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    Half a Century After Malcolm X Came to Visit: Reflections on the Thin Presence of African Thought in Global Justice Debates.
    Mathias Risse. 4/17/2019. Half a Century After Malcolm X Came to Visit: Reflections on the Thin Presence of African Thought in Global Justice Debates.. Carr Center Discussion Paper Series. 2019007th ed. Cambridge: Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. See full text.Abstract
    What would it mean for there to be a genuinely and legitimately global discourse on justice that involves Africa in authentic ways?

    There are various responses. On the one hand, there is the idea of “philosophical fieldwork” developed by Katrin Flikschuh. African thought that fell by the wayside due to European expansionism must be recuperated and inserted into that discourse. On the other hand, there is the world society approach pioneered by John Meyer and others. The point is that ideas  from elsewhere in the world can be genuinely and legitimately appropriated, which is how ideas have always spread. Once ideas about justice are appropriated by African thinkers, they are associated with Africa as much as with any other region. My goal here is to explore both approaches and support the second, while also making room for the first. In doing so, I articulate a view about how my own ongoing work on global justice can be seen as a contribution to an actual global discourse. There are rather large (and sensitive) issues at stake here: how to think about respectful appropriation of ideas and thus respectful philosophical discourse.  A great deal of nuance is needed.

    People Power is Rising in Africa
    Zoe Marks, Erica Chenoweth, and Jide Okeke. 4/25/2019. “People Power is Rising in Africa.” Foreign Affairs. See full text.Abstract
    New article in Foreign Affairs from Carr Center's Zoe Marks and Erica Chenoweth, with Jide Okeke, delineates how protest movements are succeeding where even global arrest warrants can’t.

    A new tide of people power is rising in Africa. On April 2, a nonviolent resistance movement in Algeria succeeded in pressuring Abdelaziz Bouteflika to resign after 20 years as president. Nine days later, protesters in Sudan were celebrating the ouster of Omar al-Bashir, Sudan’s president of 30 years, after a three-month-long uprising against his regime.

    The nonviolent overthrows of Bouteflika and Bashir are not aberrations. They reflect a surprising trend across the continent: despite common perceptions of Africa as wracked by violence and conflict, since 2000, most rebellions there have been unarmed and peaceful. Over the past decade, mass uprisings in Africa have accounted for one in three of the nonviolent campaigns aiming to topple dictatorships around the world. Africa has seen 25 new, nonviolent mass movements—almost twice as many as Asia, the next most active region with 16.

    Read the full article on Foreign Affairs.

    The Populist-Nationalist Rebellion: Challenge to Transatlantic Democracy
    John Shattuck. 4/29/2019. “The Populist-Nationalist Rebellion: Challenge to Transatlantic Democracy” 2 (19). See full text.Abstract
    New Policy Brief from John Shattuck for the College of Europe Policy Brief series.
     

    "The US and the European Union (EU) are confronted to- day by a surge of populist nationalism that presents mul- tiple challenges to transatlantic democracy. Populism is a form of grassroots rebellion against governing elites with a long history and complex relationship to democracy, as illustrated by two historical examples, the rebellions in colonial America and post-1989 Czechoslovakia, both of which led to democratic governments, and two contrary contemporary examples, in the US and Hungary, which have gone in the opposite direction."


    Link here: https://www.coleurope.eu/research-paper/populist-nationalist-rebellion-challenge-transatlantic-democracy

    protest_01
    David Robson. 5/13/2019. “The '3.5% rule': How a small minority can change the world.” BBC Future. Publisher's VersionAbstract
    Research featuring Carr Center's Erica Chenoweth. 

    Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.
     

    "In 1986, millions of Filipinos took to the streets of Manila in peaceful protest and prayer in the People Power movement. The Marcos regime folded on the fourth day.

    In 2003, the people of Georgia ousted Eduard Shevardnadze through the bloodless Rose Revolution, in which protestors stormed the parliament building holding the flowers in their hands."

    Read the full article on BBC Future.

