Abstract
The manifestations of 'open' are permeating the society enabled by the rise of participatory culture and improved communication technologies. In her research, Tanja Aitamurto examines the impact of openness on traditionally closed processes such as journalism, policy-making and design. Aitamurto draws on several case studies, in which collective intelligence is harnessed through crowdsourcing, open innovation and co-creation. Her work is based on data from 150 in-depth interviews and about 8,000 data points recorded by netnography. Aitamurto's research is situated in social sciences, informed by organization studies and management science and engineering. She finds that the 'open' challenges the incumbent power structures when participatory mechanisms become a means to practice social control.
Tanja Aitamurto is a visiting researcher at the Program on Liberation Technology at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford. In her PhD project she examines how collective intelligence, whether harvested by crowdsourcing, co-creation or open innovation, impacts incumbent processes in journalism, public policy making and design process. Her work has been published in several academic publications, such as the New Media and Society. Related to her studies, she advises the Government and the Parliament of Finland about Open Government principles, for example about how open data and crowdsourcing can serve democratic processes.
Aitamurto has previously studied at the Center for Design Research and at the Innovation Journalism Program at Stanford. She is a PhD Student at the Center for Journalism, Media and Communication Research at Tampere University in Finland, and she holds a Master’s Degree in Public Policy, and a Master of Arts in Humanities. Prior to returning to academia, she made a career in journalism in Finland specializing in foreign affairs, doing reporting in countries such as Afghanistan, Angola and Uganda. She has also taught journalism at the University of Zambia, in Lusaka, and worked at the Namibia Press Agency, Windhoek. More about Tanja’s work at www.tanjaaitamurto.com and on Twitter @tanjaaita.
Wallenberg Theater
Thomas Hegghammer is the Zukerman fellow at CISAC for 2012-2013 and senior research fellow at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) in Oslo. He has previously held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and at Harvard, Princeton and New York Universities. Thomas studies militant Islamism with a particular focus on transnational jihadi groups. His book Jihad in Saudi Arabia (Cambridge 2010) won the silver medal of the Arthur Ross Book Award from the Council of Foreign Relations. He also co-authored Al-Qaida in its own Words (Harvard 2008) and The Meccan Rebellion (Amal Press 2011). His other publications include academic articles for International Security and theJournal of Peace Research, op-eds for the New York Times and the Guardian, and reports for the International Crisis Group and the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. He has commented widely in international media and has testified in parliamentary hearings on terrorism legislation in Canada and Denmark.
Thomas currently works on two main research projects, one on the Islamist foreign fighter phenomenon and the other on socio-cultural practices (rituals, music, etc) in terrorist groups. He is in the process of completing two books: a monograph about the jihadi ideologue Abdallah Azzam and an edited volume about “jihad culture”, both for Cambridge University Press. While at CISAC, he will begin work on a new comparative study of socio-cultural practices in terrorist groups of different ideological persuasions.
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Department of Political Science
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David Laitin is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science and a co-director of the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford. He has conducted field research in Somalia, Nigeria, Spain, Estonia and France. His principal research interest is on how culture – specifically, language and religion – guides political behavior. He is the author of “Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-heritage Societies” and a series of articles on immigrant integration, civil war and terrorism. Laitin received his BA from Swarthmore College and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.
Security concerns at the Olympics have dominated headlines over the past month after private contractor G4S failed to recruit the number of guards it had promised. The British government responded by deploying military personnel, and now there are more British troops guarding the streets of London than in Afghanistan.
Martha Crenshaw, a senior fellow at the FSI and CISAC, explains what kinds of threats exist at the Games, the challenges of securing such a large event and whether the failure by G4S will make the Olympics an easier or more attractive target.
What motivates terrorists?
Terrorists want to make a political statement. So you have to ask, "What kind of political statement would attacking the Olympics be?" Al-Qaida could regard the Olympics the way they regard the United Nations. They attacked U.N. headquarters in Iraq and a U.N. agency in Algiers. They regard the U.N. as a tool of the oppressor. That said, they don't talk about the Olympics the way they do about the U.S. – the great Satan, etc. And Muslim countries are competing in the Olympics. Of course they oppose many of the regimes of those countries, like Saudi Arabia.
But I'm not aware of any specific threat to the Olympics or chatter about the Olympics.
