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The past five decades have seen increasing representation for Black women in US politics, with success for candidates in both local and national elections. In her new book, Political Black Girl Magic: The Elections and Governance of Black Female Mayors, Sharon D. Wright Austin tracks the history of African American mayors in the US. She … Continued

The African continent is currently witnessing the creation of the largest regional free trade area in the world. The African Continental Free Trade Area represents a significant milestone in Africa's socio-economic development. However, this development is also significant in another respect: A recently adopted special Protocol on Women and Youth in Trade has the potential to blaze the trail for gender-transformative intra-African trade. The protocol thus confirms a general trend in international economic law to acknowledge and address the gendered nature of trade.

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Raufu Alaka, chief in the fishing village of Orimedu (Lagos State). © Photo: Arne Hoel, World Bank






















Digital technologies offer new avenues for economic growth in Africa by accelerating job creation, supporting access to public services and increasing productivity and innovation. However, major challenges remain. The lack of connectivity in remote and rural regions and the low use of digital technologies in connected areas is further disadvantaging the poor, women, and small businesses. Increased cyber risks and lack of data protection have brought new risks and vulnerabilities to businesses, governments, and people.

Government policies and regulations are key to enable greater use of digital services while mitigating risks. But how to intervene in a timely manner in a changing technological environment? Agile enabling regulations are needed to quickly respond to market developments, facilitating entry of new competitors for the benefit of consumers. In Kenya, collaboration between the competition authority, the central bank and the telecom regulator allowed digital financial service providers to access telecom services to offer mobile money services along mobile network operators. Consumers benefitted with greater availability of options for mobile payments. Later, the collaboration also facilitated interoperability between mobile money providers and banks, allowing consumers to seamlessly transfer funds between providers, top up saving accounts or use digital credit.

Such new approach is required to support the development of agile and collaborative regulations. A shift from planning and controlling to piloting and implementing policies in a multi-stakeholder setting for rapid feedback and iteration is necessary. Feedback loops allow policies to be evaluated against the backdrop of the broader ecosystem to determine if they are still meeting citizens' values and needs and considering the impact on the industry and private participation. To implement this approach, a change of mindset is first needed. This approach is particularly appropriate for dealing with digital transformation, which by its nature is changing and evolving, and would otherwise be hampered by rigid policies and regulations.

Some African countries are already implementing agile regulation principles to address various issues. Ghana and South Africa responded swiftly to COVID pandemic demand for higher bandwidth by quickly adjusting current regulations and made it easy for companies to offer higher bandwidth to citizens. Kenya and Zimbabwe were quick to remove roadblocks and supported the roll-out of applications that allowed citizens to quickly access mobile money transfers and other financial apps. The African Union has consulted perspectives from businesses, civil society and academia to develop policy frameworks on data and on digital identities. This inclusive multi-stakeholder approach resulted in workable frameworks that encourage innovation through data sharing and cross-border data flows for African eCommerce while protecting rights of individuals. These African Union frameworks on data and on digital identities are important cornerstones to build an African Digital Single Market – the vision of the Smart Africa Alliance that is endorsed by all members of the African Union.

The African Union's Agenda 2063 envisions a people-driven development for Africa, relying on the potential of African people, especially its women and youth. That's why digital skills are prioritized in the African Union Digital Transformation Strategy 2020-2030, where the goal is to "build inclusive digital skills and human capacity across the digital sciences […] and technology policy & regulation". African leaders recognize the pivotal role of policies and regulations in shaping societal and business practices and - if done correctly – how policies can support and encourage digital transformation.

German Development Cooperation and the Digital Development Partnership of the World Bank, in partnership with Smart Africa, have started piloting this agile approach under the Agile Regulation for Digital Transformation program (AReg4DT), a program linked to the Smart Africa Digital Academy, the digital skills vehicle for Smart Africa, and atingi - an online learning platform developed by GIZ, the implementing organization of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Development and Cooperation. The pilot is equipping policymakers and regulators in Africa with the knowledge and tools to regulate digital markets in Africa to support digital transformation. The results so far have been promising with a combination of online and face-to-face training events to allow for learning and knowledge exchange within and for Africa. This partnership is testing the development of capacity building activities in an agile and iterative way and tailoring the content to the local context, as well as gaining a practical understanding about implementation challenges and the training ecosystem in Africa. Prof. Dr. Yeboah-Boateng from Ghana's National Communications Authority also appreciated the chance for peer-to-peer exchange during the event in Abidjan. In particular, he noted the "value of better harmonization of policies and regulations across Africa that would benefit the continent as a whole."








Regulators across the world are developing and testing new policies and regulatory tools, while also adapting existing ones for new purposes, particularly in face of the COVID pandemic. In many cases, the same technologies that challenge traditional regulation also offer many opportunities to reinvent rule making, oversight, inspections, and enforcement.

