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American Public Diplomacy towards the Arab World in the Digital Age

Discourse on American public diplomacy has been traditionally focused on use of the broadcast media by the US government, such as Voice of America, to reach out to audiences in the Middle East and other regions. For example, much has been written about initiatives such as Radio Sawa and Al-Hurra television, and their struggles to gain credibility among Arab audiences.

Jenny Aker on mobile phones and economic development in Africa

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Jenny Aker an Assistant Professor in the Economics Department and Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, provided an overview of the welfare impacts of mobile technologies and how current research is testing our assumptions about the benefits of mobile phones for individuals in developing countries.

Mobile phones are used by some of the poorest people in the world; even at the country ranked 160 in the UN's Human Development Index, levels of adoption of mobile phones are at 50%. There are few systematic studies looking at why people adopt mobile technology, but those that exist suggest there are correlations with higher income levels, trading professions and an urban location. Mobile phone coverage across Africa is now extensive. Research shows that roll out by mobile phone companies is determined by factors including the size of population, the costs associated with terrain, quality of road access and the operating environment (whether there exists a competitive liberalized market).

Identifying the positive impact of mobiles can be difficult because they have so many uses, making assessment of costs and benefits problematic. Mobiles are also only pseudo private goods since they are often shared and benefits extend beyond the owner.  Despite these difficulties, a number of researchers have demonstrated the impact of mobile phones in the developing world. Robert Jensen's paper found that the introduction of mobiles into the fishing industry in Kerala, India resulted in reduced price discrepancies and significant welfare benefits in the form of increased profits for fishermen and reduced waste. Similarly, Jenny's own study of grain markets in Niger found that the use of mobile phones reduced price discrepancy and enhanced welfare through increased trader profits and reduced average consumer prices.

As well as these externalities from the IT sector, we are also seeing deliberate attempts to harness the potential of mobile phones, from private sector services (e.g. the provision of mobile money transfers such as M-Pesa) to non-profit development projects using mobiles in diverse contexts including health, governance and market information. Jenny is currently working on a project that will examine how mobiles can improve literacy in Niger. A pilot of Project ABC over the next three years will assess how access to mobile phones can complement traditional literacy lessons by giving people the chance to practice their literacy skills via SMS. Early results suggest significantly higher performance in literacy testing by groups using mobile phones.

If mobiles have genuine welfare impacts then ensuring access becomes a key policy concern. Jenny highlighted the importance of continuing liberalization of telecoms markets in Africa, maintaining fair and transparent legislation and reconsidering ICT taxes (in some countries mobiles are taxed as a luxury good). But while mobiles can enhance the delivery of and access to resources and information, we should be wary of viewing them as a development panacea since they cannot replace basic infrastructure investments such as power and roads.

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A Panel Discussion: Taiwan's Participation in the International Community under President Ma

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In this panel discussion, three leading scholars in the field of China and Taiwan studies will examine recent developments and future prospects for Taiwan's participation in international organizations, from the World Health Assembly to a range of other UN-affiliated and other international organizations (including new and less formal groupings such as the Community of Democracies).  More broadly, this panel discussion will examine how Taiwan is now trying to, and might in the near future, engage the international community and international organizations, in an era when relations across the strait are thawing but Beijing is still actively limiting Taiwan's international space.

Dan Blumenthal is a resident fellow at American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. He is a current commissioner and former vice chairman of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, where he directs efforts to monitor, investigate, and provide recommendations on the national security implications of the economic relationship between the two countries. Previously, he was senior director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia in the Secretary of Defense's Office of International Security Affairs and practiced law in New York prior to his government service. At AEI, in addition to his work on the national security implications of U.S.-Sino relations, he coordinates the Tocqueville on China project, which examines the underlying civic culture of post-Mao China. Mr. Blumenthal also contributes to AEI's Asian Outlook series.

Kao-cheng Wang received his Ph.D. in Political Science from University of Pennsylvania. He is Professor and former Director of Graduate Institute of International Affairs and Strategic Studies, Tamkang University, Taipei.

