interested in being involved after all, which ends up giving the theory credibility. Think of Iran's current stance towards what is going on in Bahrain, as demonstrated in the recent attack on the Saudi embassy in Tehran.
Finally, authoritarian learning is nothing new. Arab leaders have been engaging in similar behavior and tactics for a very long time as a mechanism of self preservation (from silencing oppositions to imposing emergency laws to controlling the media). So it would actually be unusual for them to suddenly break with tradition.
2. Arab citizens have by now become so familiar with the above pattern that they have come to expect it and even embrace it.
Here is the good news: This embrace is because the above pattern has become a proof of failure on the part of the rulers. First, Arab despots have become very predictable, which will make it easier for protesters to anticipate their actions and strategize accordingly. This is especially that Arab reformists do not operate in a vacuum. Just like the rulers learn from each other, so do the reformers, only that they are firmly tuned in to the changing realities around them. It is not just that they are communicating on Facebook, they are also learning from one another's experiences on the ground.
Second, there has been a role reversal when it comes to the fear factor. Protesters are viewing the cheap concessions offered to them by despots as proof that the despots themselves are scared, and thus are not settling for compromises and escalating their demands. They also see the despots' use of brutal force as proof of how little their own lives as citizens are valued, and consequently are no longer fearful. The more suppression the rulers apply, the more resilient the protesters become. After all, they have already gone so far, and have already sacrificed so much, and look at what happened in Tunisia and Egypt. The rules of the game have changed, and a new Arab reality is in the making.
In this talk, we describe enormous opportunities for innovation in delivering information technology based services. We start by describing inefficiencies, estimated to be about $15 Trillion, in how the world operates today (e.g. in industries like transportation and healthcare), some of which can be eliminated by infusing more instrumentation and intelligence into these systems. We then describe some unique challenges faced in emerging economies like India, for example, much larger scales of operations (for anything involving people), lower price points, and the need to handle noisy data. We provide several examples of innovations in dealing with these challenges. One of them is Spoken Web, our attempt to create a new world wide web, accessible over the (mobile) phone network, for the masses in countries like India. The Spoken Web platform facilitates easy creation of user-generated content that populates "voice sites", allows contextual traversal of voice sites interconnected via hyperlinks based on the HyperSpeech Transfer Protocol, and provides simple search and navigation capabilities over this audio content. We present our experience from pilots conducted in villages that shows the potential for dissemination of information and services to the masses using Spoken Web and interesting possibilities regarding social networking in these communities. Finally, we describe several opportunities for improving efficiency, quality and value from delivering various kinds of services globally, and the computer science and multi-disciplinary problems that arise in that context.
Manish Gupta is the Director of IBM Research - India and Chief Technologist for IBM India/South Asia. He leads a team conducting research on technologies underlying innovation in Services, Software and Systems, and is leading the IBM Research activities across the world in the Mobile Web area. Previously, he has held senior leadership positions at IBM Research - India, IBM India Systems and Technology Lab, and the T. J. Watson Research Center, where he led research on software for the IBM Blue Gene supercomputer. IBM was awarded the 2008 National Medal of Technology and Innovation for the invention of the Blue Gene supercomputer by US President Barack Obama in October 2009. Manish received a B.Tech. in Computer Science from IIT Delhi in 1987 and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1992. He has co-authored over 70 papers, with more than 3000 citations in Google Scholar, in the areas of high performance compilers, parallel computing, and Java Virtual Machine optimizations, and has filed eighteen patents. Manish has received an Outstanding Innovation Award, two Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards and the Gerstner Team Award for Client Excellence at IBM, and has been invited to give keynotes at several international conferences and workshops. He is an ACM Distinguished Scientist and a member of the IBM Academy of Technology.
CISAC Conference Room
Please join the Program on Human Rights at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, in welcoming Kenneth Roth, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch for a special event on the topic of President Obama's human rights record. Mr. Roth will speak about the US response to human rights abuses around the world, including recent uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa.
The event will be chaired by Professor David Abernethy, Professor Emeritus in the Stanford department of Political Science.
How is Obama doing on human rights?
Executive Director Kenneth Roth will assess the Obama Administration's human rights record. How has the president done in addressing the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa? How has he performed on legacy issues, such as Guantanamo and torture? How has he handled competing national interests in places like China? Has his greater emphasis on multilateral diplomacy, especially at the United Nations, helped or hurt the promotion of human rights?