The AReg4DT program supports the implementation of the Digital Economy for Africa (DE4A) initiative and aims at facilitating regional integration through a common understanding of challenges, opportunities and solutions that can be implemented at the national and regional level, thereby ushering Africa, into the dawn of the single digital market.









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https://www.linkedin.com/in/boutheina-guermazi-8699a35a

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Boutheina Guermazi
Director for Regional Integration for Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, World Bank
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Birgit Pickel
Director-General for Africa in the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ)
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Lacina Kone
Director General and Chief Executive Officer, Smart Africa
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Key Takeaways from the Africa Evidence Summit CIDR PanelAt the 2023 Africa Evidence Summit, panelists Jeanine Condo (Chief Executive Officer, The Centre for Impact, Innovation and Capacity building for Health Information Systems and Nutrition), Rose Oronje (Director of Public Policy and Knowledge Translation, and Head of Kenya Office, AFIDEP), Aurelia Munene (Founder of Eider Africa), and Constantine Manda (Assistant Professor of Political Science, UC Irvine) joined moderator Daniel Posner (Professor of International Development, UCLA) to explore the varied incentives for African scholars to publish. Amy Shipow (Project Manager, CEGA Global Networks) and Maya Ranganath (Associate Director, CEGA Global Networks and Inclusion) synthesize the discussion to shed light on the publication gap and generate insights on how barriers can be alleviated to allow African scholars to participate fully in scholarly publication.Jeanine Condo speaks on the panel at the 2023 Africa Evidence Summit | Luft Ventures"The research infrastructure on the [African] continent remains very low. Few publications are a reflection of the limited investments governments are putting into research […] There are biases in journals. As a PhD student studying in the US, I was told that I should have my Western professor as a co-author to get published." — Rose Oronje, Director of Public Policy and Knowledge Translation, and Head of Kenya Office, AFIDEP.The Collaboration for Inclusive Development Research (CIDR), co-led by CEGA and the Network for Impact Evaluation Researchers in Africa (NIERA), aims to shift norms in global development research towards a more inclusive ecosystem. At the 2023 Africa Evidence Summit in Nairobi, we organized a panel to discuss how differing incentives and resources contribute to publishing disparities between researchers from high income countries (HIC) and those from low- and -middle-income countries (LMICs). The panel also probed the role of journals, universities, and researchers in HICs in exacerbating (or mitigating) this problem.We present the major themes of the discussion below, which shed light on the barriers and opportunities that African scholars face along the education to evidence-use pipeline.Co-authorship with scholars from HICs can serve as a helpful career stepping stone; however, it is only a small step in changing the research ecosystem to produce more African scholarship.Dr. Condo shared that working with and publishing together with CEGA affiliated professor Paul Gertler was an important lever for her career. Yet, African scholars often face internalized pressure (due to external biases) towards co-authoring with scholars from HICs. When Dr. Oronje asked the nearly 500 Summit attendees, "How many African scholars here are first authors when you submit a publication?," hardly anyone raised their hand, leading her to share that not even she submits academic publications as a first author.Panelists shared the structural obstacles African researchers face to conduct their own rigorous social science research.Since most African universities are "teaching" institutions and prioritize this over research, scholars are left with limited time to pursue their own research agendas. Moreover, faculty are rarely trained to mentor or share resources with their students — challenges that are further exacerbated by the significant time constraints they face. Access to scholars with experience publishing at top-tier universities is also privileged for HIC students, who can more easily build subject-matter expertise simply by attending office hours and speaking with other students and faculty. Without this similar exposure to the most relevant literature and resources, African students instead spend more self-directed time finding, reading, and engaging with a variety of potentially less relevant work."Last year, I was challenging the Vice Chancellor of the University of Rwanda — I am breastfeeding but I am expected to publish three papers. How can I have more space and time to be an equal competitor?" — Jeanine CondoFemale scholars face additional barriers to publishing, even at the highest levels of academia.Dr. Condo recently published a paper on gender inequities in publishing, which outlined that in papers from sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), men comprised 61% of first authors, 65% of last authors, and 66% of single authors. A recent survey of over 200 alumni of SSA STEM PhD programs confirmed that women obtain less university and external funding for graduate studies than their male counterparts. Female panelists shared that they had to push back against senior leadership with regard to career expectations in the face of reproductive and domestic responsibilities; they are expected to achieve the same results as their male counterparts but are constrained by additional, invisibilized labor.Given these constraints to African-led authorship, what are the potential solutions to incentivize and support publishing?"Money is the problem and the solution," Dr. Manda shared. Existing funds should be leveraged to support and nurture African researchers so that journals will be eager to publish their work. Dr. Condo recently wrote a grant to research the effects of providing monetary incentives for researchers to publish, instead of accepting small consultancies, where their contributions were less likely to be recognized by name. Preliminary results suggest that this is an effective incentive for SSA researchers. Similarly, panelists cited the dedicated