    Elections Under Oppression in Cambodia: A Predictable Outcome?
    Sreang Heng. 9/4/2018. “Elections Under Oppression in Cambodia: A Predictable Outcome?” Yale Macmillan Center. See full text.Abstract
    Read more on the Cambodian elections by by Sreang Heng, Carr Center fellow.
     
    "On July 29, 2018, another parliamentary election was held in Cambodia. When the commune elections had been held on June 4, 2017, they were followed by complaints and recounts, but the official results showed that the two major rival parties had won the majority of votes: the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) received 1,156 communes (out of 1,646) while its opposition party, the Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP) won 489. The Khmer National United Party received only one."

    Full publication.

    Deepfakes are Solvable—but Don’t Forget That “shallowfakes” are Already Pervasive
    Mark Latonero. 3/25/2019. “Deepfakes are Solvable—but Don’t Forget That “shallowfakes” are Already Pervasive.” MIT Technology Review. See full text.Abstract
    New article features Carr Center Technology and Human Rights Fellow Mark Latonero.

    " Mark Latonero, human rights lead at Data & Society, a nonprofit institute dedicated to the applications of data, agreed that technology companies should be doing more to tackle such issues. While Microsoft, Google, Twitter, and others have employees focused on human rights, he said, there was so much more they should be doing before they deploy technologies—not after."
    Big Tech Firms are Racing to Track Climate Refugees
    Mark Latonero. 5/17/2019. “Big Tech Firms are Racing to Track Climate Refugees.” MIT Technology Review. See full text.Abstract
    The MIT Technology Review features new report by Carr Center Technology and Human Rights Fellow Mark Latonero.

    "Simply layering technology on top of existing humanitarian problems tends to exacerbate the issues it intended to resolve. In a new report on the role of digital identity in refugee and migrant contexts, a team of researchers at the Data & Society Research Institute, led by Mark Latonero, detail the various ways these initiatives can reproduce and worsen existing bureaucratic biases."

    https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613531/big-tech-firms-are-racing-to-track-climate-refugees/

    Digital Identity in the Migration & Refugee Context: Italy Case Study
    Mark Latonero, Keith Hiatt, Antonella Napolitano, Giulia Clericetti, and Melanie Penagos. 4/2019. Digital Identity in the Migration & Refugee Context: Italy Case Study. Data & Society. Data & Society. See full text.Abstract
    datasociety_digitalidentity.pdf
    New Report by Carr Center Technology and Human Rights Fellow Mark Latonero.

    "Increasingly, governments, corporations, international organizations, and nongov-ernmental organizations (NGOs) are seeking to use digital technologies to track the identities of migrants and refugees. This surging interest in digital identity technologies would seem to meet a pressing need: the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) states that in today’s modern world, lacking proof of identity can limit a person’s access to services and socio-economic participation, including employment opportunities, housing, a mobile phone, and a bank account. But this report argues that the tech-nologies and processes involved in digital identity will not provide easy solutions in the migration and refugee context. Technologies that rely on identity data introduce a new sociotechnical layer that may exacerbate existing biases, discrimination, or power imbalances.How can we weigh the added value of digital identification systems against the potential risks and harms to migrant safety and fundamental human rights? This report provides international organizations, policymakers, civil society, technologists, and funders with a deeper background on what we currently know about digital identity and how migrant identity data is situated in the Italian context. "
    The Future Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Humans and Human Rights
    Steven Livingston and Mathias Risse. 6/7/2019. “The Future Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Humans and Human Rights.” Ethics and International Affairs, 33, 2, Pp. 141-158. See full text.Abstract
    What are the implications of artificial intelligence (AI) on human rights in the next three decades?

    Precise answers to this question are made difficult by the rapid rate of innovation in AI research and by the effects of human practices on the adaption of new technologies. Precise answers are also challenged by imprecise usages of the term “AI.” There are several types of research that all fall under this general term. We begin by clarifying what we mean by AI. Most of our attention is then focused on the implications of artificial general intelligence (AGI), which entail that an algorithm or group of algorithms will achieve something like superintelligence. While acknowledging that the feasibility of superintelligence is contested, we consider the moral and ethical implications of such a potential development. What do machines owe humans and what do humans owe superintelligent machines?

    Read the full article here

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