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What Derails Political Protest
This is not the NDN. It is not even a railroad in Central Asia. It's in Australia. Photo: Louise Docker.
I continue to be troubled by the theses represented in this paper: "Networked Authoritarianiam and the Demonization of Social Media in the Republic of Azerbaijan."
As I said, the excerpt of the paper published appears to suggest that documenting abuses and protesting them is futile and may even harm protest movements or more incremental reform. It's an argument against the human rights documentalist approach and an argument for a pragmatic accommodation to the regimes to avoid further human suffering and perhaps preservation of a core of intellectuals for a better day.
I haven't misread this excerpt: the theses are there to be seen. Curiously, Sarah Kendzior implies in the comments here that you cannot criticize a paper when only the excerpt is available; her co-author Katy Pearce even implies that expressing concern about the logic of certain theses is "an attack". Why the thin skin, ladies? If you don't want your paper read and critiqued by the general public before its time, don't publish excerpts, or even keep the entire paper hidden behind a paywall or academic log-on.
Worse, following the now-standard Registan smear method, Kendzior implies that my "poor analytical skills" (i.e. my normal and legitimate critique of this excerpt and its theses) means I shouldn't be employed in this field. My, that's rather severe punishment -- and truly an illegitimate means of debate -- for having a different opinion and expressing legitimate concern about the inexorable logic of the paper as it stands now: that the message activists should draw is to cease being active -- to "watch out," because their activism not only is futile against such authoritarian regimes, it may actually harm further progress that might be achieved other ways, or even the longer term prospect of the more thorough revolution. Say the authors:
Many assume that greater exposure to information technology leads to increased activism in authoritarian states.[i] [...] In the Journal of Communication article, we suggest the opposite: that greater documentation and publicizing of suppressed dissent is often what derails political protest. We argue that this is particularly evident in the authoritarian countries of the former Soviet Union – the very countries, ironically, that fuel the misguided Cold War analogy. Often neglected in analyses of the internet, these countries have a unique approach to internet regulation that represents a "middle path" between open access and censorship
Their approach, rooted in the particularities of post-Soviet political culture, exploits problems of trust, cynicism, and insecurity in the population.[ii] Other scholars of the internet have defined these internet regulation practices as "networked authoritarianism". Rebecca MacKinnon defines networked authoritarianism as when "an authoritarian regime embraces and adjusts to the inevitable changes brought by digital communication". States that practice networked authoritarianism do not strictly censor online dissent: they compete with it, making an example out of online dissenters in order to affirm the futility of activism to a disillusioned public. This is what we believe happened in Azerbaijan. Our study found that the Azerbaijanis who were most active online during the donkey blogger affair were the ones whose attitude to protest was most negatively affected by the crackdowns on activism.
Obviously, I'm not the only one who will find problems with all these theses, even starting with the simple observation about the milk of human kindess that has been more on evidence than you might imagine even in those societies ridden with distrust and cynicism. I'm also not convinced that "networked authoritarianism" functions quite the way Rebecca MacKinnon indicates. This is Evgeny Morozov's thesis as well -- that these post-Soviet countries "don't have to" use prior or post censorship or even arrests for speech offenses much of the time because they can prevail with the cynical statist narrative and use every bad-faith Soviet-style propaganda and active-measure trick in the book to discredit dissenters online, often through sock-puppets in the comments sections of blogs or news sites.
While they're masters at this -- they have all the time in the world to wait out the distractable West -- they sometimes get overwhelmed, they sometimes pick their battles, they sometimes so overplay their hands that they get blowback. It's not a one-way street. (BTW, a bit of that "networked authoritarianism" laps at the shores of Registan.net itself, as they ban critics like me, delete statements by their defenders and keep nastily trying to control the narrative in any way possible.)
Then there's the problem that even those more "subtle" networked authoritarians like Russia and Kazakhstan on its better days in fact do in fact censor (they block journalists from entering a crisis area); they do deploy arrests strategically and pull Live Journal accounts and use other methods of pressure. (I'll never forget the array of characters brought forth to persecute Samodurov).
No doubt Kendzior and Pearce have compelling field studies -- they know their business and their methodical interviews are going to tell what any of us have seen for ourselves, that people are intimidated if a fellow blogger or any Internet user is punished and an example was made of him. To be sure, a commenter named Ani on Registan.net (Ani Wandaryan @GoldenTent on Twitter) has elaborated that what was a critical factor in the "donkey bloggers" case is that these comics were not seen as "political," i.e. as part of the organized human rights groups or political parties, so it seemed doubly disconcerting that the regime picked on them.
And the analytical model is undoubtedly correct and helpful and not something I'm trained to comment on; I never chose to go into academia. (Years ago when I contemplated getting a higher degree in political science, a seasoned professor of Soviet studies laid out all the branches and theories and schools to me in several meetings, and I found all of them inadequate to explain the intuitions one gathers from living and studying these countries of the Soviet bloc first-hand, which I had done. The field was also filled with fellow-travellers who relied on good relations with the Soviet and other communist regimes for their very field of study and access -- the number of scholars of dissent could be counted on half a hand. While there have been improvements in the last 20 years, I don't find the field free of these problems to this day.)