research and pilot funding that CEGA provides to African scholars helps them pursue their own research interests.Investing in the quality of African journals is essential, and can be accomplished through different mechanisms.Panelists urged researchers to publish important work in African journals, which can signal the quality of the journal, can make findings more accessible, and uphold the ethical responsibility to share results with the communities of study. Dr. Oronje also emphasized the need for African scholars to sit on the editorial boards of such journals.Concurrently, HIC journals are making strides to improve geographic equity; for example, PLOS recently announced a policy that authors conducting research outside of their country of origin will be asked to complete a questionnaire that details the ethical, cultural, and scientific considerations taken to uphold inclusivity in their research, including if local authors are included among the authorship list. Making journals open access was another solution proposed by the panel. Initiatives like the Northwestern Research Feedback Project provides LMIC scholars, who have a desk-rejected paper from the Journal of Development Economics (JDE), the opportunity to be matched with a HIC scholar for feedback. While the author is not reconsidered for JDE, it is hoped that the paper can be improved for other submissions.Both Africa-based and HIC-based non-governmental organizations can complement African universities by offering dedicated mentorship to African scholars.Through her work as the founder of Eider Africa, panelist Aurelia Munene is striving to decrease the sense of isolation researchers experience, especially among recent graduates looking to publish. Her organization offers mentorship on essential research and writing skills as well as supports enhancing curricula at African universities. Additionally, panelists mentioned the importance of identifying resources (such as Afrobarometer, the Harvard Dataverse, or datasets of published papers) and training students to use them.While the panel began with discussion about differing incentives to publish, the conversation evolved to mirror CIDR's fundamental goals: how can we best support African researchers so that journals will actively seek out African scholars to publish their research and policymakers will hasten to apply their results?If you are working in this space, we invite you to let us know what you think! We will soon launch an online survey for students, faculty, research professionals, journal editors, and funders to share their thoughts on the current state of inclusion in the evidence ecosystem and ways to improve it. Please watch for the official announcement of this online survey later this month. The results of the survey and other CIDR research will be released in 2024.It Takes a Village to Raise a Researcher was originally published in CEGA on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Associate Director of Global Networks and Inclusion Maya Ranganath reflects on the goals, outcomes, and key learnings of this summer's 11th annual Africa Evidence Summit in Nairobi. The Summit would not be possible without our partners: the Network of Impact Evaluation Researchers in Africa, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and many others mentioned in the post below.https://medium.com/media/f17cd8514f9c798ca99f083c6c2054d7/hrefLow and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs) disproportionately experience the world's greatest challenges — climate change, food security, and rampant inequality. Effective solutions to these problems must be evidence-informed and inclusive of scholars living in these countries. However, many LMICs face a shortage of researchers — only two percent of the world's research output is produced by African scholars. The evidence-informed policy community has marshaled significant momentum to address this problem and invest in LMIC research infrastructure. In fact, a recent report from the Center for Global Development identified a 26 percent increase in organizations with impact evaluation capacity since 2019. The Africa Evidence Summit, co-hosted by CEGA and the Network of Impact Evaluation Researchers in Africa (NIERA) this summer, further showcased this progress.Now with more than a decade of momentum, the Summit returned to Nairobi for its largest gathering yet: In a signal of the demand for more rigorous and locally-led evidence on what works to combat poverty, more than 500 researchers, policymakers, and practitioners attended. As every year, the Summit had four goals:Elevate the voices of African scholarsDisseminate new research findings to decision-makersSeed new collaborationsGenerate insights to advance evidence-informed policymaking and, specifically, ways to make the ecosystem more inclusiveTo this end, the Summit featured 21 research presentations from CEGA affiliated faculty, our fellows network, and partners (see here for a full list of presentations). It also included several panels that focused on meta-themes, including:Incentives, resources, and pathways for African-led publicationFunder perspectives on supporting African-led researchSupporting pro-poor growth in sub-Saharan Africa (led by event partner African Economic Research Consortium)Centering African voices in policy-making and advocacy (led by event partner Afrobarometer)Below we present some key insights from the event. Please see our takeaways document for more information.Evidence must be generated by, and in partnership with, local researchers…"To claim the 21st century as the turning point for Africa, African experts and scholars should step up to define, own, and drive the continent's development agenda," said Dr. Eliya Zulu, Executive Director of the African Institute for Development Policy (AFIDEP), in his keynote address.Summit co-host NIERA (comprised of alumni of CEGA's fellowship program) is leading this movement as the first all-African network of evidence generators. But greater investment is needed.As Rose Oronje, AFIDEP Director of Public Policy and Knowledge Translation and Head of Kenya Office, discussed, the low rate of publications by African scholars reflects a need for greater investments by governments in research infrastructure. Constantine Manda, 2012 CEGA Fellow and Assistant Professor at UC Irvine added, "We need to reform our institutions — for not just the number of publications, but the quality of them." "The incentive structure is broken and something needs to change," noted Chris Chibwana, Program Officer at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.