Encina Hall
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Senem is the Program Manager for Reform for Results at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. She has over a decade of experience in fundraising and project management in non-profit organizations in Istanbul, Turkey. Before coming to Stanford, she served as a Development Associate at the School of Music and Arts in the Bay Area.
Senem holds a Bachelor of Arts in Communication and Design from Bilkent University. She has a passion for the arts and enjoys baking and traveling with her family in her free time.
Shorenstein APARC's annual report for the academic year 2022-23 is now available.
Learn about the research, publications, and events produced by the Center and its programs over the last academic year. Read the feature sections, which look at Shorenstein APARC's 40th-anniversary celebration and its conference series examining the shape of Asia in 2030; learn about the research our postdoctoral fellows engaged in; and catch up on the Center's policy work, education initiatives, publications, and policy outreach. Download your copy or read below:
Kumi Naidoo is a prominent South African human rights and environmental justice activist. At the age of fifteen, he organized school boycotts against the apartheid educational system in South Africa. His courageous actions made him a target for the Security Police, leading to his exile in the United Kingdom, where he remained until 1990. Upon his return to South Africa, Kumi played a pivotal role in the legalization of the African National Congress in his home province of KwaZulu Natal.
Kumi also served as the official spokesperson for the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC), responsible for overseeing the country's first democratic elections in April 1994. His dedication to democracy and justice led to notable international roles, including being the first person from the global South to lead Greenpeace International as Executive Director from 2009 to 2016. He later served as the Secretary General of Amnesty International from 2018 to 2020.
In the realm of education, Kumi has shared his expertise, lecturing at Fossil Free University and holding a Richard von Weizsäcker Fellowship at the Robert Bosch Academy until early 2022.
Currently, Kumi serves as a Senior Advisor for the Community Arts Network (CAN). He holds the position of Distinguished visiting lecturer at Stanford University’s Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and is a Professor of Practice at the Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University. Additionally, he continues to represent global interests as a Global Ambassador for Africans Rising for Justice, Peace, and Dignity. He also holds positions as a Visiting Fellow at Oxford University and an Honorary Fellow at Magdalen College.
In a testament to his family's commitment to positive change, they have established the Riky Rick Foundation for the Promotion of Artivism, honoring the legacy of their son and brother, the now late South African rapper Rikhado “Riky Rick” Makhado through a commitment to supporting artivism and mental health in South Africa.
Kumi has authored and co-authored numerous books, the most recent being Letters To My Mother (2022), a personal and professional memoir that won the HSS 2023 non-fiction award by the National Institute Humanities and Social Sciences.
As part of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law’s Fall 2023 Research Seminar series, University of Southern California Political Scientists, Hoover Fellows, and CDDRL affiliated scholars Erin Baggot Carter and Brett Carter presented findings from their latest book Propaganda in Autocracies: Institutions, Information, and the Politics of Belief (Cambridge University Press, 2023). The book offers unique insight into how and why autocratic regimes use propaganda.
Under authoritarian regimes with “non-binding electoral constraints,” the authors explained, the goal of propaganda is to intimidate citizens and convey the idea that the regime can survive without their support. Propaganda in this context also makes the consequences of dissent common knowledge, thereby saving the regime the cost of actual repression.
As for regimes with binding electoral constraints, their use of propaganda is often aimed at creating a semblance of credibility with a view to enhancing the functioning of future messaging. This involves mixing fact and fiction by exploiting the infrequent provision of public goods and occasionally conceding policy failures. The latter can sometimes prove damaging to the regime since it may contribute to future protests and unrest.
The data compiled and analyzed by the Carters in this book constitute the world’s largest dataset on propaganda in autocracies, comprising 80 newspapers from 70 countries. Based on extensive coding and computational linguistics techniques, the authors used the coverage of about 8 million articles to build several measures of pro-regime propaganda.
Propaganda in Autocracies is full of novel findings on how repressive governments approach propaganda. For example, the book challenges conventional wisdom that the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) propaganda is actually persuasive to its citizens. Using an innovative list experiment, they found no evidence that citizens’ beliefs were swayed by propaganda, although exposure to propaganda can reduce people’s propensity to protest by cueing fear.
By analyzing propaganda trends over time, the book brings to light the CCP’s strategies of control during anniversaries of pro-democracy events. For most such anniversaries, regime propaganda remained the same. Yet, for salient anniversaries, like that of the Tiananmen Square massacre, the regime propped up its propaganda messaging. The authors found that repression against the ethnic Uygurs is often more heavily broadcasted, possibly to showcase the regime’s repressive power.
Erin Baggot Carter and Brett Carter discuss their new book in the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law’s weekly research seminar.
Produced by The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and Final Cut for Real, the documentary “The Killing of a Journalist” is about the 2018 murders of Slovak investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancee, Martina Kušnírová. Underlining the threats journalists face simply for doing their jobs, the killings were a shocking act of violence that directly threatened the EU’s founding principles of freedom of expression and the rule of law.
The film shows how the killings spurred mass protests and investigations in Slovakia that eventually brought down judges, police, and even a government.
Ján was a tenacious reporter and covered one of the most dangerous beats in journalism: the nexus between organized crime and politics. At the time of his death, he was working on a cross border investigation with journalist Pavla Holcová, who helped complete and publish Jan’s stories, including one that connected Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico’s inner circle to the most powerful Italian mafia, the N’drangheta. The string of revelations would eventually lead to Fico’s resignation.
The film also shows how Pavla received the leaked police files of the Kuciak/Kusnirova murder investigation, containing 70 terabytes of data and evidence that implicated Slovakian oligarch Marián Kočner. That evidence also provided an inside look into the rot at the heart of the country’s judicial system, showing how Kočner secured influence via threats, bribery, and the blackmailing of public officials, sometimes by recording audio and video of meetings with them.
The screening will be followed by a discussion and Q&A with the film's executive producers, Drew Sullivan and Paul Radu, and award winning journalist and current Stanford JSK Fellow Pavla Holcová.
PANELIST BIOS
Drew Sullivan
Executive Producer, “The Killing of a Journalist”
Co-Founder and Publisher, The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP)
Drew Sullivan is a social entrepreneur and co-founder and publisher of OCCRP. He founded the organization in 2007 with Paul Radu and served as editor-in-chief until March 2023. Under his direction, OCCRP has won numerous awards, including the Daniel Pearl Award, the Global Shining Light Award, the Tom Renner Award for Crime Reporting, the European Press Prize, and the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship. Drew also created Reporters Shield, a membership program for media outlets and NGOs that helps defend investigative journalism against SLAPPs and other legal harassment.
Paul Radu
Executive Producer, “The Killing of a Journalist”
Co-Founder and Chief of Innovation, The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP)
Paul Radu is Head of Innovation at OCCRP. He co-founded the organization in 2007 with Drew Sullivan and leads OCCRP’s major investigative projects, scopes regional expansion, and develops new strategies and technology to expose organized crime and corruption across borders.
Paul initiated and led the award-winning Russian, Azerbaijani, and Troika Laundromat investigations, and coined the term “laundromat” to define large scale, all-purpose financial fraud vehicles that are used to launder billions of dollars. He is a co-creator of Investigative Dashboard — a research desk that sifts through datasets to help journalists trace people, companies, and assets.
Paul is an Ashoka Global Fellow and has held a number of other fellowships, including the Knight International Journalism Fellowship with the International Center for Journalists as well as a 2009-2010 Stanford Knight Journalism Fellowship.
Pavla Holcová
Editor in chief, investigace.cz
Central Europe Editor, OCCRP
Pavla Holcová is an investigative journalist and founder of independent outlet investigace.cz in the Czech Republic. Pavla Holcová joined OCCRP in 2013 and is a regional editor for Central Europe. She has contributed to major cross-border projects such as the Panama Papers, the Russian and Azerbaijani Laundromats, the Pegasus Project, the Pandora Papers, and the Russian Asset Tracker. Holcová is a current JSK Fellow at Stanford and the winner of the ICFJ Knight International Journalism Award, the World Justice Project’s Anthony Lewis Prize Award, and the Allard Prize for International Integrity.
Governance is the way that societies make decisions and solve problems. Good governance is difficult when a society is divided in its values, when trust in governing institutions is low, when political participation is biased along various social lines, and when there is not enough reliable information and structured debate in the media. Complicating matters further, governments may not be able to reach important decisions when there are too many veto points that enable small groups to delay or stop decisions, regardless of their merit or public support. Finally, even after a decision is made, governmental agencies may lack the personnel and capacity to implement and administer policies.
While California’s governance system has solved many problems, its governance system suffers from significant challenges in many areas. These include: hard problems (with large-scale challenges associated with climate change, housing, poverty, and more), multiple veto points in public decision-making, partisan division, and polarization, lack of trust in institutions, biased participation in public decisions, and the need to accelerate the modernization and strengthening of civil service in state and local government.
The following are presented as four possible scenarios for California’s governance, media, and civil society future.
A California 100 Report on Policies and Future Scenarios
Meduza is the last remaining independent Russian media outlet. It continues to reach millions of people inside the country despite the project’s newsroom having to operate from exile for the last eight years. In April 2021, Russian authorities designated Meduza as a “foreign agent” in an attempt to knock out its advertising income, and weeks after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the government began blocking Meduza’s website outright. Finally, in January 2023, the Kremlin banned Meduza completely, declaring the outlet an illegal “undesirable organization.”
In an event* hosted by the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford University, Meduza’s editor-in-chief and CTO will discuss what is happening in Russia’s media landscape, how they covered the last year of brutal warfare in Ukraine and the invasion’s reverberations back in Russia, how readers in Russia have responded to the war, the nature of “proxy reporting,” and the challenges in maintaining journalistic objectivity when you’re treated like an outlaw. Meduza’s senior managers will also talk about how the outlet delivers content to people inside Russia, behind the Kremlin’s Internet firewall.
*Please note that this event is open to Stanford affiliates and invited guests only.
You can also follow Meduza’s English-language edition or support the newsroom’s work with one-time or recurring donations.
Philippines Conference Room
Encina Hall, Third Floor, Central, C330
616 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305
This event is open to Stanford affiliates and invited guests only.
The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), Stanford University’s hub for interdisciplinary research, education, and engagement on contemporary Asia, invites nominations for the 2023 Shorenstein Journalism Award. The award recognizes outstanding journalists and journalism organizations with outstanding track records of helping audiences worldwide understand the complexities of the Asia-Pacific region. The 2023 award will honor a recipient whose work has primarily appeared in Asian news media. APARC invites 2023 award nomination submissions from news editors, publishers, scholars, journalism associations, and entities focused on researching and interpreting the Asia-Pacific region. Submissions are due by Wednesday, February 15, 2023.
Sponsored by APARC, the award carries a cash prize of US $10,000. It alternates between recipients whose work has primarily appeared in Asian news media and those whose work has primarily appeared in American news media. The 2023 award will recognize a recipient from the former category.
For the purpose of the award, the Asia-Pacific region is defined broadly to include Northeast, Southeast, South, and Central Asia and Australasia. Both individual journalists with a considerable body of work and journalism organizations are eligible for the award. Nominees’ work may be in traditional forms of print or broadcast journalism and/or in new forms of multimedia journalism. The Award Selection Committee, whose members are experts in journalism and Asia research and policy, presides over the judging of nominees and is responsible for the selection of honorees.
An annual tradition since 2002, the award honors the legacy of APARC benefactor, Mr. Walter H. Shorenstein, and his twin passions for promoting excellence in journalism and understanding of Asia. Over the course of its history, the award has recognized world-class journalists who push the boundaries of coverage of the Asia-Pacific region and help advance mutual understanding between audiences in the United States and their Asian counterparts.
Recent honorees include NPR's Beijing Correspondent Emily Feng; Burmese journalist and human rights defender Swe Win; former Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Tom Wright; and the internationally esteemed champion of press freedom Maria Ressa, CEO and executive editor of the Philippine news platform Rappler and winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize.
Award nominations are accepted electronically through Wednesday, February 15, 2023, at 11:59 PM PST. For information about the nomination procedures and to submit a nomination please visit the award nomination entry page. The Center will announce the winner by April 2023 and present the award at a public ceremony at Stanford in the autumn quarter of 2023.
Please direct all inquiries to aparc-communications@stanford.edu.
Sponsored by Stanford University’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, the annual award recognizes outstanding journalists and journalism organizations for excellence in coverage of the Asia-Pacific region. News editors, publishers, scholars, and organizations focused on Asia research and analysis are invited to submit nominations for the 2023 award through February 15.
Cold War Radio is a fascinating look at how the United States waged the Cold War through the international broadcasting of Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL). Mark G. Pomar served in senior positions at VOA and RFE/RL from 1982 to 1993, during which time the Reagan and Bush administrations made VOA and RFE/RL an important part of their foreign policy. Pomar takes readers inside the two radio stations to show how the broadcasts were conceived and developed and the impact they had on international broadcasting, U.S.-Soviet relations, Russian political and cultural history, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Pomar provides nuanced analysis of the broadcasts and sheds light on the multifaceted role the radios played during the Cold War, ranging from instruments of U.S. Cold War policy to repositories of independent Russian culture, literature, philosophy, religion, and the arts. Cold War Radio breaks new ground as Pomar integrates his analysis of Cold War radio programming with the long-term aims of U.S. foreign policy, illuminating the role of radio in the peaceful end of the Cold War.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
This event is co-sponsored by CREEES Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.
