Abstract

Running across freeways with labor organizers, speaking with taxi drivers and laborers, and visiting rural areas of Egypt convinced me during my fieldwork that neither social media technologies nor the youth that use them caused or directly led a revolution where people from every walk of life took to the street. Indeed, only 15% of Egyptians and other Arab Spring countries have Internet access and a small percent of them are active on social media. These dynamics replay themselves in the many countries and cultures that I have worked within - from Kyrgyzstan, to Native America, to India. Indeed, while re-telling a story that places heroic youth and wonderfully liberating technologies at the center ignores the masses, dismissing social media’s dramatic impact on journalism and high-end organizing in turn is equally shortsighted. This talk will bring up different arguments (sometimes in conflict with one another) of how networks of the street and networks of the Internet work with one another, placing working classes and community organizers side-by-side with social media users.

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:

A system is only as strong as its weakest connections.  The most fragile and easily disrupted links of international development and foreign aid structures are unfortunately the most important:  those connecting community stakeholders with one another and with the larger system designed to support them.  Grassroots civil society organizations are essential to sustain growth in developing regions.  Across Africa, these groups do the hands-on, local development work that changes lives, but the overwhelming majority operate in isolation, unable to collaborate, to plan new interventions, share best practices, or communicate directly with funders and supporters.

Joshua Stern will discuss some of the systemic obstacles facing grassroots civil society organizations, and the impact that web technology is having in developing communities across East Africa.  Stern co-founded Envaya whose mission is to build and deploy a software platform that provides “the last mile” of connection between grassroots activists and the larger development sector.  Built to be easy-to-use and optimized to work in challenging, developing-world environments, Envaya's online and mobile tools empower community organizations to stake out an online presence, connect and coordinate with each other, and directly engage the international development sector.  The tools encourage collaboration and transparency, inspire activism and civil society engagement, and increase the efficiency of established programs. In just over one year, the Envaya platform has become the largest online network of civil society organizations in East Africa.

Joshua Stern (Stanford '06) is the Executive Director of Envaya. After graduating, Joshua served in the Peace Corps in Tanzania. He founded Envaya in 2010 with Jesse Young (Stanford '06, MS '07) and Tanzanian civil society leader Radhina Kipozi. Joshua splits his time between Africa and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Andrew McLaughlin is Executive Director of Civic Commons, and a Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School, teaching a course on freedom of speech in the Internet age. Previously, Andrew served on President Obama's senior White House staff as Deputy Chief Technology Officer of the U.S.; as a member of the Obama-Biden transition team; as Director of Global Public Policy at Google; and as Vice President and Chief Policy Officer of ICANN, the Internet's technical coordinatingorganization.

Introductory Seminar

This first session is meant for students who are registered for the one-credit course.  We will look at the course requirements in this session and provide a broad overview about the speakers to come in the course of the quarter.  Those interested in attending the seminar series and are not registered for the class are encouraged to come on October 6. This will mark the beginning of the speakers with Andrew McLaughlin of Stanford University.

For the schedule of speakers http://cddrl.fsi.stanford.edu/libtech/events/series/liberation_technology_seminar_series/

A series of events over the last few years, including attempts to deny non-Muslim rights to use the term "Allah," arson attacks on Christian churches, curbs on conversions of Muslims, and confiscation of bibles, alert us to disconcerting trends that have emerged in Muslim-Christian relations in multicultural Malaysia.  The purpose of this presentation is to analyze the underlying drivers behind these events, and to understand how and why the Christian community has mobilized in recent years in the face of perceived constriction of religious space.