…which requires re-aligning incentives, investing in research capacity, and collaborating.A variety of solutions were proposed. Oronje suggested including more editors from Africa on journals, "as they will be looking at research differently because they understand the context." Aurelia Munene, founder of Eider Africa, proposed engaging NGOs to complement African universities, training new faculty on supervision, and "providing researchers with a sense of belonging." Jordan Kyongo, Head of the East Africa Research & Innovation Hub at the UK's Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), added that "universities must support an enabling environment for students to [become] researchers." Manda urged scholars in high-income countries to "ask for invitations to present work to an African audience" to expose students to new research methods, insights, and questions.In this vein, collaboration is not only an important driver of innovation but also the keystone in inclusive evidence generation. The growing group of impact evaluators, big data researchers, and other evidence generators in LMICs relies on a close-knit community for intellectual partnership, capacity building, evidence dissemination, and funding. Indeed, the Summit would not have succeeded without its local partners (NIERA, AFIDEP, Afrobarometer, AERC, Busara, among others) and the many talented researchers who presented posters.From left to right: CEGA Fellows Jonathan Izudi, Bezawit Bahru, and Michel Ndayikeza listen to a presentation at AES 2023 | Luft VenturesEvidence is essential, but insufficient alone, for policy changeThe summit featured many research studies aimed to assist decision-makers to support vulnerable communities. A few highlights include:CEGA Faculty Co-Director Ted Miguel's study on the intergenerational impacts of child health investments in East Africa, which shows that deworming school children decreases under-five mortality in the children of those dewormed by one-fifth.A randomized control trial presented by Youth Impact's Thato Letsomo demonstrated that the ConnectEd intervention, which sends children a weekly math problem and provides tutoring phone calls, improved learning in Uganda by more than a standard year of schooling.University of Ghana's Edward Asiedu's study found that providing patients with information on their insurance coverage reduces their out-of-pocket expenditure on health.2021 CEGA Fellow Mary Nantongo's early-stage design to evaluate the impact of Uganda's Parish Development Model on the poverty levels, incomes, and participation in decision-making of beneficiary households.However, Dr. Zulu made a powerful point, saying "Evidence is essential, but not sufficient for policy. Researchers need to understand the key people and decisions being made in order to help." Building on this, Tricia Ryan from USAID led a presentation on evidence gap maps, a visual tool that identifies where more evidence is needed on a particular research subject. 2020 CEGA Fellow and Director of Research at the International Center for Evaluation and Development (ICED) Solomon Zena Walelign presented his evidence gap map, which found that more research is needed on how infrastructure interacts with the nutritional needs of people in LMICs, especially women, girls, and low-income consumers.CEGA's long history of working to shift norms in development economics toward greater leadership by African scholars has produced significant results. The Africa Evidence Summit reflects that growth, and we are excited to harness this community's momentum to advance our shared goals. Sign up for our Global Networks newsletter to hear first about next year's Summit.Supporting an inclusive evidence ecosystem: Insights from the 2023 Africa Evidence Summit was originally published in CEGA on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The latest movie adaptation of Frank Herbert's classic novel Dune, Dune: Part Two directed by Denis Villeneuve, has set truly intergalactic box office records, and been globally exalted by movie critics. Dune: Part Two has, of 24 March, hit over US$220 million in the United States domestic box-office, and worm-holed its way to over US$520 million globally. Villeneuve's latest foray into the harsh world of Arrakis has been critically acclaimed as a masterpiece, with the film compared favourably to the brilliant Star Wars sequel The Empire Strikes Back, while it currently enjoys near-perfect popular and critical reviews.
Dune: Part Two returns us to the story of Paul Atreides, quickly picking up from where Dune: Part One left us, as he enters the harsh desert climate of Arrakis in the company of the planet's indigenous inhabitants, the Fremen. In the film, the young Atreides must rally the 'desert power' of the Fremen, spurred on by his mother Lady Jessica, to have any hope of exacting vengeance against the brutal Family Harkonnen, who butchered his father Duke Leo Atreides and the rest of his royal House in Dune: Part One. The film depicts Paul gradually mobilising the thousands upon thousands of Fremen warriors across Arrakis against the Harkonnen rulers, and eventually in opposition to Emperor Shaddam IV himself, as his prescient visions reveal that his growing power will lead to an intergalactic holy war, much to the initial fear of himself and the revulsion of Chani, his Fremen comrade and lover.
Much good work has been written on Dune: Part Two as an example, or critique, of the white saviour narrative; a demonstration of interplanetary fascistic war; an exposé of brutal colonial violence; a self-aware Orientalist appropriation of a sandbox of non-Western cultures; a piece that deemphasises the complexity and agency of women from Herbert's original book; a movie that has noted analogies with the current Israel-Palestine war; and a movie that obviously took inspiration from Islamic and North African and Middle Eastern sources but equally relegates this recognition. Now, in preparation for seeing this movie for the third time at the local IMAX cinema, I wanted to do something a bit different before strolling in, and I swapped the 3D IMAX glasses for my Marxist spectacles to try to understand some key themes of this intergalactic blockbuster… spoiler alert! (for both Marxist theory and Dune: Part Two).
The post Marxist Viewing of Dune: Part Two appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

