Abstract: 
While the debate rages on regarding the role of social media technologies within the Egyptian revolution of 2011, and more generally the larger wave of ‘Arab Spring’ protests, the more relevant question of today is whether the 18 days of revolt may have done more for social media than vice versa. In different manners, social media technologies appear to be central to this discussion. From the Muslim Brotherhood’s use of technology to engage global publics, to activist uses of social media to build grassroots networks which bypass the barriers of infrastructure and access, or blogger uses of social media to impact older top-down media, social media technologies represent critical sites for analysis and critique. Building on two years of ethnographies and interviews, this paper identifies three key themes by which social media technologies shape political power: 1. Moving Past Bubbles, 2. Linking Older and Newer Media, and 3. Digital Subversion.

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

Abstract:
Initially, the global debate over Internet regulation questioned whether any regulation is necessary. These discussions have since moved beyond this question to consider a wide array of new regulatory challenges, such as which online activities require regulation; what regulation is most effective; and, what is the desired outcome of these regulations.

Latin American countries have in recent years begun addressing these questions through legislation aimed at improving existing regulations. In his recent edited work, “Towards an Internet Free of Censorship: Proposals for Latin America,” Professor Eduardo Bertoni discusses the responsibility of intermediaries, the management of private data, content filtering, and the applicability of jurisdiction, within the context of Latin America. During his presentation, "Internet Regulation in Latin America: Are we Moving in the Right Direction?” Prof. Bertoni will expand upon these themes by exploring the legal questions they raise and will present specific cases from Latin America to illustrate recent examples of regulatory challenges. The presentation will encourage a discussion of how these questions and alternatives can be answered in Latin America, with a comparative perspective in mind. These answers are of crucial importance due to the effect they could have on the politics of freedom of expression.

 Prof. Eduardo Bertoni is director of the Center for Studies on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information at Palermo University School of Law, in Buenos Aires. He teaches Human Rights and Criminal law at Palermo University and University of Buenos Aires. He served as executive director of the D.C.-based Due Process of Law Foundation from 2006 to 2009 and as special rapporteur for freedom of expression of the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights at the Organization of American States from 2002 to 2005. Prof. Bertoni has also been a legal advisor to nongovernmental human rights organizations in Argentina and an advisor to Argentina’s Ministry of Justice and Human Rights. He has published opinion pieces on democracy and human rights in leading newspapers in the Americas and has written several publications on the right to freedom of expression, judicial reforms, and international criminal law. During his fellowship, Prof. Bertoni plans to explore the prospects for and obstacles to freedom of expression on the Internet in Latin America, including recommendations to ensure that increased access to the Internet promotes, rather than undermines, free speech.

Abstract:

Political parties that represent old regime interests in moments of democratization are normally thought exclusively to play a "negative" role, blocking democracy and only conceding it when sufficiently challenged. Summarizing research for a book on the historical rise of democracy in Europe, this presentation will focus on British and German democratization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to make the case that under certain conditions, old regime conservative parties play a decisive and counter-intuitive role that makes democratization more settled over the long run.

Speaker Bio:

Daniel Ziblatt is Professor of Government at Harvard University. He has been named a Sage Publications Fellow for a project on "Conservative Political Parties and Democratization in Europe" and in 2012-2013 is on leave at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

His research and teaching interests include democratization, state-building, development, comparative politics and comparative historical analysis, with a particular interest in Europe. He is the author of Structuring the State: The Formation of Italy and Germany and the Puzzle of Federalism (Princeton University Press, 2006), the winner of three prizes from the American Political Science Association, including the 2007 Prize for the Best Book published on European Politics. He is co-editor of a 2010 special double issue of Comparative Political Studies entitled "The Historical Turn in Democratization Studies." Recent papers have appeared in American Poiltical Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, and World Politics.  His most recent papers have received APSA's 2011 Mary Parker Follett Prize from the Politics and History Section of APSA, APSA's  2009 Luebbert Prize for the best paper published  in comparative politics, the 2008 Sage prize for best paper presented in comparative politics at the APSA meeting, and two  prizes in 2010 from the Comparative Democratization Section of APSA.  Ziblatt has been a DAAD Fellow in Berlin, an Alexander von Humboldt visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute in Cologne and the University of Konstanz, Germany, and visiting professor at the Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris in 2010. He is currently completing a new book entitled Conservative Political Parties and the Birth of Modern Democracy in Europe, 1848-1950 (Cambridge University Press) that offers a new interpretation of the historical democratization of Europe.

Forecasting is a difficult profession. International economist David Hale and writer Lyric Hughes Hale do not claim they can foretell the future. But as veteran observers of the Asian economies, they can envision scenarios that are contrary to current conventional wisdom, and trends that deserve more attention than they are given in the media. What if China and Japan actually engage in armed conflict? Could East Asia experience its own version of the Arab Spring? What would be the consequences of another major earthquake in Japan? When the United States was the dominant power in the Pacific, security interests and economic interests were aligned in the region. Now that China has become the largest trading partner for many ASEAN countries, a new Great Divergence is emerging, with  potentially destabilizing consequences. While our national attention has been dominated by the Middle East for a decade now, in the coming era of energy self-sufficiency in the United States, we must shift our focus to the Far East.

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