Writes Kendzior and Pearce:
In Azerbaijan, there is a non-relationship between frequency of internet use and support for political protest. Unlike in the Arab world, where citizens were mobilized by the documentation of state crimes on social media, the arrest of Azerbaijani bloggers only demoralized frequent internet users. We argue that this is because of the Azerbaijani government's embrace of "networked authoritarianism": the use of the internet to compete with and engage with internet activists through propaganda campaigns in cyberspace and physical force on the ground.
In an indignant response, Kendzior says -- for my sake -- "One thing I'd like to make clear is that the situations in Azerbaijan, and in other places I wrote about, can change, and the grimness of the current situation does not therefore mean activists should cease their work."
But she didn't say that in her excerpt; it took some prodding. That's unfortunate. They did indeed paint a grim picture: they said documenting human rights abuses only scares people away and that ultimately publicizing of suppressed dissent is often what derails political protest -- those were their words. They didn't say, "But we don't mean to discourage activists" or "we understand people surprise us with their bravey and overcome intimidation anyway" or "it's a moving target and this is just our take now." They said their main thesis: publicizing of suppressed dissent is often what derails political protest.
The point is, if someone -- already presupposed to feeling burned on colour revolutions -- wanted to find some theoretical underpinnings as to why they should stop giving grants in "non-permissive environments" -- this could be their thesis.
The facts that Kendzior and Pearce found -- and they aren't disputed, just insufficient -- they packaged, in this excerpt (which we have no reason to believe differs substantively from the still-to-come longer piece) do inexorably lead to a policy prescription: don't spend a lot of money on people who are going to go to jail and cause the regimes to backlash so hard that even milder forms of Internet activity could be harmed.
Nedouchki like myself, of course, can't be allowed to debate academic papers or scientific models. But when they move from the realm of theory to policy, then I as a tax-payer and blogger do get to comment. And so I do. The policy prescription indeed seems to be one of caution and incrementalism. It is a body of data and thinking meant as a bulwark against cyber-utopianism which at this point can get people killed in countries like Uzbekistan.
Remember how the story of the suicide girl got real legs? It wasn't from Urlaeva, writing in Russian on a limited mailing list, or fergananews.com that ran a short piece quickly buried by other news. It wasn't from me, who didn't write about it for some days out of distrust of the story because of its classic intelligence memes. It was from Sarah Kendzior, writing in English on the fairly widely read Registan.net, taking it very seriously, and even adding thoughtfully, "Facebook doesn't kill people; the national security services of Uzbekistan do." Indeed, it was seeing her taking the story at face value, and other people expressing sympathy about the tragedy on Twitter that made me think that I would be churlish to express my doubts and not write, too. That's how it works.
Socialbakers is showing quite an increase on Facebook use in Azerbaijan -- there's a big jump this last month -- over the New Year's holidays, maybe people had more time to go on line. "The total number of FB users in Azerbaijan is reaching 604040 and grew by more than 185200 in the last 6 months." So, donkey blogger backlash or no, people keep coming; we do understand that their cute-catting does not have a high dissident conversation rate, however, such as to justify the ROI of granting to Internet programs for velvet/coloured/spring revolutions. And we do get to ask a simple question vis-a-vis the thesis of Kendzior and Pearce: with growth like this, maybe the demonization of social media by the government just didn't work?
Again, the policy debate out of this is what matters -- academics likely argue even among themselves when they measure the fluid and elusive thing called "the Internet" (which is a new field of study in a context of a lot of pseudoscience from Silicon Valley motivational consultants like Jeff Jarvis and Seth Godin).
Even without any arguments about Central Asia and the Caucasus, the failures of the Arab Spring to deliver those velvety democracies some hoped for are their own brake on policy; if you listen to Ethan Zuckerman's cute-cat talk all the way through and don't just read Cory Doctorow's self-serving digest of it, Zuckerman does throw in some cautionary stories about killed people on the square in Egypt.
My guess -- although it's completely a hunch -- is that if Azerbaijan experiences a larger growth in Internet and people, especially those connected to the leadership, see it as a way to make money, the regime will find ways to create the managed class of technologists and technologically-savvy I spoke of and get them to do their own policing away of dissent without having to use jailings but it's all going to move forward. And the other narrative is about Islam, which I will return to later.
Everything depends on whether you adopt a strategy of accepting the regime's incrementalism as a pose that you constantly attempt to dodge or call its bluff, or accept incrementalism as having actual merit that ensures a sturdy and reliable conveyor belt between the regime and its coopted intellectuals and their professional positions and perks.
Posted at 08:39 PM in Internet Freedom & Policy, Philosophy, Registan, Social Media | Permalink