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.

Despite some interesting research on crime and violence in Latin American countries (particularly Colombia), there is still a relative dearth of policy-oriented research. People interested in these subjects lack a convenient means to access the emerging research in these areas, or to pool data across countries and contexts.  Scholars within particular sub-fields are routinely engaged in separate conversations that do not sufficiently leverage complementarities in methods and substantive areas. This project will addres these gaps by delivering a first-rate electronic resource making it easy to pool data, to share research, and to engage audiences within and beyond academia. We also want to make it easier for policymakers in the United States and Latin America to learn about cutting-edge, policy-oriented research addressing the problems before them. 

Abstract
The so-called "Arab Spring" saw politically and economically disenfranchised citizens take advantage of new tools such as social media and smartphones to break the state’s monopoly on information, and mobilize mass protest. While governments were quick to employ familiar, time-tested mechanisms of repression against demonstrators in the streets and main squares, they fumbled at first in controlling this new digital dissent.  

Against an increasingly security-aware online community, the traditional tools
of blocking, filtering, and wiretapping had become less effective. Nervous regimes turned to the largely unregulated $5 billion a year industry in Internet surveillance tools. Once the realm of the black market and intelligence agencies, the latest computer spyware is now sold at trade shows for dictator pocket change.

Activists and journalists soon found themselves the target of e-mails promising exclusive or scandalous information.  We analyzed messages forwarded to us by suspicious users, and found spyware products apparently from Gamma International and Hacking Team, recognized players in the surveillance industry.  For the first time, we analyzed their products, chasing internet addresses and shell corporations across the globe.  As we published our findings, servers disappeared, and spyware was rewritten.

In this talk, we detail the cat and mouse game between authoritarian regimes and dissidents, as well as our ongoing efforts to map out the relationship between surveillance software companies and governments.

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Abstract
The manifestations of 'open' are permeating the society enabled by the rise of participatory culture and improved communication technologies. In her research, Tanja Aitamurto examines the impact of openness on traditionally closed processes such as journalism, policy-making and design. Aitamurto draws on several case studies, in which collective intelligence is harnessed through crowdsourcing, open innovation and co-creation. Her work is based on data from 150 in-depth interviews and about 8,000 data points recorded by netnography. Aitamurto's research is situated in social sciences, informed by organization studies and management science and engineering. She finds that the 'open' challenges the incumbent power structures when participatory mechanisms become a means to practice social control.

Tanja Aitamurto is a visiting researcher at the Program on Liberation Technology at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford. In her PhD project she examines 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 has previously studied at the Center for Design Research and at the Innovation Journalism Program at Stanford. 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, doing 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. More about Tanja’s work at www.tanjaaitamurto.com and on Twitter @tanjaaita.

Marvin Ammori heads a small law firm that advises Silicon Valley companies on public policy issues and is also a Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation and a Visiting Scholar at Stanford Law School's Center for Internet & Society, writing about the U.S. First Amendment. He was previously the head lawyer of an advocacy group, Free Press, where he worked primarily on network neutrality and open Internet issues and handled the Comcast/BitTorrent case. His work for several companies in their opposition to SOPA and PIPA earned him recognition by Fast Company magazine as one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business in 2012. 

***** NOTE: CHANGE OF LOCATION*****

Abstract
The mobile Internet — accessed through smartphones, tablets, and 4G technology — is now set to overtake the wired Net in usage and users. The implications of this shift are most obvious in Africa, where journalists have seized on mobile-driven innovations to transform newsgathering. But mobile networks also give repressive governments unprecedented powers to identify, locate, and harass journalists, their sources, and their audiences. The Committee to Protect Journalists invited a group of pioneering African journalists and entrepreneurs to Silicon Valley in October to talk about their work at the forefront of the media revolution. The group worked with executives and technologists from leading media and technology companies to find practical ways to protect free speech and privacy online. This panel will discuss their conclusions.

Erik Charas is an engineer, social entrepreneur, and founder of @Verdade, the largest-circulation newspaper in Mozambique. Hailing from northern Mozambique, Erik is passionate about his responsibility to work for his country. The inspiration to create @Verdade came from the realization that most people in Mozambique lacked access to quality information. He believes informing people about their government, country and the world is the first step toward engaging them as active participants in transforming the country. He is one of the most vocal advocates of anti-poverty activism in Africa today.Erik is also founder and CEO of Charas LDA, a company that invests in Mozambican entrepreneurs. Erik was voted a Hero of Africa in 2005 by media group MSN, named a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader in 2006, and served as an Archbishop Tutu African Leadership Initiative Fellow in 2007. He chairs several boards of companies and non-profit organizations in Mozambique and other countries. He has an engineering degree from the University of Cape Town. Follow him on Twitter @echaras.

Rafael Marques de Morais is an award-winning journalist, human rights activist, and founder of the anti-corruption watchdog website MakaAngola. The site is named for ‘maka,’ a Kimbundu world meaning "problem" or "trouble." Rafael’s writings on political economy, the diamond industry, and government corruption have earned him international acclaim, and have set the agenda for political debate in Angola by exposing the abuse of power. His most recent book, "Blood Diamonds: Corruption and Torture in Angola," published in September 2011, exposed hundreds of cases of torture and killings. Research for the book formed the basis of a criminal complaint Rafael filed against the shareholders of three private Angolan diamond mining companies for crimes against humanity. He now faces retaliatory legal action as company shareholders, including some of the country’s most influential generals, have countersued him in Portugal. Rafael was imprisoned for his work in 1999, and released after international advocacy efforts on his behalf. He was then charged with defaming the president and spent years in costly legal battles. His case was eventually taken up by the UN Human Rights Committee, which delivered a precedent-setting ruling in 2005 that Angola had violated the journalist’s fundamental rights. Born in Luanda, Rafael holds an MSc in African Studies from the University of Oxford and a BA Hons in Anthropology and Media from Goldsmiths, University of London.

