Advancing gender equality means a shift in thinking — from seeing boys and men as part of the problem, to including boys and men as part of the solution. (Credit: Sujoy Dhar/IPS)
Dear Editors,
Thanks for the story on working with males and females on gender equality.
You may [...]]]>
Advancing gender equality means a shift in thinking — from seeing boys and men as part of the problem, to including boys and men as part of the solution. (Credit: Sujoy Dhar/IPS)
Dear Editors,
Thanks for the story on working with males and females on gender equality.
You may also be interested in work that ICRW has done in this area. We developed and evaluated a program called “Gender Equity Movement in Schools” that is now being scaled up to 250 schools in Mumbai. Additionally, the project team has traveled to Vietnam for discussion on adapting the program to the Vietnamese setting.
…
Ellen Weiss
Senior Technical Advisor
Research Utilization and Development
International Center for Research on Women
Out of 157 countries, India ranks in the bottom three for girls’ and women’s education, economic participation and empowerment in the latest Gender Equity Index compiled by international NGO Social Watch, followed only by Côte d’Ivoire and Yemen.
ICRW’s two-year programme uses games and role-play to engage 12- to 14-year old boys and girls in fostering equitable relations and scrutinising the social norms that construct gender roles. The students also learn how to spot and combat gender-based violence.
How are you advancing the third millennium development goal? We want to hear from you! Send us your ideas, examples and comments for making the world more gender equitable: mdg3 [at] ips [dot] org.
]]>http://www.idealist.org/view/internship/HzfTFwmKC3H4/
Please spread among your networks.
We also thank David Elkins for his work these past months and wish him all the best.
]]>http://www.idealist.org/view/internship/HzfTFwmKC3H4/
Please spread among your networks.
We also thank David Elkins for his work these past months and wish him all the best.
]]>This is not an administrative internship. You won’t be filing our work, answering our phones and [...]]]>
This is not an administrative internship. You won’t be filing our work, answering our phones and getting us coffee (unless you’d like to). This is an incredible opportunity to write about the issues about which you are passionate, interview the thinkers you admire or loathe, and build a portfolio of substantive clips. Your pieces will be published by news outlets all over the world.
You’ll be expected to commit to a minimum of 15 hours per week and can be accommodated through the end of the school year – dates are negotiable. The internship is unpaid, although reasonable expenses incurred in the performance of work would be reimbursed. Past journalistic experience and foreign-language proficiency, particularly in Spanish, French, or Arabic, are desirable.
Applications with your CV and two to three writing samples (clips are preferred; academic papers are okay, too, but just send excerpts) can be sent to ipswas [at] igc [dot] org.
Since its founding in 1964, IPS, which is based in Rome, has specialized in the coverage of issues and events of interest to the Global South, particularly regarding social and economic development, human rights, the environment, and the foreign policies of the developed powers as they interact with developing countries.
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A word cloud of the most-used terms in Obama's 2011 State of the Union address
The administration usually loves to throw around the idea that the international arena is not defined by zero-sum games, but in last night’s State of the Union, Obama took a clear turn, sending mixed messages about his multipolar worldview with an address themed “Winning the Future.” In stark contrast to all the “win-win” rhetoric — another favored term — of past years, last night’s speech framed the competition for jobs through a “yours-or-mine,” “here-or-there” lens in a way that has never been done before.
Here’s a small sample of what Obama has said in the past (more from the White House and State):
Japan, Nov. 2010
Rapid growth will lead to a healthy competition for the jobs and industries of the future. And as President of the United States, I make no apologies for doing whatever I can to bring those jobs and industries to America. But what I’ve also said throughout this trip is that in the 21st century, there is no need to view trade, commerce, or economic growth as zero-sum games, where one country always has to prosper at the expense of another. If we work together, and act together, strengthening our economic ties can be a win-win for all of our nations.
India, Nov. 2010
We’ve all lived the world of globalization and know that it’s not a zero-sum game, that it creates jobs in the United States and also creates jobs in India.
Russia, July 2009
Competition in everything from astrophysics to athletics was treated as a zero-sum game. If one person won, then the other person had to lose. And then, within a few short years, the world as it was [during the Cold War] ceased to be.
