[liberationtech] Drezner's Guide to Thinking About Civil Society 2.0

[Rebecca MacKinnon]

http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/drezners-guide-thinking-about-civil-society-20

Drezner's Guide to Thinking About Civil Society
2.0<http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/drezners-guide-thinking-about-civil-society-20>
 Nancy Scola <http://techpresident.com/blogs/nancy-scola> | November 9, 2010
- 12:28pm | Email This! <http://techpresident.com/forward?path=node/18478>

Tufts international relations professor and master blogger Dan
Drezner<http://drezner.foreignpolicy.com/>has a paper in thelatest
issue of the
* Brown Journal of World
Affairs*<http://www.bjwa.org/article.php?id=gk5HI7zD9NmuIYGSd66jz8H4r0bHlSafn3QOVVgS>that
lays out constructive ways for us to start thinking about the impact
of
the Internet on the relationship between the "state" and civil society
around the globe. Weighing what modern connective technologies mean for what
the U.S. State Department*<http://personaldemocracy.com/about-us/#disclosures>calls,
in the context of its so-called Civil
Society 2.0 initiative<http://www.state.gov/statecraft/tech/society/index.htm>,
"social good" organizations against what the mean for the ability of
totalitarian regimes to control their people, Drezner suggests that they
often mean more of the same, whatever that same might be:

It would seem, therefore, that the internet merely re-inforces the
pre-existing dynamics between states and non-state actors. In societies that
value liberal norms -- democracies -- the internet clearly empowers
non-state actors to influence the government. In arenas where liberal norms
are not widely accepted -- interstate negotiations and totalitarian
governments -- the internet has no appreciable effect.

Actually, more than having "no appreciable effect," Drezner concludes a bit
later in the piece that networked technologies might actually have a *
deleterious* impact in oppressed lands once things have moved past a sort of
magic window of the first round of protests, something we saw in Iran where
the regime in Tehran started using tools like Twitter and blogs to track
down dissidents and start to turn the wave of public opinion back their way.
Things look a bit different in places where, like China, an regime that has
restrictive tendencies also would really like to use the Internet and mobile
and all the rest to boost their country's economic activity; there, there's
a bit more of an opening, because it's nearly impossible for a country that
wants to exploit the web to impose a perfect regime of censorship at the
same time. To boil it all down, the Internet might seem like a global
organism, but its meaning and potential differs tremendously depending on
the real-world relationship that already exists between human creatures and
the governments under which they live.

Seems obvious. But Drezner thinks that Hillary Clinton's very Civil Society
2.0 initiative lacks such an awareness. Drezner calls them "misperceptions,"
and puts them as an unwarranted assumptions that, first, all these social
tools primarily benefit "'good' groups" and, second, that the most major
thing standing in the way of "digital liberalism" is that bad governments
keep their people from the Internet.

On that first point, though, at least  this FAQ
sheet<http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/150607.pdf>(pdf)
from State's Tech at Stateproject implies that they're busy picking
winners. The very idea is to equip
NGOs and other civil society groups with better tools and practices to
better balance out the power dynamic between them and the state. The risk of
doing that, it seems, is that it ups the odds that repressive regimes are
going to simply up their game, doing whatever it takes get better at doing
the web and all its affiliated technologies. But that ship has likely sailed
already. The trend is towards networking the world, and it seems to make
sense to consider who benefits from that wiring as its own distinct
question. That approach still very much requires an understanding that
dialing up Twitter in the context of Iran is very different than setting up
people with mobile phones in Mexico -- or that meddling in Mexico City is
different than doing it in Juarez, Mexico. Drezner, for his part, seems
worried that this whole new "civil society 2.0" approach to diplomacy and
development is a bit undermature when it comes to appreciating the
multitudinous variations of life as it's lived across the planet.

Alas, Drezner's illuminating piece is available only to subscribers to
the *Brown
Journal of World
Affairs*<http://www.bjwa.org/article.php?id=gk5HI7zD9NmuIYGSd66jz8H4r0bHlSafn3QOVVgS>,
or you might get lucky picking up a copy in your local bookstore. Or, should
you have access to a university journal database, there's that route too.


-- 
Rebecca MacKinnon
Schwartz Senior Fellow, New America Foundation
Co-founder, GlobalVoicesOnline.org
Cell: +1-617-939-3493
E-mail: rebecca.mackinnon at gmail.com
Blog: http://RConversation.blogs.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/rmack
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/attachments/20101110/66b24652/attachment.html>