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The global #occupy movement seeks a cosmopolitan democracy. Here’s why they should read David Held

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sqrlyearlynyc/6221379837/sizes/m/in/photostream/ CC VBlessNYC

On 17 September, around one hundred people set up a camp in a small private park a block away from the 9/11 memorial site in New York. Their example has swiftly grown and spread around the world. Mainstream media has been confused by the fact that Occupy activists make no single demand and have no spokesman. This is an example of new networked leadership. The protestors are united in a sense that their democratic system is broken.

In Europe, Germans cannot believe that those in Greece were able to put themselves in such a precarious financial position, and Greeks are angry about having to take severe welfare cuts perceived as orders from the IMF, European Commission and European Central Bank.

 CC mkhalili

Earlier this year the UK public, whose trust in politicians is extremely low, rejected voting reform that could have changed the system, perhaps because they no longer believe that national electoral system is the problem. 

The link between these groups is the feeling of powerlessness in the face of forces they cannot control.

David Held’s book, Democracy and the Global Order, published in 1995, to some extent foresaw this. There is now, particularly following the global economic crisis, a deep underlying public understanding of the subject on which scholars such as Held have been writing for decades.

Democracy in its current form is being deeply tested by globalisation. How we respond to this should be the greatest debate of our time. Though they cannot yet articulate it, the occupiers of Wall Street, Bay Street, Paternoster Square and the Puerta del Sol are partly appealing for a new cosmopolitan democracy in Held’s model.

Democracy and the Global Order

Essentially the book is a call for a renewed form of democracy, a form that can cope with the complexities of a modern global life and its economic, political, social and cultural facets. Held argues that the Westphalian model of state sovereignty and autonomy is outdated, in both a real and normative sense. In this model sovereignty is granted both internally, by those in a territory of a state, and externally, through recognition by other states. Autonomy is the power and freedom of a state, and the state alone, to set rules for its territory.

Held argues that the UN Charter model has altered the Westphalian model of states somewhat, introducing the concept of the legitimacy of a state, granted by respecting democratic values and human rights [i.e. the ‘international community’ intervenes in Afghanistan, Libya etc.]

Held further demonstrates that the autonomy of states is constantly being reduced by environmental governance, world economic forces, the increase in international organisations, the growing power of civil society associations and changing political and cultural identities. These converge to radically change the governance environment in which the modern state finds itself.

His question, ultimately, is how can democracy be achieved in this interconnected, overlapping world, in which there are so many centres of power?

His answer is to start from the guarantee of individual autonomy. Autonomy is the the ability to take self-conscious, reasoned decisions on the matters that affect you. It requires legal delimitation of various sites of power (be they economic, biological, cultural etc) to ensure the possibility of political participation.

From this, Held develops the concept of a cosmopolitan democratic law. Since any global force can affect individual autonomy regardless of location or state membership, laws to protect autonomy must be realised globally. They must also guarantee autonomy in the various bodies politic and the various sites of power, which are multifaceted: from local to global, from cities to states, from corporations and entire economic markets.

From 1995 to 2011

Until now, the world has lacked the mechanical solutions for organising polities around the issues that affect them. But social media, and a little Arab Spring inspiration, can connect people (like Google+ circles!) around the issues they care about, regardless of national borders. The occupy movements are trying to give some physical presence to global online movements. The banking industry globalised long ago – that’s why they run the show. It’s time global democratic governance stepped up too. 

Below is the manifesto from the ‘United for #globaldemocracy movement’, though movement may be too strong a word, published in the Guardian on Friday. (Geeky spot: note how they list New York as though it were a country)

United for #GlobalDemocracy
On 15 October 2011, united in our diversity, united for global change, we demand global democracy: global governance by the people, for the people. Inspired by our sisters and brothers in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, New York, Palestine-Israel, Spain and Greece, we too call for a regime change: a global regime change.


In the words of Vandana Shiva, the Indian activist, today we demand replacing the G8 with the whole of humanity – the G7,000,000,000.


Undemocratic international institutions are our global Mubarak, our global Assad, our global Gaddafi. These include: the IMF, the WTO, global markets, multinational banks, the G8/G20, the European Central Bank and the UN security council. Like Mubarak and Assad, these institutions must not be allowed to run people’s lives without their consent. We are all born equal, rich or poor, woman or man. Every African and Asian is equal to every European and American. Our global institutions must reflect this, or be overturned.


