We are pleased to be able to announce that the Program on Liberation Technology will have two new visiting scholars from September 2010 - Patrick Meier and Evgeny Morozov.

Patrick Meier is a fourth-year PhD Candidate at The Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy and Co-Director of the Program on Crisis Mapping and Early Warning at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. His dissertation research analyzes the impact of the information revolution on the balance of power between repressive rule and civil resistance. He is particularly interested in how repressive regimes and resistance groups use information communication technologies to further their own strategic and tactical goals. Patrick serves as Director of Crisis Mapping and Strategic Partnerships at Ushahidi and co-founded the International Network of Crisis Mappers. He is also on the Board of Advisors of  DigiActive and Digital Democracy, two leading digital activism and democracy initiatives. Patrick blogs at iRevolution and Early Warning.

• View Patrick's presentation to our Liberation technology seminar class, "The Impact of Technology Access on Protest Frequency in Authoritarian Regimes"
• Watch Patrick's short talk about using crowdsourcing during relief efforts in Haiti
• Read more about his dissertation research

Evgeny Morozov is a leading thinker and commentator on the political impact of the Internet and a well known opponent of internet utopianism.  He is a contributing editor to Foreign Policy and runs the magazine's Net Effect blog about the Internet's impact on global politics. Evgeny is currently a Yahoo! fellow at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University. Prior to his appointment to Georgetown, he was a fellow at the Open Society Institute, where he remains on the board of the Information Program. Before moving to the US, Evgeny was based in Berlin and Prague, where he was Director of New Media at Transitions Online, a media development NGO active in 29 countries of the former Soviet bloc. He is writing a book about the Internet and democracy, to be published this fall by PublicAffairs.

• View Evgeny's presentation to our Liberation technology seminar class, "Authoritarian Governments in Cyberspace"
• Watch Evgeny's TED Global talk, "How the Internet strengthens dictatorships"
• Read his article for Prospect, "How Dictators Watch us on the Web"
• Read his Boston Review article, "Texting Towards Utopia"

We are looking forward to welcoming Patrick and Evgeny to the Stanford community in a few months time. 

By the end of the year, scholars of security studies will be able to use a new website to learn how terrorist and militant organizations evolve over time and how they collaborate with--and compete against--one another.

"Mapping Terrorist Organizations," an interdisciplinary online project headed by CISAC Senior Fellow Martha Crenshaw, will focus initially on providing detailed, annotated information on militant and terrorist groups operating in Iraq since 2003, Pakistan and Afghanistan--areas of current policy concern for the United States. Future plans involve expanding research to include groups in Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and the United States and, if time and resources permit, to include major historical groups such as the Russian revolutionary movement.

The three-year project is funded by a $500,000 grant awarded to Crenshaw last fall by the National Science Foundation. It is part of the Department of Defense's Minerva Initiative launched in 2008 to support "research related to basic social and behavioral science of strategic importance to U.S. national security policy."

"No such study exists in the literature of terrorism," Crenshaw wrote in a report on the project. "Evolutionary mapping can enhance our understanding of how terrorist groups develop and interact with each other and with the government, how strategies of violence and non-violence are related, why groups appear and disappear, and how opportunities and constraints in the environment change organizational behavior over time." Furthermore, Crenshaw noted that visual mapping of highly complex, shifting information is likely to stimulate new observations that might otherwise have been overlooked."

Student involvement

Daniel Cassman, a 2010 CISAC honors graduate in political science and computer science, is building the site, which will contain interactive timelines, family trees and detailed group profiles. Cassman's programming--developed specifically for the website--will allow scholars to better understand and analyze patterns and structures of violent and non-violent opposition groups in multiple contexts.

At a June 1 meeting of a half dozen students working on the project, Crenshaw said one of the most challenging problems facing researchers is documenting how terrorist organizations evolve over time. With no official sources to rely on, Crenshaw's team spent the last year combing through government documents and academic research, autobiographies, newspaper reports and even jihadist websites-many of which disappear as quickly as they pop up. Crenshaw acknowledges that "precision in this field is elusive" even though the project emphasizes using documented primary sources. Students working on the project include Christy Abizaid and Sadika Hameed, 2010 graduates of the International Policy Studies master's program, and undergraduates Rob Conroy, Asfandyar Mir and Ari Weiss. CISAC staff member Julia McKinnon is assisting Crenshaw as well.

"We're keenly interested in changes in the sizes of groups," Crenshaw said. "That's one of the hardest things to figure out." It also is difficult to know when a group dissolves, becomes dormant or morphs into something else, she said. To obtain as complete a profile as possible, the website will include information about failed and foiled plots, as well as successful attacks, she said.

Charles Nicas, a student in International Policy Studies and Public Policy, said he joined Crenshaw's project to learn more about militancy and terrorism in South Asia. "The U.S. presence in Afghanistan and the fact that Pakistan is a nuclear-armed country mean that the U.S. will be involved in this region...for a long time," he wrote in an email. "The complexity of the situation takes a lot of research to understand."