Is al-Qaida the only terrorist group to be concerned about?
People will be concerned about Hezbollah now because of the series of foiled attacks against Israel and the successful attack in Bulgaria. Hezbollah and al-Qaida have global reach. But when we talk about al-Qaida, we can't forget the groups affiliated with the main organization: al-Qaida in Iraq and al-Qaida in Yemen, for example. There's also the Pakistani Taliban and other al-Qaida linked groups there.
What kinds of terrorist attacks are of most concern?
We've tended to think, and I stress think, that al-Qaida wants spectaculars. In terms of their attacks in general, targets have often been public transportation. Think of Madrid and London. They're also fond of multiple targets at once, and as regards the U.S., it seems they're still focused on airplanes. We could be dead wrong and they could do something that's totally different but this is the pattern.
It could be that they'd like a big explosion in the middle of Trafalgar Square, but it wouldn't have to be during the Olympics. There are crowds in Trafalgar Square all the time. However, if Britain were the target, terrorists might think it's particularly embarrassing and spectacular to attack during the Olympics because it would heighten the fear factor. On the other hand, it's easier to mount an attack when there is not the high level of Olympics security.
Has there always been a great fear of attacks at Olympics?
The hostage taking in Munich in 1972 (of Israeli athletes) and then the bombing in Atlanta in 1996 have made us afraid that something would happen at the Olympics because it's so prominent.
A recent study concludes that security has been effective. But we don't really know that entirely. We don't know what the terrorists are thinking. We don't know whether they looked at all of the security precautions and said, "This is going to take a lot of work and we will probably fail because security is so good. Let's do something else."
Is London exceptional, because of its size or politics?
From the point of view of this year's Olympics, London could be as much of a target as the Olympics themselves. But Britain was attacked in 2005 because of their involvement in the war in Iraq, now over. I'm not sure if that changes Britain's vulnerability. We're in the realm of speculation because we don't really know how the adversary is thinking about this. So there is a risk in London but if I were in London I'd be more afraid of a traffic jam.
What does the failure by G4S to provide enough guards say about using private contractors to protect public safety?
Outsourcing security is widespread. A lot of people who were with the military in Iraq and are in Afghanistan are contractors. Everybody contracts out security these days.
But, the question deserves to be looked at. Is it a good idea to rely on these private firms? Would it be a good idea even if all of their people showed up? Are their guards reliable, are they trustworthy, or do they pose a security problem? Have they all been properly vetted to ensure they haven't been infiltrated by al-Qaida and don't include people who are mentally unstable? It raises a lot of questions about who provides security against terrorism for very large international events.
Does the use of military personnel at the last minute create vulnerabilities?
It's possible to imagine that some very determined and nefarious groups would look at this situation and say it's not really going to win us much fame and glory to go shooting a bunch of private security guards, but now the military is a target by being deployed on the streets of London. If someone wanted to attack them, they might think here is the opportunity.
But this switch also means that anybody who decided now that they wanted to target the military or the Olympics won’t have much time to plan. Typically, not always but typically, attacks that cause large numbers of casualties and a lot of destruction have been elaborately planned for a long time – even the lone wolf types like Anders Breivik in Norway or the recent attack in Colorado. Individuals or groups plan in advance and work to get the weapons and explosives, which is not easy. So even if somebody got the idea of doing something it wouldn't be so simple in this short time to come up with a plan and acquire the right materials.
How hard is it to guard a place like London, as well as the Olympics?
It's hard to protect lots of people in a big city. There are lots of crowds, lots of movement. It's not as though you can extend a perimeter; it's a moving target all the time. The Olympics might be a target, London has been a target, so the combination of the two could cancel each other out but I'm sure security officials are worried.
Yet, at this point, if I were the British government dealing with the fallout of the security firm's lack of preparedness, I'd much rather rely on soldiers who have been vetted and have experience than security officers who were quickly brought together.
Brooke Donald is a writer for the Stanford News Service.
