Armed only with law textbooks, six Stanford law students and faculty advisor and senior research scholar Erik Jensen landed in Kabul, Afghanistan on Feb. 6 on a mission that would last six days.

The group made up Stanford's Afghanistan Legal Education Project (ALEP), a student-led law school project funded by the U.S. State Department that creates textbooks on Afghanistan's legal system specifically for the instruction of Afghani students.

Stanford students in the Afghanistan Legal Education Project (ALEP) meet with Supreme Court Chief Justice Abdul Salam Azimi during their six-day visit to Kabul. (Courtesy of Daniel Lewis)

Working with the American University of Afghanistan (AUAF), the project is creating a new generation of lawyers to shape Afghanistan's future.

Since it was founded in 2007 by Stanford law alums Alexander Benard J.D. '08 and Eli Sugarman J.D. '09, the project has published four textbooks. These include an introductory text to the laws of Afghanistan and textbooks on commercial, criminal and international law. Students are currently writing a textbook on constitutional law.

"The whole project is indigenously oriented," Jensen said. "The textbooks are written in response to needs and demands of Afghan students, and we try to contextualize our work as much as we can to the politics, economics and social order in Afghanistan."

The purpose of the recent trip to Kabul was to explore the future and progress of the project. Students attended classes that are currently taught using ALEP textbooks, got feedback from Afghani students and professors and interacted with administrators at the AUAF to see where the project is headed.

"Sitting in on the classes and meeting with the students was for us a priority, because that's the best way we can get feedback on our books and make the project better," said Daniel Lewis LAW '12 and ALEP co-executive director.

After meeting with the president of AUAF, the group agreed that the ultimate goal for the project is to build a complete law school curriculum.

"The time frame is uncertain, but we're expanding really quickly," Lewis said.

In addition to rolling out the new textbook, ALEP plans to introduce new classes in the fall on Islamic law and the informal justice system in Afghanistan, taught by a collaborating Afghan professor and an affiliated postdoctoral fellow. Workshops on practical skills such as negotiation and writing are also on the horizon, as well as translations of the books into Dari and Pashto.

The group met other notable Afghan and American officials, including the dean at the Kabul University School of Law, university professors from the most populated provinces and Ambassador Hans Klemm, coordinating director of rule of law and law enforcement at the Embassy of the United States in Kabul.

"All the high officials we met with were extraordinarily supportive of the project," Jensen said.

"We'd gone over there expecting it wouldn't really be easy getting our books out there [past AUAF], or that there would be some hostility," Lewis said. "But that really wasn't the case. The feedback was that they were excited to have another resource that was new and updated."

Other universities are not the only other audiences attracted to the project's textbooks, which are available publicly, and for free, online.

"Over the past year or so, people have been downloading them [the books] and using them, some of which we know about and some of which we don't," said Rose Ehler LAW ‘12, another ALEP co-executive director.

The U.S. military has also used the textbooks to familiarize officers with Afghani law. According to Jensen, retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal was "very familiar" with the textbooks.

The Afghan Ministry of Justice, leading judges and legal academics have also expressed interest in the project, according to Lewis.

"It was fascinating to be [in Kabul] as Stanford law students talking to these really important people in Afghanistan...in a knowledgeable way," Lewis said.

But strengthening the AUAF law school and spreading legal education are only the beginning of ALEP's goals.

"The development of the rule of law is historical process. It takes time; there are fits and starts," Jenson said.

"The problem is when you are at Afghanistan's level of development, it will go through years and years of fits and starts...and as society goes through these episodes, it will need a new cadre of leaders to lead to positive episodes," he added.

ALEP seeks to contribute to the formation of these future leaders, not only in the legal profession but also in the country as a whole. By using analytical methods to teach students critical thinking, they hope to bridge the gap between American style legal education and the Afghan reality.

"They [the Afghan students] will see opportunities that we can't see from Stanford, but they can see on the ground in Afghanistan," Jensen said, describing the project as one that is about imagining alternatives so as to prevent oppression.

The law students' person-to-person contact with the Afghani students made it clear that this project extends far beyond what can be seen on paper.

"The passion that we all saw in the students in Afghanistan just increased our passion for the project at Stanford...the heart and soul of the Stanford group is derived from the heart and soul of the Afghan students."

"Everybody on the trip came away saying, ‘Wow, we're actually doing something that's useful here,'" Lewis said.

The trip left the group optimistic about the project's future.

"Student demand is high; we've been successful at retaining some of the best faculty, and we hope that that the [AUAF] law school becomes a center of educational excellence," Jensen said.

Despite the fact that ALEP is no longer the "sole source" of Afghan law textbooks, Jensen is confident about the books' prospects.

"I look forward to the marketplace of competition...I think our books will show themselves to be the best."

On February 24, the Program on Liberation Technology at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) hosted a conference entitled Blogs and Bullets: Social Media and the Struggle for Social Change, in partnership with the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) and George Washington University's Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication (GW). This event was a high-impact gathering of scholars, academics, and representatives from the Silicon Valley tech community, to examine a very timely subject--how social media is being used to advance political change in developing democracies.