Today, more than ever before, global forces shape people’s lives. Our jobs, health, housing, education and pensions are controlled by global banks, markets, tax-havens, corporations and financial crises. Our environment is being destroyed by pollution in other continents. Our safety is determined by international wars and international trade in arms, drugs and natural resources. We are losing control over our lives. This must stop. This will stop. The citizens of the world must get control over the decisions that influence them in all levels – from global to local. That is global democracy. That is what we demand today.


Today, like the Mexican Zapatistas, we say “¡Ya basta! Aquí el pueblo manda y el gobierno obedece“: Enough! Here the people command and global institutions obey! Like the Spanish Tomalaplaza we say “Democracia Real Ya”: True global democracy now!” Today we call the citizens of the world: let us globalise Tahrir Square! Let us globalise Puerta del Sol!

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Keep calm and carrying on tweeting from the chamber (on @UKparliament approval of electronic device use)

Slightly surreal debate on use of smartphones/tablets etc in the chamber of the UK House of Commons last week. Happily, among much argument of who was the first to use Twitter / iPad / take Hipstamatics of PMQs etc, they decided that they can continue to use them.

Some of the arguments made in favour concerned: instant access to information, communication with sources, the ability to update speeches easily as debates move on and to get work done while waiting to be called by the Speaker – so a mix of improving the accuracy and effectiveness of debate, and simple productivity improvements. No mention of Angry Birds, oddly. 

What’s really interesting is when a MP will rely on a constituent for his or her argument and essentially will become a channel for, rather than a representative of, their views. The MP for Liverpool, Wavertree, Luciana Berger (@lucianaberger) actually read out tweets from the public to the chamber in this debate and ended up largely holding a debate by herself. 

There was extensive use of Twitter at the readings of the controversial Digital Economy Bill too – seem to remember constituents explaining issues via Twitter to their MPs. 

Digital participative democracy. It grows and grows. Why even meet to parler in a physical location at all?

  Not for this.
(CC umpcportal.com) 
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Mini-briefing on the Open Government Partnership

The OGP was launched at last month’s UN General Assembly to a good deal of buzz in the gov 2.0 world. It seems to be part of, or hosted by, the Transparency and Accountability Initiative, another Soros venture.

Essentially, it’s a well-meaning anti-corruption, pro-openness platform between some of the nations leading on open government: publishing data (not just numbers) and doing innovative things with it. Or allowing citizens to do interesting things with it. Brazil and the US led the project.

Here’s an explanation in splendid socialmedialand format:

The Open Government Declaration that nations can sign up to is just that, a declaration, but by promoting examples like these….

We commit to increasing our efforts to systematically collect and publish data…We commit to pro-actively provide high-value information, including raw data, in a timely manner, in formats that the public can easily locate, understand and use, and in formats that facilitate reuse.

We commit to maintaining or establishing a legal framework to make public information on the income and assets of national, high ranking public officials.

We commit to making policy formulation and decision making more transparent, creating and using channels to solicit public feedback, and deepening public participation in developing, monitoring and evaluating government activities.

…the founding nations hope to cajole plenty more into joining them. It’s an interesting start. The examples above are just a few lines from a fairly vast, all-encompassing list that reads a little bit like somebody put together in one place all the government transparency ideas they could find. Which might not be a bad thing.

Now, how about more of the same, but for the United Nations itself?

In the blogosphere:

David Eaves has argued that this ‘openness’ idea could be a sign of ‘open’ states raising the bar in governance:

It abandons the now outdated free-market/democratic vs. state-controlled/communist axis in favour of a more subtle, but more appropriate, open vs. closed…I like the idea of world in which states compete to be more open. We could do worse.

The Economist blogged a response:

The problem with Mr Eaves’ argument isn’t that it’s necessarily wrong as such. The OGP would definitely be in line with an overall strategy to promote Western democratic values and provoke people in other countries to demand more of them…

No, the problem is that this is really nothing new or major…

Countries can join the list if they demonstrate that they meet certain “minimum standards of open government”—”minimum” clearly being the operative word.

The Economist also included a broad overview of the whole project, including strengths and weaknesses, in their print edition.

One simple test of effectiveness: is anybody still talking about this in a year’s time?

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Multilateralism 2.0 – UN University prof ponders open, networked international relations

It’s not just me! Luk Van Langenhove of UNU Bruges and other important places believes that the 2.0 metaphor can be applied usefully for global governance. Sort of. He’s talking about multilateral decision making in the UN, and how it might change if the UN didn’t only involve states.

