Non-State Actors

By Péter MARTON To answer the question in the title:* I would. Ironically, one of the best texts so far on a subject whose study originates from the Chinese context, with examples like the Human Rights Society of China in mind, is this brief paper (by Chris Carothers). A research memo, from a workshop . It is not bad for starters, though, and at least it offers a basic typology that covers "propaganda", "militant" and "development" NGOs. And some of the uses these have for autocratic and, let's say, imperfectly democratic political regimes (such as attracting funding away from genuine NGOs/civil society, or creating the semblance of mass support for government decisions, policies and entire agendas, even). This is great, but of course the political regimes in question are more creative than this. Everyone who hasn't been living under a bucket lately is probably aware of the presence of GONGOs in politics, and how that is felt in even mo...

It may be a familiar thing by now on this blog: once again I am preparing to speak at an event, this time about the Rohingya exodus from Myanmar, and I am putting together some notes to share (relatively briefly this time) before I head off to do this. For a reminder, this ( see map ) is the part of the world we are talking about. No offense meant by including that map above. You may know more about Myanmar than me. But even as a non-Myanmar-specialist I will risk saying that in general people in the West know very little about the place. Many are not really sure if Myanmar should be Burma rather, because everyone heard of the military junta (so who knows if using one or the other name in reference to the country is appropriate or not). Many may have heard that there was some kind of "democratic" change but in pictures appearing in the media about the country generals in military uniform and military uniforms in general still proliferate. And there are those names for th...

By Péter MARTON All that concern about Facebook's impact on democracy in the wake of the 2016 US presidential elections (mainly, along with some other developments elsewhere) has now apparently caused the company to react . So speculate some. This is a picture of me hearing about this. Trying to figure out an alternative to setting up sophisticated filters, to try to weed out fake news and other kinds of crap from the Newsfeed, it seems they came up with the idea to turn the Newsfeed into... just Feed. Because that filtering shit is hard. To remain: friend feed + junk feed. "The experiment, which began 19 October and is still ongoing, involves limiting the core element of Facebook’s social network to only personal posts and paid adverts. So-called public posts, such as those from media organisation Facebook pages, are being moved to a separate “explore” feed timeline." The declared aim of this is to see if people want personal posts and posts from pag...

By Péter MARTON 1. " What Facebook did to American democracy " -- and not only to American democracy of course. A few days old but worth your time, at The Atlantic . 2. The BBC's summary (by Middle East correspondent Jim Muir) of the Islamic State's story so far, a timely a look back, but with a future to ponder. It may also be interesting to explore the connections between the two subjects as there may be many. If social media facilitates the coming to power of populists, if it rewards socially polarising media and communication strategies and policies, if it helps the spread of "fake news" as well as semi-informed and biased opinions, it can provide opportunities to various actors, and it can also contribute to creating and sustaining reservoirs of hatred that can feed violent movements. On the other hand, it is ironic that whereas back in the 1970s developing countries were demanding "information sovereignty" as part of a "New Wo...