Participants from Google, Facebook, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, eBay, and YouTube, among others, commented on how recent events in the Arab world have affected their work and the role Web 2.0 tools and mobile phones played to facilitate these citizen-based movements. The Blogs and Bullets research project was launched in 2010 to examine new media through an analytic framework to better understand its impact on contentious politics-whether positive or negative. This event was a rare opportunity to bring both the public and private sectors together to discuss this topic during a daylong closed door session, providing the ideal forum for cross sector collaborations to emerge.

While there was a broad consensus around the effectiveness of social media tools to advance political change, participants were encouraged to look beyond the anecdotal evidence available to employ a more rigorous and methodical approach to impact evaluation. They discussed the challenges involved in studying the affects of social media on contentious politics-from the research design to the scarcity of available data. Many participants used social media throughout the course of the meeting to communicate key findings and discussion points on Twitter and Facebook, opening up the discourse beyond the conference room.

The workshop culminated in a public session that drew over 150 participants eager to learn more from those working on the "frontlines of social media." Panelists included; Marc Lynch from GW, Clay Shirky of New York University (NYU), Olivia Ma of YouTube, Larry Diamond from Stanford University, and was moderated by Sheldon Himelfarb of USIP.

Marc Lynch, Director of Middle East Studies at GW and also know by his pseudonym, Abu Aardvark, for his popular blog on Foreign Policy's website, opened the panel by reflecting on the broader pattern of Arab politics in the 2000s and how surprised the academic community was by the uprising in Egypt, "They (young activists) succeeded at a time when all experts believed we were in a period of authoritarian retrenchment."

Lynch credited previous failed social movements for laying the groundwork for the January 25 revolution, which was catalyzed by the events in neighboring Tunisia. The use of social media had an enormous impact on Arab societies where mainstream media is so heavily censored.  Lynch described the cascading effect of these web 2.0 platforms, which sent video, audio, personal testimonies, and on the ground sources, directly to an international audience. However, Lynch cautioned against crediting just social media, "It is a huge mistake to think this is just about social media, al-Jazeera was absolutely critical."     

Himefarb introduced Olivia Ma, News Manager at YouTube, a Google owned video sharing site, by mentioning a study conducted by the Berkman Center of Harvard University, which found YouTube the most frequented website in the Arabic language blogosphere. YouTube has been an important platform for protestors who are documenting events on the ground across the Arab world and posting video content on YouTube to reach an international audience and raise awareness. This phenomenon is described by Ma as, "The democratization of media because the barrier to broadcasting has dropped allowing everyone the ability to document and bear witness to events".

Ma described a typical day for the news team at YouTube, which involves culling through all the recent video content covering events in any corner of the world to identify the trends, buzzing topics, and "hot videos." Popular videos are often identified by searching through Facebook and Twitter to identify those that are most often shared or 'liked' by users, something Ma identified as the "complex eco-system between all the social networks." While, many of the protest videos are quite graphic in nature, YouTube has classified these videos for educational and documentary purposes, allowing them to keep as much content on the site as possible.

Clay Shirky, Professor of New Media at NYU, provided an historic account of how IT has been used by both insurgents and autocrats in each revolution since the fall of communism. Shirky explained that, "New media tools have been powerful for insurgent movements but they must be built on a need for larger change in the public sphere. (Clay Shirky)New media tools have been powerful for insurgent movements but they must be built on a need for larger change in the public sphere."

Shirky believes the Egyptian revolution was successful because it was built on the foundation and learning from prior movements in Egypt, beginning with Kefaya in 2005, to the April 6 movement in 2008, and most recently with Iran's Green Movement.

Failed uprising have occurred in places, such as Sudan, because there were no established networks of trust and shallow social capital. Shirky described the power of social media to shift mindsets by drawing on a domestic example-in 2006 the American public would not have believed it was possible to elect an African American president until an Obama speech was broadcast on YouTube, outside of the mainstream media, changing the public's perception.

CDDRL Director Larry Diamond who oversees the Program on Liberation Technology, reflected on the first time he met young Egyptian bloggers and leaders of the youth movement, "The energy and freshness of the perspectives along with the agenda and content discussed amongst these young people was striking to the point of disarming." Diamond described the Egyptian youth movement and events in Tahrir Square as possessing a "Jeffersonian quality of the value of the individual and suspicion of authority."

Diamond emphasized the importance of the window onto the world that the Internet provides, which propels the individual from a passive observer to an active contributor. While, Diamond recognized the importance of ICT he also cited its limitations, "It (ICT) will bring down an authoritarian regime but not everyone can build political parties." Diamond continued by suggesting that ICT's are useful tools for emerging political parties to widen the arena for constitutional deliberation, set new rules of the game, and create a "freer and fairer deliberation space."

Surveying cyberspace that evening, it was exciting to follow all the discussion and dialogue across the various social media platforms describing the impact and value of this event in advancing ideas and partnerships. While, Blogs and Bullets was pivotal in moving the research agenda forward, it was clear that the story does not end here. More work needs to be done to collectively examine the impact of this emerging field beyond what we read in our daily Twitter feed.

To learn more about the USIP Blogs and Bullets initiation, please click here

To learn more about the CDDRL Program on Liberation Technology, please click here