Nicas's area of work focuses on sectarian groups in Pakistan, mainly Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP) and its offshoot Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), both virulently anti-Shia groups. Nicas said SSP was founded in 1985 with state support and spawned LeJ in the mid-1990s. The groups are based in Punjab province in eastern Pakistan but had a significant presence in neighboring Afghanistan during Taliban rule. Both have become increasingly allied with militant groups in the border region, including al-Qa'ida, and are part of an umbrella group known as the Punjabi Taliban. "I've been surprised to learn how far back the roots of this problem go, which makes the challenge of effectively countering it especially daunting," Nicas said.

Terrorist organizations profiled

In addition to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Crenshaw's website will feature profiles of the following groups:

• 1920s Revolution Brigades
• Mujahideen Army
• Islamic Army in Iraq
• Ansar al-Islam
• Al-Qa'ida in Iraq

Group profiles include the following attributes:

• The group's name, including pseudonyms and name changes
• A history with a timeline, including whether the group is active, dormant or disbanded
• The group's goals/ideology
• Key leaders
• Group size (by date)
• Resources in the form of money and weapons
• Outside intervention and influence
• Dates of first and last known attacks
• Targets
• Area of Operations
• Tactics
• Political activities (by date)
• Key operational experiences (by date)
• Known splinter groups (by date)
• Relationship to other groups (by date)
• Relationship with surrounding population/popular support
• Defining characteristics/Major events

Abebe Gellaw, CDDRL visiting scholar from Ethiopia, writes in the Wall Street Journal on Ethiopia's "embarrassing" elections which delivered a fourth term for Meles Zenawi.

Stanford seniors Sam Stone and Ashley Lohmann have been awarded the Firestone Medal and Perry Prize, respectively, for their theses on energy import dependence and the Jihadist terrorist threat to the United States since 9/11.

Stone and Lohmann discussed their findings during a CISAC seminar on June 2. Their papers are available below.

The Firestone Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Research recognizes the top 10 percent of all honors theses in social science, science and engineering. The William J. Perry Prize is awarded to a student for excellence in policy-relevant research in international security studies. Both recipients are students in CISAC's Undergraduate Honors Program in International Security Studies, directed this year by Senior Fellow Stephen J. Stedman and Thomas Fingar, the Oksenberg/Rohlen Fellow.

Sam Stone, a student in the Department of Mathematics and Program in International Relations, wrote "Gas & Geopolitics: The Foreign Policy Implications of Energy Import Dependency."

Stone's thesis abstract states: "In recent years, much attention has focused on the dangers of dependency on energy imports. Fears of energy import dependency are particularly acute in Eastern Europe, where most countries remain heavily dependent on Russian gas, but similarly dependent relationships exist across the globe. Most energy security research focuses on exporters; this thesis contributes to the study of energy security by exploring the effects of energy dependence on importers."

During 2010-11 academic year, Stone, as a Fulbright Fellow, will study Russian foreign policy, in particular energy security issues and nuclear nonproliferation efforts at Moscow State University. He also plans to continue working with the Stanford US-Russia Forum, an initiative that brings together American and Russian students to explore global issues.

Ashley Lohmann, a student in the Program in International Relations, wrote, "Jihad on Main Street: Explaining the Threat of Jihadist Terrorism to the American Homeland since 9/11."

Lohmann's abstract states: "Since September 11, 2001, 26 jihadist plots and attacks have targeted the American homeland, but because the details of the plots and attacks as well as the profiles of their perpetrators vary greatly, scholars, government officials, and other authorities still disagree about the seriousness of threat posed by jihadist terrorism to the United States. This study provides a clearer understanding of the nature of jihadist terrorism in the U.S. by examining all 26 plots and attacks in detail. It concludes that jihadist terrorism is generally a minimally threatening, homegrown phenomenon, but some plots and attacks still emerge that do pose a serious threat to U.S. national security."

Stedman and Fingar described the award-winning theses as the very best in an exceptionally strong field of submissions by members of this year's honor's class.  "Sam Stone's creative and rigorous use of case studies and 'large N' data to to examine hypotheses about the effects of energy dependence gives decision makers theoretical and empirical tools to anticipate and ameliorate unwanted consequences of dependence on foreign sources of oil and gas," Fingar said. "Ashley Lohmann's rigorous examination of factors contributing to the success or failure of Jihadist threats to the American homeland provides valuable insights on the magnitude and character of such threats and how best to address them. These were the best, but other theses were also worthy of special recognition and we learned much from the work of every member of the class."

Norway is lauded as the rare example of a major oil and gas exporting country that has managed to avoid the "resource curse." A new study by PESD Associate Director Mark C. Thurber and Consulting Research Associate Benedicte Tangen Istad looks more closely at the Norwegian petroleum experience and the role of national oil company Statoil in it. The reality is messy and political but nonetheless an impressive story of how Norway built a vibrant domestic oil and gas industry on the back of national champion Statoil and a robust system of governance that could curb Statoil's excesses as needed at a few key junctures.