About the Topic: Media outlets in multi-party electoral systems tend to report on a wider range of policy issues and present more competing policy frames than media in two-party systems. This suggests we should observe more challenges to governments’ preferred framing of foreign policy in multi-party democracies. Citizens in multi-party democracies are better equipped to hold their leaders accountable, relative to their counterparts in two-party democracies. This, in turn, ought to result in greater caution when leaders consider the prospect of employing military force abroad. By analyzing the news coverage of interventions in Iraq and Libya, as well as public support for war and joining multinational coalitions that fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, Baum proposes a mechanism through which leaders can be constrained in decisions concerning war and peace. 

About the Speaker: Matthew Baum is the Marvin Kalb Professor of Global Communication and professor of public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. His research focuses on delineating the effects of mass media and public opinion on international conflict and cooperation and on American foreign policy, as well as on the role of the mass media and public opinion in contemporary American politics. He has published in over a dozen leading scholarly journals, including American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and International Organization. He is also author of Soft News Goes to War: Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy in the New Media Age and co-authored, War Stories: The Causes and Consequences of Public Views of War. Baum received his PhD in political science at the University of California, San Diego in 2000.

Speaker Bio:

David Blair is an Air Force officer with a background in Special Operations who has served as an instructor pilot and subject matter expert on illicit terror networks in Iraq, Afghanistan and other locations. Applying Social Network Analysis, he is now conducting research as a PhD candidate at Georgetown University on the application of principles from the intelligence community, such as data fusion and dark network assessment, to illicit markets in general and human trafficking in particular. David is a graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School and the US Air Force Academy.

About the Topic: Osama bin Laden’s demise was merely one sensational moment in the first decade of America’s shadow war, the transformation of the national security apparatus into a machine calibrated for man-hunting operations. Beyond the “big wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq, America has pursued its enemies with killer robots and special operations troops, sent privateers on assassination missions and to set up clandestine spying networks, and relied on mercurial dictators, unreliable foreign intelligence services and ragtag proxy armies. A new military-intelligence complex has emerged: the soldiers have become spies and spies have become soldiers.

The CIA, created as a Cold War espionage service, is now more than ever a paramilitary agency ordered by the White House to kill off America’s enemies: from the sustained bombing campaign in the mountains of Pakistan and the deserts of Yemen and North Africa, to the simmering clan wars in Somalia. For its part, the Pentagon has turned into the CIA, dramatically expanding spying missions in the dark spaces of U.S. foreign policy.

About the Speaker: Mark Mazzetti is a national security correspondent for The New York Times, based in the newspaper's Washington DC bureau. In 2009, he shared a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the intensifying violence in Pakistan and Afghanistan and Washington's response, and he has numerous other major journalism awards including the George Polk Award (with colleague Dexter Filkins) and the Gerald R. Ford Prize for defense reporting. Mazzetti has also written for the Los Angeles Times, U.S. News & World Report, and The Economist.

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.

Abstract:

Image