The Center for the Study of the Novel is pleased to present a discussion of Professor Joseph Slaughter's new book, Human Rights Inc: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law.  Prof. Slaughter (Columbia) will be in conversation with Prof. Saikat Majumdar (Stanford) and Prof. Michael Rubenstein (UC Berkeley) in the Terrace Room of the English Department (Building 460, Room 426) on Friday, November 20th, at 3:30 pm.  A reading selection from this book is available as a pdf by email request and in hard copy on the second floor of the English Department, under the grad mailboxes.

Human Rights Inc is, in Simon Gikandi's words, "one of the most intense and intelligent reflections on the relation between the novel and human rights....a model of how students and scholars of literature can respond to the great humanitarian crisis of our time and transform the culture of human rights itself."

Joseph Slaughter is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.  He teaches and publishes in the fields of postcolonial literature and theory, African, Caribbean, and Latin American literatures, postcolonialism, narrative theory, human rights, and 20th-century ethnic and third world literatures. His many publications include articles on the narrative foundations of human rights in Human Rights Quarterly, "Humanitarian Reading" in Humanitarianism and Suffering, torture and Latin American literature in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, ethnopsychiatry, Nigerian literature, and globalization in African Writers and Their Readers, colonial narratives of invoice in Emerging Perspectives on Chinua Achebe, city space and the national allegory in Research in African Literatures, human rights, multiculturalism, and the contemporary Bildungsroman in Politics and Culture, a short story translation of Argentine Elvira Orphée's "Descomedido" in The Southwest Review, as well as a co-authored article on contemporary epistolary fiction and women's rights in Women, Gender, and Human Rights. His essay, "Enabling Fictions and Novel Subjects: The Bildungsroman and International Human Rights Law," appeared in a special issue on human rights of PMLA (October 2006) and was honored as one of the two best articles published in the journal in 2006-7; another, "The Textuality of Human Rights: Founding Narratives of Human Personality," was named a winner in the Interdisciplinary Law and Humanities Junior Scholar Workshop held at UCLA in 2004. He has co-edited a special issue on "Human Rights and Literary Form" of Comparative Literature Studies.

Bethany Lacina is a Hewlett Pre-Doctoral Fellow at CDDRL and a PhD candidate in the Stanford Department of Political Science.  She is also affiliated with the Centre for the Study of Civil War at the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo.  Next fall, she will begin an assistant professorship at the University of Rochester.

Despite its frequent military coups, Thai democracy was practically a textbook case of successful transition during the 1980s and 1990s. A so-called "semi-democracy" during 1980-88 gave way to a fully elected civilian leadership whose corrupt government laid the conditions for a putsch in February 1991. As the coup makers institutionalized their power through the political party and electoral systems, a popular uprising put the military back in the barracks in May 1992. Following an organic five-year constitution-drafting process, the promulgation of the reform-driven 1997 Constitution appeared to cross the threshold between transition and consolidation. But the rise of Thaksin Shinawatra and his Thai Rak Thai party changed all that. The Thaksin regime was paradoxically corrupt and abusive of power on the one hand but delivered the goods from its populist platform through policy innovation on the other. Thaksin triumphed at the polls in 2001 and again, by a landslide, in 2005. In the same year, a Bangkok-based "yellow-shirt" movement campaigned against his graft and abuse, laying the groundwork for Thailand's latest putsch in September 2006. Thai politics has been murky and topsy-turvy since. Thaksin's opponents from the military, palace, Bangkok's middle class, royalist political parties, swathes of civil society, and the yellow-shirted People's Alliance for Democracy are now in charge, fronted by Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva and his Democrat Party-led coalition government. Yet this anti-Thaksin coalition is unable to put the lid on the pro-Thaksin "red shirts" as the remarkable reign of King Bhumibol Adulyadej enters its twilight. Thai democracy and monarchy are increasingly enmeshed. Its road ahead towards a workable constitutional monarchy that is consistent with democratic development will have much to say about the democratization in developing countries. It is a crucial case that could build or sap the momentum of democratization and democracy promotion elsewhere.

Dr. Thitinan Pongsudhirak is Director of the Institute of Security and International Studies (ISIS) and Associate Professor of International Political Economy at the Faculty of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University. He has authored a host of articles, books and book chapters on Thailand's politics, political economy, foreign policy, media and ASEAN and East Asian security and economic cooperation. He is frequently quoted and his op-eds have regularly appeared in international and local media. Dr. Thitinan has worked for The BBC World Service, The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), Independent Economic Analysis (IDEA) and consulting and research projects related to Thailand's macro-economy and politics. He received his B.A. from the University of California at Santa Barbara, M.A. from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and Ph.D. from the London School of Economics where he won the United Kingdom's Lord Bryce Prize for Best Dissertation in Comparative and International Politics. Dr. Thitinan has lectured at a host of universities in Thailand and abroad, and is currently a visiting scholar with the FSI-Humanities Center and Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.

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.

Abstract
Technology can be a positive force for decentralization, but in extreme cases this can lead to chaos.  Technology can also be a positive force for centralization, creating huge value.  However, in extreme cases the potential for centralization could play into the hands of governments with totalitarian aspirations.  I will explore examples of each, and also of how technology companies can create systems and processes that prevent this kind of abuse.  I will bring up some of the most difficult decisions I have faced in my career and give the class a chance to tell me what they would have done in my shoes.

Kim Scott is the Director of Online Sales and Operations for AdSense and YouTube at Google. In that role, she is responsible for managing Google's worldwide network of partner publishers and building the YouTube community and YPP program.

 Prior to joining Google, Kim was the CEO and co-founder of Juice Software, a business intelligence start-up based in New York City. Kim was VP of Business Development at two other technology start-ups: CapitalThinking, a commercial mortgage ASP and Delta Three, an Internet telephony service provider.  Earlier in her career, Kim managed a pediatric clinic in Kosovo, served as senior policy adviser to Reed Hundt at the FCC, and worked in Moscow from 1990-1994.

Kim is the author of three unpublished novels, The Measurement Problem, The
Househusband, and Virtual Love.  Kim currently sits on the advisory board for Sunlight Foundation and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.  

Summary of the Seminar
Kim Scott, Director AdSense Online Sales & Operations at Google, explored the potential of new technology for both increasing decentralization and centralization. Decentralization refers to the capacity of the internet to disperse power and influence to many more people. In the political context, this has (arguably) enabled greater citizen activism. In business, online advertising enables start-ups to get going without relying on venture capitalist funding. Individuals have greater capacity for personal expression now that they can bypass publishing power houses and distribute their own work at virtually no cost. Corresponding to these benefits are a number of negative impacts. The same technology that allows pro-democracy groups to come together also enables terrorists and pedophile groups to organize and perpetrate harm on a greater scale.

Technology also allows for increasing centralization. The Internet provides a place for the world's information to be easily organized and accessed. But with this comes the risk that certain groups (particularly authoritarian governments) could deliberately misinform citizens.  

Kim raised a number of dilemmas for discussion, including:

• How should technology companies respond to requests from governments to hand over data?
• How should Internet companies respond to different countries' understanding of what content is acceptable? Google's policy to date has been to allow different access in different countries but it has stopped short of allowing any one country to dictate what others countries see.