Live Webcast and Online discussion: Mapping the Russian Blogosphere

Experts from Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and Morningside Analytics will present their new research on the Russian blogosphere, while prominent Russia experts and notable bloggers will respond. The research team mapped this extensive social network, analyzing over 11,000 Russian language blogs to understand how politics is discussed, by whom, and if there is evidence of political and social mobilization in the blogosphere. The team also analyzed the blogosphere’s place within the overall Russian online and traditional media ecology, including discussion of top political YouTube videos.

Click Here to find a full list of speakers and more details about the event.

This event is part of USIP’s ongoing Blogs and Bullets initiative that examines the relationship between online discourse and violent conflict.

Webcast: This event will be webcast live beginning at 10:00am EDT on October 19, 2010 at www.usip.org/webcast.html.  Online viewers will be able to engage panelists and each other through live chat and Twitter discussions (hashtag: #usipblogs).

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Female suicide bombers set off huge explosions in two subway stations in central Moscow during the Monday morning rush hour, Russian officials said, killing more than three dozen people and raising fears that the Muslim insurgency in southern Russia was once again being brought to the country’s heart.

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A consensus seems to be growing among Western policymakers and intellectuals that Russia is not ready for liberalism and that there are even certain advantages to dealing with the illiberal political order built by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. This may be why Western policy toward Russia has only served to shore up the Russian powers that are pursuing anti-Western interests…

So what would a more principled Russia policy entail? Western leaders must keep liberal and democratic principles in mind while dealing with the Russian elite. They must be wary of the latest fairy tales about “modernization,” avoid naively spreading the Kremlin’s ideas…

Democracy is Russia is a very dim prospect. In a Gallup public opinion poll in February 2009, only 18% of respondents thought that democracy was good for Russia, while close to 70% preferred some sort of dictatorship. This not surprising as Russia’s only experience with democracy was in the 1990s, during a time of deep economic crisis and embarrassing leadership of Boris Yeltsin, while growth exploded and the country regained status as a major power under Putin‘s return to dictatorship. Nevertheless, the regime does not tolerate internal dissent and its discouraging to see democratic leaders fail to highlight this point.

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China itself has a similar history of sending its officials abroad to learn techniques of governance they believed suitable for China’s future. Since the 1980s the CCP has demonstrated interest in the People’s Action Party (PAP) in Singapore. David Shambaugh’s book, China’s Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation, reveals that the CCP values the PAP model for “guided democracy” in which the PAP sustains itself through successful policies and co-optation of the opposition”.

Each of these cases is evidence of oft assumed authoritarian cooperation, but what the implications of this learning between authoritarians are for democracy advocates and practitioners is unclear. The ability of democracy assistance or democracy/reform advocates to exert any kind of pressure on authoritarian regimes is minimal. However, a regime’s selection and analysis of case studies is perhaps indicative of direction. In China, corruption could potentially undermine the ability of the CCP to claim itself an efficient manager and capable steward of economic expansion. Singapore is the logical choice for the CCP to study given its economic success and the PAP’s ability to retain control of the state during and after economic modernization. Shambaugh believes the interest of the CCP in semi-authoritarian regimes is one example of the CCP undergoing renovation in order to retain power. If similar direction can be assumed from United Russia’s choice of China as a model then the implications are less positive. That direction might best be summed up by Sergei Mitrokhin, leader of the liberal pro-Western Yabloko party, who is quoted in the NY Times article as saying “the China meeting demonstrated that United Russia wants to establish a single-party dictatorship in Russia, for all time”.

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Best friends forever?

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is taking a tour of the world’s autocracies.  Over the past 11 days, he has visited Russia, Iran, Syria, Belarus, Turkmenistan, Libya, and Algeria.  While Venezuela is still nominally (barely?) a democracy, Chavez seems intent on building his authoritarian bona fides. His trip to Russia was particularly productive as he secured a $2.2 billion line of credit for weapons purchases and an agreement to jointly develop oil fields and nuclear energy.

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