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Arab New Media For Peace and Dialogue
This publication is the result of the Arab New Media for Peace and Dialogue project carried out by the UNESCO Centre of Catalonia - Unescocat, in cooperation with the UNESCO Office in Baghdad, and with the support of the UNESCO Freedom of Expression, Democracy and Peace Division. The Best Practice Guide gives a general overview of new media in Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, the Palestinian Territories and Syria. It analyses new media experiences acquired in conflict and post conflict areas, presentin...
Placing Human Rights Violations in Iran on Top of the Foreign Policy Agenda
In this new report published by Heinrich Böll Stiftung North America, Geneive Abdo and Sebastian Gräfe make suggestions on how U.S. and European governments can deal with human rights violations in Iran. The report identifies some key recommendations for the international community to consider: Monitor and highlight Iran’s human rights violations, support the rights and needs of Iranian refugees, and increase assistance to NGOs that support Iranian civil society.
Dissecting Global Civil Society: Values, Actors, Organisational Forms
What we see in global civil society depends on what value lens we use to define it. The trend towards networked organisation may have emancipatory effects, but may also obscure inequalities and clashing values. Working Paper 14 systematically describes the different expectations people have of global civil society. Each of us, Marlies Glasius suggests, carries a slightly different picture of the concept in our head. She describes the different normative connotations, normative ideal types, th...
Non-Democratic Rule and Regime Stability:Taking a Holistic Approach
Looking at historical facts, it becomes clear that non-democratic government has been the norm for most of human history. Nevertheless, much of the existing (western-oriented) literature focuses on ideals of democracy and on democratization-issues. Besides being the historical dominant political system, there are more reasons to study non-democratic regimes. It highlights the moral ambiguities and contrasts involved in government and politics, it illustrates differences of the structural beha...
The Uncertain Future of Democracy Promotion
Democracy promotion has had a tough decade, nowhere more so than in the Middle East. In Working Paper 12 Steven Heydemann reviews the policy paper Beyond Orthodox Approaches: Assessing Opportunities for Democracy Support in the Middle East and North Africa. Ten years ago, the democratic optimism that followed the end of the Cold War was in relatively good health. Today, after a decade of authoritarian reversals, a sustained “backlash against democracy promotion,” and authoritarian resurgence...
A Climate of Unease for Artists in Syria
In the recently published article in the New York Times by Michael Kimmelman he writes how under President Hafez al-Assad red lines of intolerance are not clear, increasing, not diminishing, the sense of uneasiness and tendency toward self-censorship for Syrian artists.Commercial globalization and the Web, having promised to erode the power of authoritarian regimes and foster new cultural riches, mostly have just concentrated more wealth in the hands of those close to power. And, aside from a...
Dissecting Global Civil Society: Values, Actors, Organisational Forms
Recently (2-11- 2010), the article "Dissecting global civil society: values, actors, organizational forms" by Marlies Glasius was published in Open Democracy. This article stems from a talk given by Marlies Glasius at the Knowledge and Change conference in the Hague, 29th September - 1st October 2010.What we see in global civil society depends on what value lens we use to define it. The trend towards networked organisation may have emancipatory effects, but may also obscure inequali...
Arab Business, a Player for Reform?
Within the framework of its project on the role of the private sector in economic and political reform, the Arab Reform Initiative is publishing two policy papers.The project has examined to what extent the private sector is influencing the reform process in the Arab world, looking in particular at the sector’s independence; its relationship to the ruling authority; its ability to organize and lobby; its involvement in social, educational, and political change; and its place in the public sph...
Tehran's Unplugged Internet Plan
An article recently published by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting tells about the plan to create a separate internet for Iran that could leave web users confined to a closed domestic network, cut off from the rest of the world. The National Internet Network project has been in the offing since 2005 and was supposed to have been launched by the end of last year. That did not happen, but the protests that followed the June 2009 presidential election, in which the internet played a cruc...
The Internet Freedom Fallacy and the Arab Digital activism
Sami ben Gharbia is a Tunisian blogger based in The Netherlands. the co-founder of nawaat.org (which means the core in Arabic), a Tunisian collective blog about news and politics and the Advocacy Director at Global Voices.His blog discusses the risks of Western funding, hyper-politicization and support of digital activism in the Arab World. He states that the direct risks on the digital activism field in the Arab World, in its current early stage of development, are huge and need therefore to...