Read the article here (it’s not long) or there’s a fuller paper in Global Policy (academic login reqd)

Here’s my quick précis:

  • We’re facing growing multipolarity in international relations (more and more powerful states who can’t be rolled over by the US, i.e. BRICs) 
  • The state-based system is a problem, since the truly serious global problems aren’t neatly divided like state boundaries. They’re global, like climate change or weapons proliferation.
  • The 2.0 metaphor recognises power of networks and openess: international relations 2.0 can include players other than states. For example, regional and sub-regional institutions. 
  • So it’s a problem that the UN is based on ‘one state, one vote’ style decision making. 2.0 might allow for more flexibility.
  • Happily, there are signs of change. The UNSC resolution on Libya is an example of how the UN referred to the Arab League and Organisation of Islamic States [presumably to gain increased legitimacy for the decision].
  • And, the EU now has speaking rights in the UN, which will lead to similar institutions getting the same thing. And these big regional institutions will be key to tackling modern problems – so let’s see more of this.

My thoughts:

  • Sovereign states are still what Langenhove calls the ‘star players’ in international relations. Unlikely to see them giving up (or effectively watering down) their UN voting rights any time soon. Just increasing the number of seats on the Security Council is proving impossible. We’re certainly not going to see an EU seat replace those of UK/France at the Security Council. Which is why…
  • Global governance 2.0 matters as it’s about transcending the nation state (or superseding, or subseding – take your pick of latin spatial references). Van Langenhove is still thinking in a very state-based system of governance. That’s fair: it accurately reflects the state we’re in. To claim that regional institutions might give a more 2.0 approach is a bit far, however. Ultimately those regional institutions are filled with state representatives and take their orders from national capitals. 
  • Instead, get a bit more creative with the 2.0 metaphor and we might find ways to bypass state-to-state deadlock. For example, perhaps it’s not states that will solve climate change with top-down regulation, but horizontal (peer-to-peer) collaborative networks, such as cities, towns or industries.

More on this sort of stuff to follow..

 

Flickr credit: Blog de Planalto

 

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Watching the globe: good governance requires open information, including satellite imagery

In terms of information useful for global governance, security information is often still perceived as closed and secret from the public (until Wikileaks comes along). Although nations and global institutions are opening up data and becoming more transparent, when it comes to security, one assumes the public just don’t have the same access to detailed imagery and intelligence information as to global events.

But wouldn’t it be great if citizens had the same access to the same kind of fancy satellite imagery that you assume the US military has (i.e. you saw it on the West Wing a few times). Imagine if we could actually see what was going on in Sudan, Zimbabwe, Libya…

Introducing..www.satsentinel.org 

“The world is watching because you’re watching”

Presumably this compares very poorly to what national governments have, but in terms of tech tools changing global governance, Satellite Sentinel is pretty interesting.

They’ve used before-and-after satellite images to create compelling stories of what’s happened in Sudan, which could become useful evidence for action against the perpetrators. More immediately, it’s useful information to prove their case that violence is continuing. 

Satsent

This seems exciting, but have a read of this critical view from Tim Brown (of globalsecurity.org) for Imaging Notes. In it he argues that imagery has often be used and abused in the past, and there’s a danger of information overload. And of course, ultimately information itself doesn’t lead to better outcomes – ‘boots on the ground’ etc. But that’s not really the point of the Sentinel programme.

The one benefit he points out is that the “goal of documenting violence, war crimes and genocide to prosecute is more attainable.”

Perhaps the point is simply that its harder to hide war crimes now. Wherever you are in the world, more and more actors are capable of seeing what you’re doing – not just those wealthy nations with high tech equipment. You already know that it’s wrong, and now you know that people will be able to see what you’re doing. It’s becoming possible for globally concerned movements and activists to observe and document any large scale atrocities that happen anywhere in the world, from anywhere in the world.

Environmental satellite imaging

Similar things are going on in global environmental governance. Google Earth Outreach “gives non-profits and public benefit organizations the knowledge and resources they need to visualize their cause and tell their story in Google Earth & Maps to hundreds of millions of people.”

So it’s a bit more of a campaign tool – but if the satellite imagery of deforestation can be provided at regular intervals, who is to say that some bright techie type won’t design some crowdsourced rainforest ‘watch, report’ thing, using hundreds of environmentalists around the world to monitor areas of rainforest and report illegal logging to locals who can confirm and act on it. 

Bright techie type? Anyone?

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Five narratives of the UK riots. A round up of links on the what, how, who, why, and what happens next?

I live not far from Gold Command, which as Sky News excitedly informed me on Monday night, is where the planning for the policing of riots or civil disobedience. And I thought it was a car park.

As of this morning, there are still a load of hire vans parked along the streets nearby – presumably used to bus in all those extra bobbies for London. They’ve had a busy week.