Kenneth Roth is the executive director of Human Rights Watch, one of the world's leading international human rights organizations, which operates in more than 80 countries. Prior to joining Human Rights Watch in 1987, Roth served as a federal prosecutor in New York and for the Iran-Contra investigation in Washington. A graduate of Yale Law School and Brown University, Roth has conducted numerous human rights investigations and missions around the world. He has written extensively on a wide range of human rights abuses, devoting special attention to issues of international justice, counterterrorism, the foreign policies of the major powers, and the work of the United Nations.
Recent Publications
Bechtel Conference Center
Protest, street demonstrations and social unrest have been increasingly prevalent across the European Union. European citizens appear ever more discontent with their national governments and with ‘Europe'. Reforms and policies aimed at countering the challenges of the economic crises and increased global competition are met by strong public opposition. Recent student movements protesting against educational reforms, strikes and massive anti-austerity demonstrations in many European capitals, protest votes for extreme right or left political parties are just some of these manifestations. What translates dissatisfaction to protest and drives these collective actions? How is protest expressed in European politics and in the public sphere today? Who is protesting and against what? Is this growing opposition the result of socio-economic insecurity felt by European citizens due to Europe's increasingly strained economic security and prosperity? Or, has Europe hit the limits of how much integration and diversity it can digest? As the current model of European economic liberalism is attacked by protest groups and populists from both left and right, how does this affect European democracy and the future of the European project?
Ruby Gropas is Lecturer in International Relations at the Law Faculty of the Democritus University of Thrace, and Research Fellow at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP) in Athens, Greece. She studied political science and international relations at ULB (Belgium), management at the State University of Maryland, and holds a PhD from Cambridge University.
Her main research interests lie in European integration and foreign policy, human rights, migration and multiculturalism. She has taught at the University of Athens and was Managing Editor of the Journal of Southeast European and Black Sea Studies (2006-2009). She was Southeast Europe Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC (2007, 2009) and a Member of the Organizing Committee of the 3rd Global Forum on Migration and Development (2009). Ruby is Vice-President of the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation Scholars' Association and is currently working on an EU-funded research project on history, identities and modernity.
Encina Ground Floor Conference Room
The February 10 Liberation Technology seminar titled, Can ICT Improve Clean Water Delivery Systems in Slums? Lessons from Kibera was led by two Stanford students, Katherine Hoffman, M.A. Candidate in International Policy Studies and Global Health together with Sunny Jeon, PhD candidate in Political Science. Hoffman and Jeon presented on the topic of the M-Maji system, a start-up non-profit project that uses mobile phones to empower communities with better information about water availability, price, and quality. M-Maji emerged from the Designing Liberation Technologies course taught at the Stanford d.school, which is dedicated to using mobile phone technology for health improvement in Kibera.
The M-Maji project was conceived to confront a specific need in one of Africa's largest informal settlements: Nairobi's Kibera slum. Kibera holds about one quarter of Nairobi's population, but lacks a formal water and sanitation system. In short, water in Kibera is scarce, costly, uncertain, and often contaminated. The cost of water can rise up to over $3 per square meter during a shortage, and often takes up 20% of residents' income. Water is uncertain because about 40% of vendors in Kibera do not have access to a constant supply of water, especially since many of the connections that they do use are illegal. Additionally, water is often contaminated because water pipes run through sewer areas and are often plastic, since metal pipes would be taken as scrap. The result of these conditions is that the average person spends about 55 minutes per day looking for water, and about 68% of residents use informal water kiosks to access water.
M-Maji is a mobile platform designed to address problems facing both the seller and buyer of water in Kibera. Sellers report information about water availability and price at their water kiosk, enabling them to attract customers. Meanwhile, buyers access the system to find information about where water is available, at what price and at what level of quality. A third feature of the platform enables complaints and feedback regarding water sources. By coordinating and centralizing water information from multiple sources, M-Maji is designed to empower residents with better information about water availability, price, and quality, which ultimately helps to improve access to clean water.