Abstract:
NATO since the end of the Cold War has emphasized democracy as political rationale both in rhetoric and in action, not only with regards to enlargement and partnership policies but also, increasingly, in its approach to out-of-area missions and state-building. While enlargement, and thus the ability to promote democratic change is consolidating in the Western Balkans, NATO faces considerable challenges to its political agenda both in Afghanistan and in its Eastern neighborhood. The interesting question is: what drives an organization like NATO (after all, a collective defense alliance) to assume such ‘soft’ security responsibilities in face of these challenges? NATO represents an interesting amalgam of interests and motivations that can possibly explain democratization as a political rationale and how it has come to vary over time. The seminar has both an empirical and a theoretical goal: to introduce NATO as a case contributing to existing studies on Western democracy promotion that tend to focus predominantly on either the U.S. or the E.U.; and to offer a realist foreign policy explanation to democracy promotion in contrast to the dominant liberalist or constructivist literature on the issue.
Speaker Bio:
Henrik Boesen Lindbo Larsen is a CDDRL visiting researcher 2011-12, while researching on his PhD project titled NATO Democracy Promotion: the Geopolitical Effects of Declining Hegemonic Power. He expects to obtain his PhD from the University of Southern Denmark and the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) in 2013.
Henrik Larsen’s PhD project views democracy promotion as a policy resulting from power transitions as mediated through the predominant narratives of great powers. It distinguishes between two main types of democracy promotion, the ability to attract (enlargement, partnerships) and the ability to impose (out-of-area missions, state-building). NATO’s external policies are increasingly pursued with a lower intensity and/or with a stronger geographical demarcation.
Prior to his PhD studies, Henrik Larsen held temporary positions for the UNHCR in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congoand with the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Denmark working with Russia & the Eastern neighborhood. He holds an MSc in political science from the University of Aarhus complemented with studies at the University of Montreal, Sciences Po Paris and the University of Geneva. He has been a research intern at École Militaire in Paris and he is member of the Danish roster for election observation missions for the OSCE and the EU.
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Henrik Boesen Lindbo Larsen is a CDDRL visiting researcher 2011-12, while researching on his PhD project titled NATO Democracy Promotion: the Geopolitical Effects of Declining Hegemonic Power. He expects to obtain his PhD from the University of Southern Denmark and the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) in 2013.
Henrik Larsen’s PhD project views democracy promotion as a policy resulting from power transitions as mediated through the predominant narratives of great powers. It distinguishes between two main types of democracy promotion, the ability to attract (enlargement, partnerships) and the ability to impose (out-of-area missions, state-building). NATO’s external policies are increasingly pursued with a lower intensity and/or with a stronger geographical demarcation.
Prior to his PhD studies, Henrik Larsen held temporary positions for the UNHCR in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congoand with the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Denmark working with Russia & the Eastern neighborhood. He holds an MSc in political science from the University of Aarhus complemented with studies at the University of Montreal, Sciences Po Paris and the University of Geneva. He has been a research intern at École Militaire in Paris and he is member of the Danish roster for election observation missions for the OSCE and the EU.
Michael Aagaard Seeberg is a CDDRL visiting researcher in winter and spring 2012, while researching on his PhD project titled “Democracy Against the Odds”. He expects to obtain his PhD from Aarhus University, Denmark in the fall 2013.
Speaker Bio:
Michael Seeberg’s PhD project seek to understand the emergence of stable (though minimalist) democracy in a number of countries despite low levels of modernization, lack of democratic neighboring countries and other factors consistently related to democratic stability in the literature. Cases in point are Ghana, India, Mauritius and Mongolia. The study of deviant democracies can give us some leverage in understanding the determinants of democracy – determinants that have not really been uncovered yet. Current accounts stress the absence of ‘damaging factors’ as decisive for the successful emergence of democracy. With the project, Michael Seeberg hope to refine existing explanations of democratization while, on the other hand identify the positive drivers that also contributed to new stable democracies. The overall aim is to build a foundation for a better understanding of why some regime changes result in stable democracies whereas others are stuck as hybrid regimes or return to the set of outright autocracies.
Prior to his PhD studies, Michael Seeberg has been a visiting scholar at the University of Washington, Seattle, assistant attaché at the Danish Mission to the United Nations in New York, and a visiting scholar at the Danish Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen, Denmark. He holds an MSc in political science from Aarhus University. Concurrently with his PhD studies, Michael Seeberg is engaged in the Scouts in Denmark, where he is a member of the executive board at the YMCA Scouts, and member of the Steering Committee for the Project supporting Guiding and Scouting in Eastern and Central Europe.