I wanted to record some of the bits of writing I’ve found useful in understanding the events of the last week, as well as some of my scattered thoughts. Helpfully, these thematically arranged themselves into the following groups.

The story of what happened

Paul Lewis runs through this well. He writes with a breathlessness which well reflects the way the stories were reported. His technique involved donning a hoodie and biking from incident to incident, but there were so many different reporters (and citizens who picked up camera phones and started tweeting) around London that the news came constantly, including this pretty brave stuff from a Sky reporter in Clapham on Monday night.

At the time, the more you read or watched, the scarier events often seemed. Particularly by Monday night, endless loops of burning buildings on the rolling news channels, rumour as well as trustworthy updates on Twitter and Facebook, live blogs from most of the newspaper websites, as well as texts from friends around London, all added up into a hyped news bubble. By around 10pm on Monday, #prayforlondon was the third highest-used phrase on Twitter, worldwide.

Some of the examples from Storify (timelines of tweets) show how the narrative of the riots developed through both offline and online media, each feeding the other.

The Wikipedia riots page is a good effort at trying to gather all of the events from this strange last week.

The story of how social media affected the riots

Live news reporters were quick to suggest that social networks were somehow involved in organising the riots. ‘The twitter’ was often mentioned by studio hacks who knew not of what they spoke. How else would so many people know to assemble in the same area at the same time, often swiftly changing locations? But urban youth don’t use Twitter, they use Blackberry Messenger, as Mike Butcher showed in this article for TechCrunch.

And so began the fairly tortured narrative around social media and riots.

One of the suggestions has been that the government should gain new controls on social media.  This has been met with predictable disdain from democracy campaigns and technologists.

It seems odd that the vast majority of politicians apparently still don’t grasp social media. Especially since, when MPs were dramatically recalled to debate the riots on Thursday, they then launched into discussions that had already taken place in a more nuanced, advanced fashion online. Twitter itself is a form of parliament. A giant town hall meeting. We sit under the tree of Twitter and debate. MPs should be engaging with their constituents through it. There’s just no need for them all to rush to the same location. And still be late on the uptake.

It’s the people that matter, not the platforms. It allows information, true or false, to spread faster and wider. Except that it also leaves a data trail, in a way that speaking on the phone or in person wouldn’t.

And without social media, communities might have struggled to organise some of the more humane elements in the riots:  #riotwombles cleaning up Clapham, financial assistance for the Malaysian student mugged while seriously injured and to the 89-yr old barber whose shop was trashed, and, as my colleague put it, the ‘digital stocks’ of photoshoplooter.tumblr.com. Whether or not the riot wombles actually did much clearing up (mostly they seemed to wait around for police forensics teams to finish) they helped show that there were two sides to the community – and showed the rioters that there was a large body of people affected by their actions.

More importantly perhaps, social media allowed trusted local bloggers/tweeters to be extremely useful in identifying what was happening in immediate areas – down to individual postcodes – providing much more geographically relevant information than national news could.

How it stopped

This has become another disputed story of the riots – a bit of a spat between police and government over who was responsible for the orders of extra police on to the streets. Top police officers claimed that they would have done so without politician involvement.

But by flying back and giving dramatic speeches, including mention of ‘more robust policing’, politicians created expectations and impressions of gravity, which may have helped changed the mood in the rioters’ communities and networks. Even if it seems unlikely that many youths watched Cameron’s speech, their parents may have done, or at least sensed that repercussions would get more severe, so hauling their children back home on Tuesday night (in London at least).

The story of who was involved

Pictures tell a thousand words. The first images of looters shown on TV seemed to only feature teenagers. It quickly became accepted truth that the looters were urban youth, acting in anarchic fashion. News reporters talked of ‘a child of only [any age between 7-14]’, but when you looked at more of the pictures coming off CCTV, it’s obvious that wasn’t only the case. It was also reported, especially in Manchester, that kids were being organised by older members of the community.

Ideally, the data from the magistrates courts across the country would be pooled and analysed, as the BBC showed with Camberwell Green (but only 55 cases from the 2,000+ arrests). The Guardian datablog post is being updated as I write. It shows a large majority of those charged being between 11-24.

The story of why it happened

And this is the biggie. In positive psychology, you’re sometimes asked to ignore the ‘why’ question – it often doesn’t help the immediate situation. By dwelling on the why, you simply get stuck in the same negative cognitive cycle. For example, ask a young rioter why they did it. They’re not going to have any good answers.

But this has been where some of the most thoughtful writing has come from. One of the best being this article from Peter Oborne. He writes with fury and a passion with which great journalism does. One suspects he will not be invited back to any Kensington dinner parties any time soon. The article has received over 4,000 comments online.