Now, here are some excerpts of last night’s SOTU (emphasis mine):
At stake is whether new jobs and industries take root in this country, or somewhere else.
The future is ours to win.
We know what it takes to compete for the jobs and industries of our time. We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world. We have to make America the best place on Earth to do business.
But if we want to win the future — if we want innovation to produce jobs in America and not overseas — then we also have to win the race to educate our kids.
Obama’s first three (of few) references to a foreign country were to China and India — in the context of competing for jobs — and to the former U.S.S.R., or “the Soviets” — in relating how they “beat us into space.” He follows up with the speech’s tagline: “This is our generation’s Sputnik moment.” Wait a second, didn’t Secretary Clinton just admonish us two weeks ago for “Cold War-style” thinking based on “outdated,” “19th century” “zero-sum formulas?” “We reject those views,” she said. Yet, last night, the president made Sputnik — a symbol of the Cold War — one of the linchpins of his speech. And he reminded us repeatedly that “they” are “beating” us — China on solar research, the fastest computer, faster trains, newer airports; India on math and science education; South Korea on teachers and internet proliferation; Europe and Russia on infrastructure investments — and he told us that we must, must “win the future” (seven times) — one that is “ours to win.”
Here’s Robert Dreyfuss’s take:
He didn’t exactly trumpet American “exceptionalism,” and he didn’t proclaim America’s mission to remake the world, in so many words, but he inserted into his speech an odd phrase: “No one rival superpower is aligned against us.” Without saying so, he portrayed the United States, therefore, as the world’s lone superpower, an errant vision that reinforces the view of the neoconservatives and liberal interventionists that America has some vague responsibility for the rest of the world. “American leadership has been renewed and America’s standing has been restored,” he proclaimed. Really? Nowhere in his speech did Obama reflect on the necessary, humbling vision of the United States as a declining world power whose future depends on its reaching a series of accommodations with at least five or six other rising powers and regions.
If America’s standing has been restored, where was it before? And if it’s been restored, why are we trying to “win the future?” Of course, implicit in this phrase is that, right now, we’re losing — or, on track to lose.
[The] world has changed. And for many, the change has been painful… I’ve heard it in the frustrations of Americans who’ve seen their paychecks dwindle or their jobs disappear — proud men and women who feel like the rules have been changed in the middle of the game. They’re right. The rules have changed… yes, the world has changed. The competition for jobs is real.
Another shift in tone and rhetoric. What happened to this? Change is no longer framed as promising and auspicious, overflowing with effortless confidence and hopeful optimism. Now, the message is: Change hurts. And it’s happening whether we like it or not. So we better shape up or we. will. lose.
But let’s back up a bit, the administration may not actually be abandoning its multilateralism, although it certainly sounded like it last night. Obama’s very acknowledgement of foreign innovations, of other nations leading where we once did, can even be seen as legitimizing the administration’s multipolar worldview. “No one rival superpower is aligned against us” could be interpreted in various ways other than Dreyfuss’s — that there are many rival superpowers aligned against us, that there are no superpowers, that the other powers aren’t rivals, that the other powers aren’t aligned against us…
The “Winning the Future” address no doubt indicated a move to the center, so it’s no wonder that his words also reflected that shift, using words that House Republicans might respond to in the hopes that they won’t slaughter his budget proposals too mercilessly — as one commentator put it, selling liberal ideas with conservative language. Last week, Shah made the case for U.S.A.I.D.: Invest in development, or else you put national security at risk. Last night, it was: Invest in innovation, education and infrastructure, or else we’ll lose to the Soviets (or, China and India). This is our Sputnik moment, indeed. As Brett Schaefer said at yesterday’s House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on “Urgent Problems” at the United Nations — during which calls were made to withhold U.S. contributions and even defund the world body altogether — “The U.N. may have five official languages” — and Obama may be able to spout metaphors that allude to zero-sum games — “but the bottom line speaks loudest.”
]]>At last Friday’s CSIS discussion (co-sponsored by the OSI and NDI folks), President-elect of Cote d’Ivoire Alassane Ouattara was patched in via telecoference from his U.N.-protected bunker at the Abidjan Golf Hotel, addressing a U.S. audience for the first time since his disputed election.
Roughly 100 people attended, while organizers said that around 250 others were watching the webcast live on-line. CSIS Africa director Jennifer Cooke, who was moderating, marveled at that “big audience.” Given that it seemed to be a hastily-prepared discussion (the media alert was released only a day prior, and a misguided reporter even asked P.J. Crowley to confirm whether Ouattara was going to be meeting with State Department officials at the end of the week, which assumed that he was going to physically be in Washington), a few hundred people frankly isn’t that big of an audience — especially globally. But for a country roughly the size of New Mexico, and given the myriad of other crises taking place around the world, it is no doubt getting considerable attention.
To open the panel discussion after Ouattara hung up, OSI’s Akwe Amosu asked: “How often have we ever seen ECOWAS, the African Union, the U.S., the E.U., the U.N., international NGOs, civil society all agree about a situation — anywhere, but certainly not in Africa? It’s extraordinarily rare.”
U.N. leadership, typically cautious, has taken an uncharacteristically strong stance, planting its feet firmly on the side of Western-bred Ouattara, directing its 9,000-odd (now 11,000), 7 billion dollar UNOCI force to protect him at the Golf. Observers see this as but part of Ban’s re-election campaign — a move to appease the P-5, who hold his second term in their veto-wielding hands. The Western 3, to whom Ban panders unabashedly, back Ouattara without question, while China and Russia are more hesitant.
All this attention seemingly because what happens in Cote d’Ivoire, analysts say, is a test for Africa — a continent that will witness 17 elections this year alone. The CSIS panelists argued that if democracy can be ushered in (as peacefully as possible) on the Ivory Coast, it can be ushered in anywhere. Well, not exactly. But the fate of CIV is certainly a key concern for regional stability, with 25,000 refugees already displaced, around 600 people crossing the border to Liberia every day, nearly 300 killed so far and a third mass grave allegedly found, according to the latest U.N. figures.
So, of course regional bodies, Western powers and civil society are concerned. Supposedly, State Department official Jason A. Small told the CSIS audience, President Obama asks about Cote d’Ivoire every day. But also paying attention is a host of corporate speculators with direct stakes in the country’s future.
Woody Allan famously said that 90% of life is showing up. On Oct. 31, 2010, 80% of Cote d’Ivoire showed up to the polls. 54% of them voted for President-elect Ouattara. 46% didn’t. And when Laurent Gbabgo stubbornly proclaimed himself the victor last month, Dr. Christopher Fomunyoh of the NDI told us, only two ambassadors showed up to his swearing-in ceremony: those from Angola and Lebanon. “Very telling,” he quipped — the audience chuckled.
Who bothered to show up to the CSIS event? 153 people RSVP’d. There were, of course, representatives from think tanks, NGOs, universities, IFIs and members of the press, as well as officials from the State Department, USAID and the DOD (4 from Defense, actually) and other interested embassies (including Japan, which funds a UNIDO program in CIV, and two people from the E.U. delegation). But nearly 20% of the RSVP list, from what I can tell, were representatives of, or lobbyists for, corporations — mostly oil, finance and defense firms — who hold significant sway in Washington. Are democracy and human rights the only U.S. motives for CIV’s stability? Here’s a glance at that inventory of private stakeholders:
- Chevron — An international consulting firm’s memo from last summer about the Ivorian oil industry calls the country an “important regional refiner with ambitious plans to play a more central role in West Africa’s petroleum product market. The Gbabgo administration’s goal is to more than double production to 200,000 barrels per day within the next few years, and to bring a second refinery on line.”
- GoodWorks International, LLC — They have an office in Abidjan, Chevron is one of their clients and it’s co-headed by this guy… Wow, they pulled the MLK, Jr. card. Here’s a less acerbic (you won’t find the words “corporate whore” in this article), but just as critical NYT piece on Andy Young.