 In 2019, I wrote about an article in the New York Times "1619 Project," which drew on a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2016:   "Racial Bias in Pain Assessment and Treatment Recommendations, and False Beliefs about Biological Differences between Blacks and Whites." The paper was based on a survey of medical students and residents that gave them hypothetical cases and asked them to rate how much pain they thought the patient would be feeling and what treatment they would recommend for the pain (narcotics vs. something weaker).*  According to the Times "when asked to imagine how much pain white or black patients experienced in hypothetical situations, the medical students and residents insisted that black people felt less pain."  Actually, the ratings were almost identical--the mean for black cases was 7.622 on a scale of 0-10, and the mean for whites was 7.626--so the description in the Times story was completely wrong.  Basically what the study found was that the number of false beliefs was associated with racial bias, but at the average level of false believes there was no bias in either direction. Last year I saw another Times story that referred to the paper as "an often-cited study," and I checked and found it had about 1400 citations, according to Google Scholar.  After the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, I ran across another article that mentioned it (I forget where that appeared), which led me to check the citation count again.  It was up to almost 2000, and is now over 2,000.   That's a lot:  it ranks 6th out of the couple of thousand papers published in PNAS in 2016.  Presumably the 1619 project story helped to bring attention to it, but it was already doing well before then:  it had 25 citations in 2016, then 54, 103, and 152 in 2017-9.  I was interested in seeing how well the academic literature did in describing the findings of the paper.   Google Scholar lists citing articles roughly in order of the citations that they have, so I started from the top and picked the first 20 with over 100 citations (a couple of books were listed, but I limited myself to journal articles).  One of the citations could be called incidental:  "Contemporary, 'mainstream' epidemiology's technocratic focus on individual-level biological and behavioral risk factors"Four of them were accurate, in my judgment:  "a recent study showed that half of medical students and residents in their sample held biased beliefs such as 'Black people's skin is thicker than White people's skin,' assessed Black mock patients' pain as lower than White mock patients, and subsequently made less accurate treatment recommendations for Black compared to White mock patients.""medical students who endorsed the false beliefs that Black patients had longer nerve endings and thicker skin than White patients also rated Black patients as feeling less pain and offered less accurate treatment recommendations in mock medical cases." "in a 2016 study to assess racial attitudes, half of White medical students and residents held unfounded beliefs about intrinsic biologic differences between Black people and White people. These false beliefs were associated with assessments of Black patients' pain as being less severe than that of White patients and with less appropriate treatment decisions for Black patients.""and a substantial number of medical students and trainees hold false beliefs about racial differences."Four were partly accurate:   "Implicit bias among clinicians and other healthcare workers can . . . contribute to . . . lower quality of care received . . . .""document false beliefs among medical students and residents regarding race-based biological differences in pain tolerance that resulted in racial differences in treatment." "minorities . . . are less likely to have their pain appropriately diagnosed and effectively treated due to structural constraints, racialized stereotypes, and false beliefs regarding genetic differences on the part of health care providers." "contemporary examples of anti-Black racism in healthcare in North America include racial bias in pain assessment and treatment recommendations between White and Black patients based on false beliefs about biological differences"These correctly say that the study found evidence that views about biological differences were associated with differences in pain assessment and treatment, but fall short because they either imply that the study involved treatment of real cases or that it found differences in average levels of pain assessment.  Ten were inaccurate--I don't mean that the statements are necessarily false, but the study provided no support for them:"Racist beliefs among some providers that African Americans have unusually higher tolerance for pain . . .  may also have reduced opioid prescribing to African Americans relative to whites." "false assumptions about Black-White physiologic differences in pain tolerance" "Black patients have been subjected to racially stratified diagnoses resulting in the denial of pain medication, based on the belief that they withstand pain better than other demarcated groups." "Currently, Black patients also are less likely to receive . . . adequate doses of pain and cancer medication" "A substantial literature in psychology has documented physicians' differential perceptions of Black patients in terms of . . . pain tolerance." "there are known racial and socioeconomic biases in how a patient's pain is perceived by observers" "Black patients are less likely to receive . . . accurate diagnoses (e.g., pain assessments)" "Demographic factors associated with chronic pain and its undertreatment include . . . being an African American or other underrepresented minority . . . ." "The backdrop for such discussions includes systemic and pervasive racial biases in the US healthcare system, including lack of insurance and a lesser quality of care for non-white, rural, and low-income populations" "perceptions of suffering are shaped by various factors such as the victim's race"The most common mistakes were citing it as evidence of racial differences in pain assessments or in prescription of pain medication (rather than recommendations for hypothetical cases).And one cited this study while describing a completely different one:  "Black mothers in the wealthiest neighborhoods in Brooklyn, New York have worse outcomes than white, Hispanic, and Asian mothers in the poorest ones, …. likely due to societal bias that impacts Black women."I don't know what's typical, but more than 50% inaccurate citations is disturbing.   Another striking thing was that I didn't find any efforts to replicate the study.  It had an obvious limitation:  the sample was just students and residents at one medical school.  So it would be natural to try to replicate it at other medical schools, or among practicing physicians.  You could also go beyond straight replication, and do things like consider other hypothetical cases (e. g., ones that were more ambiguous), or the possibility of interactions between race and other factors like gender.  The data were from an online survey, so replicating it would be cheap and easy--I could see giving it as a project for a master's student or even an undergraduate.  Of course, I can't say that there are no published replications, but I made enough effort to be confident that there aren't many.  Is that because of a lack of attempts, or because attempts haven't found anything, so they haven't been published?***There was also a survey of Mechanical Turk participants, but that doesn't get much attention.  **The evidence in the original study was weak--there's a good chance that it's just a combination of random variation and what Andrew Gelman calls "researcher degrees of freedom."