Joseph Chinyong Liow is Associate Dean and Professor of Comparative and International Politics at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.  He was a visiting scholar at Stanford in 2007.  Among his forthcoming publications are “Malaysia’s 2008 General Election: Understanding the New Media Factor,” Pacific Review; “Creating Cadres:  Mobilization, Activism, and the Youth Wing of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party,” Pacific Affairs; and “Islamist Ambitions, Political Change, and the Price of Power:  Recent Successes and Challenges for the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party,” Journal of Islamic Studies.  Earlier works include Islam, Education, and Reform in Southern Thailand: Tradition and Transformation (2009); Piety and Politics:  Islamism in Contemporary Malaysia (2009); and Islam in Southeast Asia (co-ed., 4 vols, 2009).  His PhD is from the London School of Economics.

Rates of tuberculosis, a disease that thrives on poverty, malnutrition and interrupted medical care, are now among the highest in the world in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK, North Korea), elevating the risk of an epidemic of drug-resistant strains and a spread into China. This project represents a unique historical opportunity to examine the relationship between food security, malnutrition and the epidemiology of tuberculosis in a present-day famine.

KSP's 2011–12 Koret Fellow, recently retired Korean senior career diplomat Ambassador Joon-woo Park, will discuss the U.S. role in current territorial disputes in East Asia. The disputes, which threaten peace and stability in the region and could result in conflict among major powers, have their origin in the incomplete settlement of the Pacific War overseen by the United States. Ambassador Park argues that the United States thus shares responsibility for the current situation. He will review the status of the major territorial disputes in East Asia and explain why the United States has a significant role to play in their peaceful resolution and in promoting cooperative and friendly relations among the countries of the region.

As a career diplomat, Ambassador Park served in numerous key posts, including those of ambassador to the EU and to Singapore and presidential advisor on foreign affairs. Park worked closely for over twenty years with Ban Ki-moon, the former Korean diplomat who is now the United Nations secretary-general.

Ambassador Park also served for seven years at the Korean embassies in Tokyo and Beijing. During his tenure as director general of the Korean foreign ministry’s Asian and Pacific Affairs Bureau, he handled sensitive, longstanding issues relating to regional history, such as the depiction of historical events in Japanese textbooks and the treatment of the history of the Goguryeo kingdom in China’s Northeast Project.

The Koret Fellowship has been made possible by the generous support of the Koret Foundation. The Fellowship’s purpose is to promote intellectual diversity and breadth in KSP by bringing leading professionals in Asia and the United States to Stanford to study U.S.-Korea relations. Fellows conduct their own research on the bilateral relationship, with an emphasis on contemporary relations, with the broad aim of fostering greater understanding and closer ties between the two countries.

Mark Juergensmeyer is director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, professor of sociology, and affiliate professor of religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is an expert on religious violence, conflict resolution and South Asian religion and politics, and has published more than two hundred articles and twenty books, including the recently-released Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State. His widely-read Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence, is based on interviews with religious activists around the world--including individuals convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, leaders of Hamas, and abortion clinic bombers in the United States--and was listed by the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times as one of the best nonfiction books of the year. 

One of Juergensmeyer's earlier books, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State, covers the rise of religious activism and its confrontation with secular modernity. It was named by the New York Times as one of the notable books of the year. 

For additional information on the series, please visit the Stanford Ethics and War series website.

Abstract: In the lecture I will address the criticism that is current among some soldiers and academic strategists these days that if you try to fight an asymmetric war in accordance with the US rules of engagement or the requirements of just war theory, you will lose the war. I will argue that the good guys can win (not that they will certainly win) without adopting the methods of the bad guys.

One of America’s foremost political thinkers, Michael Walzer has written about a wide variety of topics in political theory and moral philosophy, including political obligation, just and unjust war, nationalism and ethnicity, economic justice, and the welfare state. He has played a critical role in the revival of a practical, issue-focused ethics and in the development of a pluralist approach to political and moral life. 

Walzer’s books include Just and Unjust Wars, On Toleration, and Arguing About War. He has served as editor of the political journal Dissent for more than three decades. Currently, he is working on issues having to do with international justice and the new forms of welfare and also on a collaborative project focused on the history of Jewish political thought.

For additional information on the series, please visit the Stanford Ethics and War series website.