Tentative conclusions on democracy & governance
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  • US Institute of Peace event on Iran’s Regime and Opposition Movement

    The US Institute of Peace will be holding an event on February 1 from 10 am to 12 pm (Eastern) entitled “A Revolution Undone?: Regime and Opposition in Iran. “ It will explore how the evolving clash between regime and opposition affects the stability of the Islamic Republic, on the one hand, and its foreign relations, on the other. It will feature former Iranian parliament member, Fatemeh Haghighatjoo, as well as scholars such as Georgetown’s own Daniel Brumberg (Acting Director of USIP’s Muslim World Initiative) and Robin Wright (prominent journalist and author on Iran and the Middle East), among others.

    USIP will be webcasting the event while maintaining live chat and Twitter discussions during the webcast. (Twitter hashtag: #usipiran). It promises to be an exciting talk. I’ll be moderating the online discussion and putting questions from the online audience to the panel.

    You can find information about the event at: http://www.usip.org/events/revolution-undone

  • Google and “Chinese norms”

    Reporting on Google’s response to a Chinese government attack on Gmail-using democracy activists, the New York Times reported:

    It is also likely to enrage the Chinese authorities, who deny that they censor the Internet and are accustomed to having major foreign companies adapt their practices to Chinese norms.

    Sorry, but censorship is not a “Chinese norm.” It is a strategy that authoritarian regimes deliberately use to impede collective action for political change. The slippery use of “norm” smacks of a common problem in sloppy cultural argumentation. Sure, culture matters. Culture is useful, for example, when categorizing actors’ exogenous preferences without time to probe them more deeply. Sometimes culture manifests as a norm, or an ‘informal’ rule of interaction (i.e. an institution). Used in this way, “norm” implies that the rule is highly particular – that it has characteristics identifying it with one or another society. But, in China, we are dealing with neither culture nor norm. Plenty of actors in plenty of societies have used censorship and control: President Tandja in Niger, Stalin in Russia, and Woodrow Wilson in our own country.

    Hats off to Google for dumping its search query censorship, which the company began in 2006 to curry business favor with the regime. (H/T to the UN Wire.)