Carson Christiano, CEGA Executive Director, outlines CEGA's top priorities in 2024, designed to expand the way we define and achieve "impact" in the evidence-informed policy ecosystem.Credit: Ronald Cuyan via UnsplashFor fifteen years, CEGA has supplied decision-makers in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) with rich evidence, insights, and tools they can use to identify cost-effective solutions for reducing poverty and improving lives. As we've matured, we have become wiser to the ways in which our efforts may — and may not — be driving meaningful and lasting policy change. In recent years, we have turned the microscope on ourselves, looking closely at our successes and failures and contemplating ways to boost the return on investment in CEGA's work. We are especially proud of the investments we've made to make evidence more cost-effective, more transparent and reproducible, and more inclusive.This year, we're re-committing to driving systematic change in the global development community and expanding our imagination of what our impact can be. Our priorities include:1. Launching new research initiatives in priority areas.As the world continues to contend with overlapping crises, there are several thematic areas where more evidence is urgently needed. CEGA faculty and staff are working to build research agendas and partnerships to support for new work in the areas of Gender & Agency, Conflict & Security, and Forced Displacement. Meanwhile, we are working to ensure that all of our thematic areas address the persistent threat of climate change, which in turn has exacerbated both conflict and forced displacement, especially for marginalized groups — and low-income women and children in particular.2. Building open science infrastructure.A key pillar of CEGA's work is to make evidence better. As such, we're constantly striving to improve the quality and credibility of the data, tools, and analytical methods used to make consequential policy decisions and drive large-scale social impact. This year, we're expanding investments in our Cost Transparency Initiative (CTI), which is developing tools and standards for rigorous intervention costing. We're promoting adoption of the Social Science Prediction Platform (SSPP), which enables timely predictions of social science research, and the Social Science Reproduction Platform (SSRP), which crowdsources and catalogs attempts to assess and improve the computational reproducibility of social science research. We're also excited to contribute a highly collaborative, novel effort to build a comprehensive, open-access, and searchable library of results from social science RCTs in low- and middle-income countries. By consistently documenting study design, intervention features and context, effect sizes, and measures of certainty and credibility, the envisioned Impact Data and Evidence Aggregation Library (IDEAL) will dramatically accelerate the translation of evidence into action by allowing users to quickly and painlessly access relevant information for a given set of studies. Once established, IDEAL will facilitate everything from qualitative systematic review to quantitative meta-analyses, making evidence-based decision-making easier for all across the development research ecosystem.3. Promoting the use of novel data science tools and approaches.CEGA's embrace of multidisciplinary and mixed methods has allowed us to generate new types of insights for decision makers, thus diversifying and expanding the number of tools in their toolkits. For example, the use of novel data sources (like satellite imagery and cell phone metadata) and data science approaches (including applications of AI and machine learning) by CEGA researchers allows them to paint a more complete or accurate picture of what's happening in a given geography or sector than they would relying on traditional data alone. This is particularly important in conflict or climate change-affected countries where household survey or government census data may be woefully out of date or insufficient for high-stakes decision-making. This year, CEGA is scoping new activities and partnerships that elevate the use of AI-based tools by researchers and policymakers for targeting, deploying, and rigorously testing a wide variety of global development solutions.4. Putting ethics and inclusion front and center.We're mindful of our position as a Global North institution working on challenges facing people in the Global South, and are deeply committed to driving both ethics and inclusion in this ecosystem. Our Global Networks program, which has brought over 70 scholars from East and West Africa to the US for semester-long fellowships in impact evaluation since 2012, continues to thrive and expand. This year, we announced a new collaboration with the Partnership for Economic Policy (PEP) to create more training and mentorship opportunities for promising African scholars. At the same time, we're helping to set new standards for ethics in development research, for example by studying the practices and preferences surrounding the returning of research results to communities. And our Collaboration for Inclusive Development Research (CIDR) is examining — using both qualitative and quantitative methods — how the inclusion of African scholars can influence evidence-informed policymaking, and the obstacles that remain in doing so.As CEGA matures and the world around us continues to shift, we're striving to update how we define and articulate "impact" — not only in terms of our investments in research and evidence, but also our investments in methods, training, and research dissemination. In other words, we're beginning to measure success not just by the specific programs or policies that have been informed by CEGA evidence — although that is important of course — but also by the ways in which the entire global development ecosystem has shifted towards the effective use of evidence. This year, we're prioritizing efforts to better track and learn from our past experience and proactively integrating these lessons into our work.At CEGA, we're motivated by the opportunities that lie ahead and stretching our imaginations about the kind of impact we can have. We can't do it alone — we're proud of our collaborations with public, private, and non-profit partners, especially with those in the Global South, and look forward to seeing what we can do together this year (and beyond!) to make global development decision-making more cost-effective, innovative, and inclusive.Innovating for Impact was originally published in CEGA on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Mary Elizabeth King on Civil Action for Social Change,
the Transnational Women's Movement, and the Arab Awakening