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Michael Aagaard Seeberg is a CDDRL visiting researcher in winter and spring 2012, while researching on his PhD project titled “Democracy Against the Odds”. He expects to obtain his PhD from Aarhus University, Denmark in the fall 2013.
Michael Seeberg’s PhD project seek to understand the emergence of stable (though minimalist) democracy in a number of countries despite low levels of modernization, lack of democratic neighboring countries and other factors consistently related to democratic stability in the literature. Cases in point are Ghana, India, Mauritius and Mongolia. The study of deviant democracies can give us some leverage in understanding the determinants of democracy – determinants that have not really been uncovered yet. Current accounts stress the absence of ‘damaging factors’ as decisive for the successful emergence of democracy. With the project, Michael Seeberg hope to refine existing explanations of democratization while, on the other hand identify the positive drivers that also contributed to new stable democracies. The overall aim is to build a foundation for a better understanding of why some regime changes result in stable democracies whereas others are stuck as hybrid regimes or return to the set of outright autocracies.
Prior to his PhD studies, Michael Seeberg has been a visiting scholar at the University of Washington, Seattle, assistant attaché at the Danish Mission to the United Nations in New York, and a visiting scholar at the Danish Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen, Denmark. He holds an MSc in political science from Aarhus University. Concurrently with his PhD studies, Michael Seeberg is engaged in the Scouts in Denmark, where he is a member of the executive board at the YMCA Scouts, and member of the Steering Committee for the Project supporting Guiding and Scouting in Eastern and Central Europe.
"Mongolian Miracles and Central Asian Disappointments: Nomadic Culture, Clan Politics and the 16. Soviet Republic”, Politica, 2009, 41(3): 315-330.
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Tanja Aitamurto was a visiting researcher at the Program on Liberation Technology at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. In her PhD project she examined how collective intelligence, whether harvested by crowdsourcing, co-creation or open innovation, impacts incumbent processes in journalism, public policy making and design process. Her work has been published in several academic publications, such as the New Media and Society. Related to her studies, she advises the Government and the Parliament of Finland about Open Government principles, for example about how open data and crowdsourcing can serve democratic processes. Aitamurto now works as a postdoctoral fellow at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Stanford.
Aitamurto has previously studied at the Center for Design Research and at the Innovation Journalism Program at Stanford University. She is a PhD Student at the Center for Journalism, Media and Communication Research at Tampere University in Finland, and she holds a Master’s Degree in Public Policy, and a Master of Arts in Humanities. Prior to returning to academia, she made a career in journalism in Finland specializing in foreign affairs, reporting in countries such as Afghanistan, Angola and Uganda. She has also taught journalism at the University of Zambia, in Lusaka, and worked at the Namibia Press Agency, Windhoek.
She also actively participates in the developments she is studying; she crowdfunded a reporting and research trip to Egypt in 2011 to investigate crowdsourcing in public deliberation. She also practices social entrepreneurship in the Virtual SafeBox (http://designinglibtech.tumblr.com/), a project, which sprang from Designing Liberation Technologies class at Stanford. Tanja blogs on the Huffington Post and writes about her research at PBS MediaShift. More about Tanja’s work at www.tanjaaitamurto.com and on Twitter @tanjaaita.
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Stanford University
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As an Anna Lindh fellow at The Europe Center, Astrid Hedin is working on her research project “Codetermination Legislation in Europe during the Cold War”, financed by the Swedish Research Council. The project studies the evolution of legislation at the level of the undertaking in several European countries, including Sweden.
Astrid is a tenured Associate Professor (lektor) at the Department of Global Political Studies, Malmo University, Sweden, where her current teaching includes International Organisation, Globalization and Welfare States, and Public Organization and Management.
Astrid has earlier written on the travel regulations for professionals under communist regimes, and the concept of participatory totatalitarianism. Her Ph.D. dissertation was "The Politics of Social Networks" on the democratic era reform of the former East German communist party SED, from a perspective of organization theory.
A native of Lund in southern Sweden, Astrid Hedin holds a Ph.D. degree in political science from Lund University, and is an Affiliate Associate Professor [docent] of the Department of Government at Uppsala University.
Sponsored by the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, the Europe Center, the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and the Stanford Humanities Center
Encina Hall West, Room 208
Encina Hall West, Room 208
Encina Hall West, Room 208