Mohamed Keita is the Africa advocacy coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists, an international press freedom advocacy organization based in New York. Mohamed has written extensively on press freedom and social media for publications including The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and Slate Afrique. He is regularly interviewed by international media including Al Jazeera, BBC, NPR, and Radio France Internationale. A native of Bamako, Mali, Mohamed also lived in Senegal before moving to New York. Prior to joining CPJ, Mohamed volunteered as a researcher with the nongovernmental World Federalist Movement-Institute of Global Policy, where he was responsible for a project on the structures and mechanisms of the African Union and helped organize outreach activities in West Africa for a project on the UN's "Responsibility to Protect" doctrine. Mohamed is a graduate of the City College of New York. Follow him on Twitter @africamedia_CPJ

Rebecca MacKinnon is a journalist and activist whose work focuses on the intersection of the Internet, human rights, and foreign policy. She serves on the board of directors of the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Global Network Initiative. As a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, she is developing new projects focused on holding technology companies accountable to universally recognized human rights standards on free expression and privacy. Her first book, Consent of the Networked, was published in January 2012 by Basic Books. In 2012 she was named Hearst Professional-in-residence by Columbia Journalism School and listed by the Columbia Journalism Review as one of “40 women who changed the media business in the past 40 years,” primarily due to her role as cofounder of Global Voices Online (globalvoicesonline.org) an international citizen media network. Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, MacKinnon worked as a journalist for CNN in China for nine years, including as CNN’s Beijing Bureau Chief and Correspondent from 1998-2001. MacKinnon received her AB magna cum laude from Harvard University and was a Fullbright scholar in Taiwan in 1991-92. Follow her on Twitter @rmack.

This seminar is being co-sponsored by the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships and in collaboration with the Committee to Protect Journalists https://www.cpj.org 

Reception to follow in Mendenhall Library, McClatchy Hall, Bldg 120

Abstract:

This book focuses upon three core questions. Is democratic governance good for economic prosperity? Has this type of regime accelerated progress towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals, social welfare, and human development? Does it generate a peace-dividend and reduce conflict at home? This book advances the argument that both liberal democracy and governance capacity need to be strengthened in parallel for effective development, within the constraints posed by structural conditions. The argument is demonstrated using systematic evidence gathered from countries worldwide during recent decades and selected cases illustrating the effects of regime change on human security.

About the speaker:

Pippa Norris is the McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics at Harvard University and ARC Laureate Fellow and Professor of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney. She is the author of a dozen related books published by Cambridge University Press, including Driving Democracy (2008) and Democratic Deficit (2011). Her contribution to the humanities and social science has been recognized most recently by the award of the 2011 Johann Skytte prize (with Inglehart) and the 2011 Kathleen Fitzpatrick Australian Laureate Fellowship.

Abstract
Drawing on open-ended interviews with more than sixty political staffers, accounts of practitioners, and fieldwork, in this talk I present the previously untold history of the uptake of new media in Democratic electoral campaigning from 2000 to 2012. I follow a group of technically-skilled Internet staffers who came together on the Howard Dean campaign and created a series of innovations in campaign organization, tools, and practice. After the election, these individuals founded an array of consulting firms and training organizations and staffed a number of prominent Democratic campaigns. In the process, they carried their innovations across Democratic politics and contributed to a number of electoral victories, including Barack Obama's historic bid for the presidency, and currently occupy senior leadership positions in the president's re-election campaign. This history provides a lens for understanding the organizations, tools, and practices that are shaping the 2012 electoral cycle.  

In detailing this history, I analyze the role of innovation, infrastructure, and organization in electoral politics. I show how the technical and organizational innovations of the Dean and Obama campaigns were the product of the movement of staffers between fields, organizational structures that provided spaces for technical development, and incentives for experimentation. I reveal how Dean's former staffers created an infrastructure for Democratic new media campaigning after the 2004 elections that helped transfer knowledge, practice, and tools across electoral cycles and campaigns.  Finally, I detail how organizational contexts shaped the uptake of tools by the Obama campaign in 2008 and 2012, analyze the emergence of data systems and managerial practices that coordinate collective action, and show how digital cultural work mobilizes supporters and shapes the meaning of electoral participation.

I conclude by discussing the relationship between technological change and democratic practice, showing how from Howard Dean to Barack Obama, new media have provided campaigns with new ways to find and engage supporters, to run their internal operations, and to translate the energy and enthusiasm generated by candidates and political opportunities into the staple resources of American electioneering.  While these tools have facilitated a resurgence in political activity among the electorate, this participation has come in long institutionalized domains: fundraising, volunteer canvassing, and voter mobilization.  Meanwhile, participation is premised on sophisticated forms of data profiling, targeted persuasive communications, and computational managerial practices that coordinate collective action.  As such, I argue that the uptake of new media in electoral campaigning is a hybrid form of organizing politics that combines both management and empowerment. 

Daniel Kreiss is Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Kreiss's research explores the impact of technological change on the public sphere and political practice. In Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama (Oxford University Press, 2012), Kreiss presents the history of new media and Democratic Party political campaigning over the last decade. Kreiss is an affiliated fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and received a Ph.D. in Communication from Stanford University. Kreiss's work has appeared in New Media and Society, Critical Studies in Media Communication, The Journal of Information Technology and Politics, and The International Journal of Communication, in addition to other academic journals.