Nonviolent resistance remains by and large a marginal
topic to IR. Yet it constitutes an influential idea among idealist social
movements and non-Western populations alike, one that has moved to the center
stage in recent events in the Middle East. In this Talk, Mary King—who has spent over 40 years promoting nonviolence—elaborates
on, amongst others, the women's movement, nonviolence, and civil action more
broadly.






Print version of this Talk (pdf)






What is, according to you, the central challenge or principal debate in
International Relations? And what is your position regarding this challenge/in
this debate?



The field of International Relations is different from
Peace and Conflict Studies; it has essentially to do with relationships between
states and developed after World War I. In the 1920s, the big debates concerned
whether international cooperation was possible, and the diplomatic elite were
very different from diplomats today. The roots of Peace and Conflict Studies go
back much further. By the late 1800s peace studies already existed in the
Scandinavian countries. Studies of industrial strikes in the United States were
added by the 1930s, and the field had spread to Europe by the 1940s. Peace and
Conflict Studies had firmly cohered by the 1980s, and soon encircled the globe.
Broad in spectrum and inherently multi-disciplinary, it is not possible to walk
through one portal to enter the field.



To me it is also important that Peace and Conflict
studies is not wary of asking the bigger hypothetical questions such as 'Can we
built a better world?' 'How do we do a better job at resolving conflicts before
they become destructive?' 'How do we create more peaceable societies?' If we do
not pose these questions, we are unlikely to find the answers. Some political scientists say that they do not wish to
privilege either violence or nonviolent action. I am not in that category,
trying not to privilege violence or
nonviolent action. The field of peace and conflict studies is value-laden in
its pursuit of more peaceable societies. We need more knowledge and study of
how conflicts can be addressed without
violence, including to the eventual benefit of all the parties and the larger
society. When in 1964 Martin Luther King Jr received
the Nobel Peace Prize, his remarks in Oslo that December tied the nonviolent
struggle in the United States to the whole planet's need for disarmament. He said
that the most exceptional characteristic of the civil rights movement was the
direct participation of masses of people in it. King's remarks in Oslo were also
his toughest call for the use of nonviolent resistance on issues other than
racial injustice. International nonviolent action, he said, could be utilized
to let global leaders know that beyond racial and economic justice, individuals
across the world were concerned about world peace:



I venture to suggest [above all] . . . that . . . nonviolence become
immediately a subject for study and for serious experimentation in every field
of human conflict, by no means excluding relations between nations . . . which
[ultimately] make war. . . .