There are several key reasons why a mobile platform that tackles the information side of the problem may be effective in solving the water problem in Kibera:
Although fieldwork conducted by the M-Maji team has indicated great potential for the platform's success, the team has also faced many challenges in implementation. One example stems from the platform's use of USSD sessions. Like SMS, these sessions allow short messages (up to 182 characters) to be exchanged. Users must enter a short code to begin a session, which then lasts about 2 minutes. However, the team has faced significant difficulty in getting mobile operators to allow access to USSD (in Swahili), as well as to negotiate rate agreements with mobile operators. The involvement of gangs and government in the water market introduces another challenges. In some cases, gangs bribe utility people to restrict the supply to push up prices, which may hinder the eventual effectiveness of the M-Maji tool.
Following the formation of a partnership with an important local NGO in Kibera called Umande Trust, M-Maji is moving rapidly into the pilot stage. The team is currently working to carry out a randomized impact evaluation to obtain convincing estimates of M-Maji's cost-effectiveness and impact on water outcomes. With the help of the community partner, the team is running a six-month long pilot on the West side of Kibera. In addition to surveying 1000 households for the baseline survey, the team is also carrying out data collection on water prices and water quality. M-Maji will officially launch in May or June of 2011, and the team will continue to reassess the project to better meet user needs as the results of the pilot become available.
To begin his talk, Archon Fung poses the following question: why is there no "killer" ICT platform in politics? After all, there are highly disruptive platforms in social media, commerce and other realms. These so-called "killer" platforms tend to be characterized by three features: notably that many users adopt the ICT platform and abandon the old way of doing something; the new platform improves users' experience by changing how they do some activity; and the organizations using new killer platforms displace those that do not use them.
Fung proceeds to present explanations for this puzzle, following a brief clarification of the scope of his question. When Fung refers to politics, he is not referring to aspects like partisan mobilization, e-government or the public sphere; instead, he examines the potential for ICT platforms in the realms of decision-making, problem solving and accountability. While the typical level of resolution for discussion is on the macro effects of ICT as a social force, Fung's analysis stems from his narrowing in on ICT platforms (such as Facebook, Wikipedia, Ushahidi, and others) themselves.
The first argument Fung presents in answer to his initial question is that both the suppliers and the demanders are different in politics than in other areas (e.g. commerce). Politics is aggregative, characterized by collective action and results, not focused on "individual benefits and gratification" like commerce and social interaction might be.
Second, while it is possible to have parallel, collaborative production in some types of platforms (e.g. Wikipedia), production in politics is characterized by strategic action. Various examples can help illustrate that there are key differences between commerce and politics on the supply side. In commerce, Amazon's customers want books and Amazon wants to sell books. While citizens want influence in the public sphere, however, politicians and officials typically do not want to give citizens power to influence the public sphere. Although there are counterexamples, as in some cities (such as Belo Horizonte) in Brazil, where 10% of the electorate directly influences public spending online through the Participatory Budgeting process, these cases are few and far between.
Another important factor is that there are much more ambiguous benefits in politics than in other spheres. While it is well understood that amassing more Facebook, Amazon or Google users will result in more money or fame, it is less well know what the benefits of more public deliberation or accountability might be. Since the factors that explain platform success in other areas don't translate to politics, Fung concludes, there is less innovation in the supply side.
In order to understand cases in which ICT platforms have nevertheless become important on the local level, Fung and his colleagues carried out a large case study analysis of specific examples from Brazil, Chile, Kenya, India, and Slovakia. Through analyzing these cases, which include such examples as São Paolo's Cidade Democrática, Santiago's Reclamos, Nairobi's Budget Tracking Tool and others, the researchers arrive at three key conclusions.
The bottom line from Fung's case study analysis is that getting context right can be more important for an ICT platform's success than getting the technology right. Typically, the uptake of a platform only occurs once all other pieces are in place.
In the final part of his talk, Fung addressed audience questions, many of which related to Fung's chosen standards for a killer platform. One audience member asked why Facebook could not be considered a killer platform, given its many uses for political purposes. After all, Facebook enables a kind of action to occur that would have occurred before, since it can often be accessed even in countries where public gatherings may be restricted. Another questioned why Wikileaks was not considered a killer platform. Fung replied that while Wikileaks does bring together people and information better, a killer platform would need to transform the nature of politics from group to individuals, which no existing platform has yet achieved.