Suisheng Zhao is Professor at the Graduate School of International Studies and Executive Director of the Center for China-US Cooperation, University of Denver. He is a member of the Board of Governors of the US Committee of the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific, a member of the National Committee on US-China Relations, and a Research Associate at the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University. He is the founding editor of the Journal of Contemporary China.

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Dan Blumenthal Resident Fellow Speaker American Enterprise Institute
Kao-cheng Wang Professor Speaker Tamkang University
Suisheng Zhao Professor Speaker University of Denver

Larry Diamond

CDDRL
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C147
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 724-6448 (650) 723-1928
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Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science and Sociology
diamond_encina_hall.png MA, PhD

Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is also professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford, where he lectures and teaches courses on democracy (including an online course on EdX). At the Hoover Institution, he co-leads the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and participates in the Project on the U.S., China, and the World. At FSI, he is among the core faculty of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which he directed for six and a half years. He leads FSI’s Israel Studies Program and is a member of the Program on Arab Reform and Development. He also co-leads the Global Digital Policy Incubator, based at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center. He served for 32 years as founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.

Diamond’s research focuses on global trends affecting freedom and democracy and on U.S. and international policies to defend and advance democracy. His book, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, analyzes the challenges confronting liberal democracy in the United States and around the world at this potential “hinge in history,” and offers an agenda for strengthening and defending democracy at home and abroad.  A paperback edition with a new preface was released by Penguin in April 2020. His other books include: In Search of Democracy (2016), The Spirit of Democracy (2008), Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (1999), Promoting Democracy in the 1990s (1995), and Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria (1989). He has edited or coedited more than fifty books, including China’s Influence and American Interests (2019, with Orville Schell), Silicon Triangle: The United States, China, Taiwan the Global Semiconductor Security (2023, with James O. Ellis Jr. and Orville Schell), and The Troubling State of India’s Democracy (2024, with Sumit Ganguly and Dinsha Mistree).

During 2002–03, Diamond served as a consultant to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and was a contributing author of its report, Foreign Aid in the National Interest. He has advised and lectured to universities and think tanks around the world, and to the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other organizations dealing with governance and development. During the first three months of 2004, Diamond served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. His 2005 book, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, was one of the first books to critically analyze America's postwar engagement in Iraq.

Among Diamond’s other edited books are Democracy in Decline?; Democratization and Authoritarianism in the Arab World; Will China Democratize?; and Liberation Technology: Social Media and the Struggle for Democracy, all edited with Marc F. Plattner; and Politics and Culture in Contemporary Iran, with Abbas Milani. With Juan J. Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset, he edited the series, Democracy in Developing Countries, which helped to shape a new generation of comparative study of democratic development.

Download full-resolution headshot; photo credit: Rod Searcey.

Former Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Faculty Chair, Jan Koum Israel Studies Program
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Joseph Chung-lin Ma

CDDRL
616 Serra St.
Encina Hall
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Visiting Scholar 2010

Joseph Chung-lin Ma is a visiting scholar at CDDRL (Jan-Dec, 2010). He is currently serving as the Director at the Passport Administration Division, Bureau of Consular Affairs, Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Prior to his current assignment in San Francisco, he was Director of Political Affairs at the Taipei Mission in Sweden.

Mr. Ma received his B.A. from the Department of Diplomacy at National Chengchi University and a M.A. from Chinese Culture University.

Geopolitics, Public Diplomacy and Soft Power

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In light of the ongoing ‘War on Terror’ and the occupation of Iraq, attention has turned again to how countries such as the United States and Britain can use ‘soft power’ to influence not only domestic communities but also countries in the Middle East and Central Asia. Inevitably, the role of media, whether in the form of radio, television, the internet or film, looms large in such debates. The United States, for example, has funded new radio stations such as Radio Farda and Radio Sawa in an attempt to influence Farsi- and Arabic-speaking audiences in Iran and the Arab world. The Middle East has, as a consequence of American geopolitical fears of both Islamist militancy and Iranian power projection, emerged as the critical space for such popular cultural expressions. Geopolitics, in this context, refers to the representation of the geographies of global politics, and in the context of the Middle East, such representations are rarely politically innocent. This special issue of the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication examines the use of soft power and public diplomacy in the Middle East, the political motives behind them, their modes of operation, and their successes and failure.