“…the criminality in our streets cannot be dissociated from the moral disintegration in the highest ranks of modern British society”

The BBC have another ’10 explanations for the riots’ which includes a fairly broad spectrum of theories. Their list includes the ‘check out the price of failing to care’ argument of Camilla Batmanghelidjh, CEO of Kids Company, a London charity for children, as well as arguments ranging from ‘weak’ policing, to American rap music (rioters referred to the police as ‘Feds’).

The other debate this week has been about cuts to policing, youth clubs etc, as opposition politicians try to carefully, or not so carefully (Ken Livingstone), gain political capital. Their cause may have been helped by this prophetic Guardian video, warning of riots due to youth club cuts, which swiftly went viral after events in Tottenham.

And the story of what happens next

The attention span of journalists, editors and ultimately news consumers is notoriously short. While a story as dramatic and visceral as riots is likely to hang around, over time another story will come along, elements of what happened may be forgotten.

News moves on, society must not.

If you want to help prevent this happening again, get involved. Volunteer. Get to know your community by working for it. Mentor a child. This is hugely rewarding and is incredibly valuable to the children involved. Charities that do this include Chance UK, who work in Tower Hamlets, Lambeth and other poor areas around the UK and whose programme I can recommend. The Mayor of London is also promoting a mentoring scheme, and Kids Co, mentioned above, also run mentoring projects.  This stuff is proven to work.

You hope that events like these wake everybody out of ignorance or moral stupor. To change things. As the Archbishop of Canterbury said on Thursday:

I believe that this is a moment which we must seize, a moment where there is sufficient anger at the breakdown of civic solidarity, sufficient awareness of the resources people have in helping and supporting one another, sufficient hope (in spite of everything) of what can be achieved by the governing institutions of this country, including in Your Lordship’s House, to engage creatively with the possibilities that this moment gives us. And I trust, My Lords, that we shall respond with energy to that moment which could be crucial for the long-term future of our country and our society. 

We’ll see.

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Do It Yourself Foreign Policy: notes on @SlaughterAM’s talk at the Personal Democracy Forum 2011

Much of what this blog’s going to be about is not actually technology.

The technology isn’t the important bit – it’s what the tech allows us to do. And right now, that’s about social networks. And connections. And everything Anne Marie Slaughter talks about in her Personal Democracy Forum 2011 talk below.

I liked it so much it’s this blog’s first post. Here’s a very quick precis of Anne’s talk:

  • until now it’s essentially been a small clicque of men who drive foreign policy, each representing one nation and fighting for its own separate interests
  • today we don’t start from separation, we can start from connection. Now you define who you are in relation to others.
  • the world of nation states still exists, but there are growing number of charities, social action groups, civil society groups, religious groups, private corporations, trying to get involved at the global level. At the big institutions, these are called non-state actors. As Clay Shirky says: ‘calling these things non-state actors is like calling an automobile a horseless carriage.’
  • women get this better than men. Women have often been defined by their relationships, or define themselves that way, see feminist Carol Gilligan – today there is also a generational gap in this way we perceive ourselves.
  • so now we have governments and a growing set of social actors, connected in ever-changing ways and ever changing identities.
  • Christakis and Fowler showed that you can join up individuals in different ways: connect in a linear fashion = bucket chain, telephone tree = efficient dissemination of information, etc
  • the Mr Y article (full pdf) written by two senior members of the US military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, essentially says the world has moved from a closed system to an open system, and in an open system, having power means having credible influence. We can no longer control by force. The US has to (again) be the most connected and influential nation.

So here’s what we do to address global problems

  • with any global issue the goal is to map the space and connect enough people to mobilise to create the solutions to address those problems. 
  • this happens in these case studies [Ed: not sure these are the big global problems] AirBnB (expensive couchsurfing), Zinch (all US scholarships in one place), Interaction (network of 190 US NGOs), Global Alliance for Clean Cook Stoves [that’s a global issue], Partners for a New Beginning (US State Dept attempt to encourage public/private partnerships that deepen links between US and ‘local communities abroad’). [Ed: I’d look at things like Ushahidi, Avaaz, maybe charity:water – but more blog posts to follow on these, esp. Avaaz)

“Here’s the bottom line:”

we imagined that we lived in a world of closed opaque orbs – states that pursued national interest – now we live in a world of ‘open system’ foreign policy with infinite possibilities of connecting. Global problems are open problems – we as a world have to grapple with these. By mapping, linking and creating we can create the coalitions to address them.

So:

build local, go global, and change the world

Check against delivery: