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I asked Shanthi Kalathil to write up a short article for DoWire about her and Taylor Boas's new book: http://www.ceip.org/OpenNetworks If you write a book or long article related to the political impact of information and communication technologies, be sure to write up a short piece for your fellow DoWire members. Also, I am increasingly interested in ensuring an honest appraisal of the real political impact ICTs are having on developing countries, be they budding democracies or authoritarian regimes. As far as I can tell, most initiatives promoting ICTs in development are avoiding this issue beyond lip service about civil society and ICTs or alluding some supposed democratizing impact of the Internet. Yet without real analysis and experiments with good governance and ICTs or the development of ICT-based methods to accommodate public will as it expresses itself in the information age (e.g. http://www.smartmobs.com ), the lack of democratic intent may lead to a growing list of authoritarian states who must use technology in increasingly controlling ways to maintain power. What do you think? Tell me I am wrong about the the head in the sand approach to political ICT impacts. E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Steven Clift Democracies Online ------- Forwarded message follows ------- From: "Shanthi Kalathil" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Open Networks, Closed Regimes: The Impact of the Internet on Authoritarian Rule By Shanthi Kalathil and Taylor C. Boas Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment, 2003 In 1989, Ronald Reagan declared that "technology will make it increasingly difficult for the state to control the information its people receive . . . the Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip." To many, subsequent events have borne witness to the truth of his prediction: authoritarian regimes have fallen around the world, while the power of the microchip has risen. A link between technological advance and democratization remains a powerful assumption in popular thinking, even amid a decline in the general "information age" optimism that characterized much of the 1990s. Specifically, many in the policy and punditry worlds now believe that the Internet poses a grave threat to authoritarian rule. Yet this conventional wisdom tends to be based on a series of "black- box" assertions that obscure the ways in which the use of technology might truly produce a political outcome. Popular assumptions often rest on anecdotal evidence, drawing primarily on isolated examples of Internet-facilitated political protest. This book seeks to critically examine the impact of the Internet in authoritarian regimes by analyzing how the technology is employed by a broad range of actors in eight authoritarian countries. Grouping Internet use into four categories - civil society, politics and the state, the economy, and the international sphere - the authors build a framework through which they examine the technology's effects in China, Cuba, Singapore, Vietnam, Burma, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. Based on a systematic examination of evidence from these eight cases, authors Kalathil and Boas argue that the Internet is not necessarily a threat to authoritarian regimes. Certain types of Internet use do indeed pose political challenges to authoritarian governments, and such use may contribute to political change in the future. Yet other uses of the Internet reinforce authoritarian rule, and many authoritarian regimes are proactively promoting the development of an Internet that serves state-defined interests rather than challenging them. This study should help policy makers to think about how the Internet can best be used to support political changes that are in the interest of both the United States and the citizens of authoritarian regimes. For more information about the book and to read the first chapter, please visit http://www.ceip.org/OpenNetworks. ^ ^ ^ ^ Steven L. Clift - W: http://www.publicus.net Minneapolis - - - E: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Minnesota - - - - - T: +1.612.822.8667 USA - - - - - - - ICQ: 13789183 *** Past Messages, Discussion http://e-democracy.org/do *** *** To subscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** *** Message body: SUB DO-WIRE *** *** To UNSUBSCRIBE instead, write: UNSUB DO-WIRE *** *** Please forward this post to others and encourage *** *** them to subscribe to the free DO-WIRE service. *** *** Please send submissions to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ***