- KRL International, LLC — One of their clients is Kosmos Energy, a firm with direct interests and investments in the the oil-rich waters lapping the Ivory Coast. Another client is private security contractor Military Professional Resources, Inc., accused king of the mercenary peddlers and a subsidiary of L-3, one of the U.S.’s most favored defense contractors. A Leslie Wayne-penned NYT article from Oct. 2002 scrutinized the likes of MPRI, who has admitted that its trainees carried out ethnic cleansing in Croatia and whose CEO famously claimed to have “more generals per square foot than the Pentagon.” They say they’re in over 40 countries — and if they’re not already in CIV (most contracts aren’t publicly disclosed), they’re in the area. “In Africa, MPRI has conducted training programs on security issues for about 120 African leaders and more than 5,500 African troops,” Wayne wrote — and that was nearly a decade ago.
While we’re on the topic, according to Ouattara, there are 3,000 mercenaries in the country at the moment.
- The Ballard Group, LLC — Deloitte, a client, has an office in Abidjan which serves the immediate region and is its main hub for UEMOA (Economic and Monetary Union of West Africa) dealings.
- Jefferson Waterman International — By looking at its (partial) client list, which includes oil companies, defense contractors (like DynCorp, another beneficiary of the military-industrial complex) and entire governments, JWI could be interested in the fate of CIV for a number of reasons.
- Covington and Burling, LLP — Halliburton and Xe (formerly Blackwater) are clients. Enough said?
Other notables:
- IJET Intelligent Risk Systems
- Choharis Global Solutions
- Manchester Trade, Ltd.
- PRM Consulting
In Fomunyoh’s words, “Very telling.”
]]>From Jeff Neumann at Gawker:
We should stop trying to fit the events in Tunisia into a Western context. It [...]]]>
From Jeff Neumann at Gawker:
We should stop trying to fit the events in Tunisia into a Western context. It simplifies things, but it also overlooks the real forces of change at work in the North African country. This isn’t about Facebook, or Wikileaks, or Twitter — it’s about the people of Tunisia being fed up with decades of marginalization at the hands of a Western-backed kleptocracy, and taking charge of their own future. Among the issues that brought about the events of the last month: Low wages, few job prospects for a growing educated class, high food prices, and a heavy-handed government lead by former President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Did social media have an effect on events in Tunisia? Undoubtedly, yes. Is this a social media revolution? Absolutely not.
Jeff’s admonition made me think, uncomfortably, of Maureen Cain (2001):
The opposite of orientalism, occidentalism presumes the ‘sameness’ of key cultural categories, practices and institutions.
From Foucault’s analysis that language allows and perpetuates discriminations of otherness and sameness, Said took up the former. Our simplistic, quick-on-the-draw impulse to laud the Jasmin revolution as borne out of our Western high-technology and on a trajectory toward Western-style democracy is not only reflective of the latter, but smacks of cultural imperialism, Hall- and Schiller-style.
In Luke Allnet’s Tangled Web post-mortem, he links technological utopianism to the misguided and jejune lure of modernization theory:
The problem is that we so desperately want there to be a Twitter revolution… Not only do “Twitter revolution” explanations mean more page views, but they fulfill some deterministic urge within us — the dual promises of technology and modernity. There was as much breathless enthusiasm about the power of the telegraph to do good as there is the Internet.
Indeed, perhaps since the first sharpened rock, a long tradition exists of wanting to attach agency to emerging technologies. The determinism debate — tired as it is — is seemingly inexhaustible as new innovations continue to be discovered and made, along with new uses for them — to do good and bad.
The #SidiBouZid protesters weren’t the only tech-savvy party in the conflict: The Ben Ali regime muzzled public discourse both offline and in cyberspace, including by arresting Internet activists and phishing its citizens’ on-line accounts.
On Foreign Policy.com, Evgeny Morozov, after a bit of shameless self-promotion, raises the prospect of a Foucauldian cyber-Panopticon and alludes to the Internet-is-making-us-dumb and “slacktivism” theses (Sidenote: Kelly Gates, a former professor, does some compelling research on post-9/11 biometric surveillance):
Part of the argument that I’m making in The Net Delusion is that it’s wrong to assess the political power of the Internet solely based on its contribution to social mobilization: We should also consider how it empowers the government via surveillance, how it disempowers citizens via entertainment, how it transforms the nature of dissent by shifting it into a more virtual realm, how it enables governments to produce better and more effective propaganda, and so forth.
The Internet’s utility for the quick and broad dissemination of information — whether mind-numbing, propagandistic or seditious — cannot be discounted. A facet of the role-of-new-media-in-Tunisia debate is the role of mainstream media — where were they?
Contrary to some claims that in established outlets there was absolutely zero U.S. coverage of the rising unrest since Mohamed Bouazizi‘s self-immolation on Dec. 17, Reuters moved a story that showed up on NPR’s site on Dec. 21, LATimes.com featured a piece on Dec. 23, and the AP’s Bouazza Ben Bouazza was filing articles (which were being printed in U.S. newspapers) on the situation as early as Dec. 25.
Still, despite these examples, coverage of the country’s worsening political climate was meager in Western media.
Why wasn’t the turmoil in Tunisia on the mainstream agenda? If we apply Dan Hallin‘s theory of public discourse to this case, the answer is simple: because the political and media elite deemed it an unworthy story — U.S. political, economic and cultural interest in the country just doesn’t measure up in comparison to other places to which we pay attention.
In a post on this blog, Emad Mekay observed:
The United States was clearly far more busy with the collapse of the government in Lebanon, a country central to U.S. main ally in the region, Israel, after the Lebanese opposition there withdrew their ministers from the coalition government.
Until yesterday, when Ben Ali’s own regime buckled (a “newsworthy” event across the board), the story stood firmly in the Sphere of Deviance.
But up until then, it was almost exclusively being written and talked about elsewhere. If one was so inclined to learn more about the crescendoing turmoil in Tunisia, a simple Google search would have offered a wide array of non-mainstream, non-traditional news sources — including from independent outlets (Emad ran an article on Dec. 31), and yes, blogs, Twitter and YouTube.
Rob Gehrke, commenting on my last post, observed:
Tunisians surely didn’t need Wikileaks to tell them that life sucked under the dictator, they knew that already — events just seemed to reach a boiling point here, in part because of the economic hardships and general repression. What it did do, along with the new media, was to make US, as “westerners” more aware of the situation.
That was certainly true for me. But, Morozov also makes this note of #SidiBouZid cyber-observers:
Let’s not kid ourselves: This is still a very small audience of overeducated tech-savvy people interested in foreign policy. I bet that 90% of Twitter users are not like that.
Incidentally, what did hold the Twitterverse’s attention span this week? From Mashable, the top ten trending topics of Jan. 8-14:
And this morning, CNN Correspondent Ben Wedeman tweeted:
No one I spoke to in Tunis today mentioned twitter, facebook or wikileaks. It’s all about unemployment, corruption, oppression. #Tunisia
According to Ben, the Tunisian people aren’t talking about Twitter and, according to Mashable, Twitter isn’t talking about them.
So what are we talking about here?
In a newer post by Morozov (in which, [Sidenote:] he jokes about picking a fight with Clay Shirky, “social media guru” [whom I quoted last time] but ultimately chooses to aim his cross-hairs at shameless champion of globalization Thomas Friedman), he zooms out a bit:
Yes, we can have an intelligent debate about the virtues and downsides of social media — but I would not like us to lose sight of the broader intellectual debate about the Internet and democratization, especially in this post-Cablegate era.
Allnet — whom I quoted way up there, if you’ve already forgotten — wrote of the “dual promises of technology and modernity” but failed to mention a third promise often implicit in this kind of rhetoric: that of democracy.
Morozov’s work aims to debunk the cyber-optimist assumption that political uses of the Internet leads to democratization. It can go the other way, too, he argues.
The Tunisian example is an apt case study of both.
]]>I’m not necessarily in the habit of lobbing construction [...]]]>
I’m not necessarily in the habit of lobbing construction tools, but consider me and my interjections of estrogen and non-Iran-related musings the wrench in this cyber mix.
So, how to begin this inaugural post? With the eponymous, of course: Jim Lobe.
“It’s all because of your damned Internet,” he told me yesterday. I can’t recall to what he was referring when he said this — no doubt he was lamenting the disappearance of some facet of a fast-going print age — but I suppose it could be anything, really.
He doesn’t tweet, doesn’t have a Facebook account (but he has seen the Social Network — I haven’t even seen the Social Network) and he still cuts out, saves and uses actual, hard-copy newspaper clippings.
But even Jim, a self-professed technophobe, is indispensed to technological accoutrements.
He uses Skype to strategize with Eli in New York and to carp at the IPS editors based abroad. He watches live feeds of briefings held elsewhere so that he can openly mock the panelists from the comfort of his well-worn office chair — well, maybe that’s not why he follows webcasts, but it’s certainly a perk. And he has not one, but two desktop monitors.
The Frontline Club hosted a fascinating discussion this week with a few prominent members of the British mainstream media about the impact of WikiLeaks on journalism today (incidentally, I used two WikiLeaks cables in my latest article). Among the panel was Ian Katz of the Guardian, the newspaper which, as this new Vanity Fair piece shows, first consummated the media-WikiLeaks marriage.
A couple of weeks ago, the Council of Foreign Relations was asking the same question as the London group: Is this new technology changing how the news is made and communicated, and if so, how?
A few years ago, that question was being asked of Twitter and blogs. A couple decades ago, it was the Internet in general. Over half a century ago, it was television, and before that, radio.
In parallel paradigmatic debates, the questions circled around the economic, social and political effects of these information technologies (shout-out to UCSD! – and James Fowler and Dan Hallin, former professors).
I doubt that Jim is a technological determinist in the vein of Marshall McLuhan or Harrold Innis. It’s not all because of my, your, our, this damned Internet.
This damned Internet grew out of economic, social, political — in fact, military — needs, Lelia Green would argue. But now, does it create new ones? Chicken or egg?
I’ll leave the answers to the likes of Manuel Castells and the folks at Berkman, although social science’s favorite answer — and the easy way out — is often “both.”
Elizabeth Dickerson of Foreign Policy proposed yesterday that Tunisia might well be the first “WikiLeaks revolution.” She writes:
As in the recent so-called “Twitter Revolutions” in Moldova and Iran, there was clearly lots wrong with Tunisia before Julian Assange ever got hold of the diplomatic cables. Rather, WikiLeaks acted as a catalyst: both a trigger and a tool for political outcry.
For Clay Shirky, writing in the latest Foreign Affairs about technology, the public sphere and political change, it doesn’t matter whether or not technology is actually, definitively a trigger, just that it’s perceived to be:
Indeed, the best practical reason to think that social media can help bring political change is that both dissidents and governments think they can. All over the world, activists believe in the utility of these tools and take steps to use them accordingly. And the governments they contend with think social media tools are powerful, too, and are willing to harass, arrest, exile, or kill users in response.
Even before Anonymous, Cablegate, the War Logs and Hashtags, there was the EZLN and listservs, People Power and SMS.
This morning, I listened to Cote D’Ivoire’s president-elect Ouattara address a U.S. audience for the first time via teleconference at the Center for Strategic International Studies. Holed up in his UNOCI-protected stronghold in Abidjan, he said the Golf Hotel was “very nice.”
In between taking dutiful notes about Ouattara’s love for democracy (as a product of Western upbringing and education) and his vision for a democratic country — and continent — I followed breaking updates of his northern neighbor’s spiral into crisis here, here and here.
A sample, from Dima Khatib, Al-Jazeera correspondent:
CONFIRMED by Tunisians tweeting; STATE TV in Tunisian has been taken over by journalists calling for revolt #SidibouzidBREAKING: President Ben Ali just announced he is sacking his entire government.. Calls for early elections within 6 months #sidibouzidClashes are terrible on streets of capital Tunis RIGHT NOW. TERRIBLE.. #sidibouzid#SidiBouzid #Tunisia Ben Ali has left the country but some of his family members are being arrested at airport while trying to fleePresident of Tunisian Parliament takes over according to constitution which gives him 60 days till new elections #sidibouzid #tunisia
Ladies and gentleman: THE TUNISIAN REGIME IS OFFICIALLY DOWN. #sidibouzid #tunisia
The revolution is live.
What’s next?… This damned technophile is on the edge of her keyboard.
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