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

[Patrick Meier (iRevolution)]

Hi All, my thoughts on Drezner's piece:

http://irevolution.wordpress.com/2010/11/17/weighing-the-scales




On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 1:17 AM, Rebecca MacKinnon <
rebecca.mackinnon at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> 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
>
>
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