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Strait Talk: US-Taiwan Relations and the Crisis with China

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At the core of US-Taiwan-China relations, mistrust has long been, and remains today, the most difficult and elusive problem policy makers face. The danger is obvious given that the Taiwan Strait is the only place where the US could go to war with a nuclear armed great power.  In her talk, Nancy Bernkopf Tucker will examine the nature of US commitments, the intricacies of decision-making, the intentions of critical actors and the impact of Taiwan’s democratization.

Nancy Bernkopf Tucker is Professor of History at Georgetown University and the
Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service . She also holds an appointment as a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University. She is the author of Strait Talk: US-Taiwan Relations and the China Crisis (Harvard, 2009), Uncertain Friendships: Taiwan, Hong Kong and the United States (Columbia, 2006), Patterns in the Dust: Chinese-American Relations and the Recognition Controversy, 1949-50 (Columbia, 1983), and more than a dozen of book chapters, edited volumes and journal articles.

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Nancy Bernkopf Tucker Professor of History Speaker Georgetown University
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Mobile Phones and Economic Development in Africa

Mobile phones are transforming lives in low-income countries faster than ever imagined.  The effect is particularly dramatic in rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa, where mobile phones have often represented the first modern infrastructure of any kind.  The iconic image of cell phones in Africa is the market woman, surrounding by her goods while making calls to potential clients in the capital city.  Equally common are the slogans of mobile phone companies promising a better life for those who use it. 

Yet do these images and slogans reflect the reality of what cell phones can do?  Cell phones are being adopted by the rural and urban poor at a surprising rate, far exceeding cell phone companies' projections. An emerging body of research suggests that mobile phones are improving households' access to information and reducing costs, thereby making markets more efficient and increasing incomes.  These impacts have occurred without NGOs or donor investments - but as a positive externality from the IT sector.

Governments, donors and NGOs have noticed the potential of information technology in achieving development goals in a variety of sectors, including agriculture, education, health, financial services and governance.  Mobile phones can greatly facilitate the effectiveness of development programs, but are needed in partnership with the private sector. And while cell phone coverage reaches over 60% of the population in most African countries, other constraints to cell phone adoption - namely pricing and handset cost - should be addressed.

Jenny Aker has worked extensively in Central, North and West Africa for the past ten years for NGOs, international organizations and universities. Her research uses field work and field experiments to better understand field-driven development problems, primarily by teaming up with NGOs and program implementers in an effort to link research with policy and implementation.

Jenny is currently involved in three main areas of research. The first assesses the impact of information technology (mobile phones) on development outcomes, namely farmers’ and traders’ welfare, market performance, labor outcomes, literacy rates and early warning systems. Based upon her previous work in Niger, she is collaborating with Catholic Relief Services in Niger on Project ABC (Alphabétisation de Base par Cellulaire), which uses cell phones as a learning tool to allow literacy participants to read and write in their local languages via SMS. The project takes a rigorous impact evaluation approach, assessing the impact of cell phones on literacy rates and farmers’ marketing behavior. Her second area of research involves assessing the impact of climate change on farmer-herder conflicts in the Sahel, with a particular focus on Mali. Her third area of research evaluates the impact of specific development interventions -- including food aid distributions, local purchases, and cash vouchers – on producers’ welfare and market performance in the Sahel.

In September 2009, Jenny joined Tufts University as an Assistant Professor in the Economics Department and Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

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Jenny Aker Assistant Professor Speaker Fletcher School, Tufts University
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