In the half century since King made his address in
Oslo, nonviolent civil resistance has not been allocated even a tiny fraction
of the resources for study that have been dedicated to the fields of
democratization, development, the environment, human rights, and aspects of
national security. Many, many questions beg for research, including intensive
interrogation of failures. Among the new global developments with which to be
reckoned is the enlarging role of non-state, non-governmental organizations as
intermediaries, leading dialogue groups comprised of adversaries discussing
disputatious issues and working 'hands-on' to intervene directly in local
disputes. The role of the churches and laity in ending Mozambique's civil war
comes to mind. One challenge within IR is how to become more flexible in
viewing the world, in which the nation state cannot control social change, and
with the widening of civil space.





How did you arrive at
where you currently are in your thinking about IR?



I
came from a family that was deeply engaged with social issues. My father was the
eighth Methodist minister in six generations from North Carolina and Virginia.
The Methodist church in both Britain and the United States has a history of
concern for social responsibility ― a topic of constant discussion in my home
as a child and young adult. When four African American students began the
southern student sit-in movement in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1,
1960, by sitting-in at a Woolworth's lunch counter, I was still in college.
Although I am white, I began to think about how to join the young black people
who were intentionally violating the laws of racial segregation by conducting
sit-ins at lunch counters across the South. Soon more white people, very like
me, were joining them, and the sweep of student sit-ins had become truly
inter-racial. The sit-in movement is what provided the regional base for what
would become a mass U.S. civil rights movement, with tens of thousands of
participants, defined by the necessity for fierce nonviolent discipline. So,
coming from a home where social issues were regularly discussed it was almost
natural for me to become engaged in the civil rights movement. And I have
remained engaged with such issues for the rest of my life, while widening my
aperture. Today I work on a host of questions related to conflict, building
peace, gender, the combined field of gender and peace-building, and nonviolent
or civil resistance. At a very young age, I had started thinking as a citizen
of the world and watching what was happening worldwide, rather than merely in
the United States.



Martin Luther King (to whom I am
not related) would become one of history's most
influential agents for propagating knowledge of the potential for constructive
social change without resorting to violence. He was the most significant exemplar
for what we simply called The Movement. Yet the movement had two southern
organizations: in 1957 after the success of the Montgomery bus boycott of
1955-56, he created, along with others, the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference (SCLC). The other organization was the one for which I worked for
four years: the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pron. snick), which initially came into being literally to coordinate
among the leaders of the student sit-in campaigns. As the sit-ins spread across
the South, 70,000 black, and, increasingly, white, students participated. By
the end of 1960, 3,600 would have been jailed.



SCLC and SNCC worked together but
had different emphases: one of our emphases in SNCC was on eliciting leadership
representing the voices of those who had been ignored in the past. We
identified many women with remarkable leadership skills and sought to
strengthen them. We wanted to build institutions that would make it easier for
poor black southern communities to become independent and move out of the
'serfdom' in which they lived. Thus we put less prominence on large
demonstrations, which SCLC often emphasized. Rather, we stressed the building
of alternative (or parallel) institutions, including voter registration,
alternative political parties, cooperatives, and credit unions.





What would a student
need (dispositions, skills) to become a specialist in IR or understand the
world in a global way?



One requirement is a subject that
has virtually disappeared from the schools in the United States: the field of
geography. It used to be taught on every level starting in kindergarten, but
has now been melded into a mélange called 'social sciences'. You would be
surprised at how much ignorance exists and how it affects effectiveness. I
served for years on the board of directors of an esteemed international
non-profit private voluntary organization and recall a secretary who thought
that Africa was a country. This is not simplistic — if you don't know the names
of continents, countries, regions, and the basic political and economic
history, it's much harder to think critically about the world. Secondly,
students need to possess an attitude of reciprocity and mutuality. No perfect
country exists; there is no nirvana without intractable problems in our world.
No society, for example, has solved the serious problems of gender inequity
that impede all spheres of life. Every society has predicaments and problems
that need to be addressed, necessitating a constant process. So we each need to
stand on a platform in which every nation can improve the preservation of the
natural environment, the way it monitors and protects human rights, transitions
to democratic systems, the priority it places on the empowerment of women, and
so on. On this platform, concepts of inferior and superior are of little value.



You also co-authored an article in 1965 about the role of women and how working in a political movement for equality
(the civil rights movement) has affected your perceptions of the relationship
between men and women. Do you believe that the involvement of women in the
Civil Rights Movement brought more gender equality in the USA and do you think
involvement in Nonviolent Resistance movements in other places in the world
could start such a process?



From within the heart of the civil
rights movement I wrote an article with Casey Hayden, with whom I worked in
Atlanta in the main office of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and in the
Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964. Casey
(Sandra Cason) and I were deeply engaged in a series of conversations involving
other women in SNCC about what we had been learning, the lessons from our work aiding
poor black people to organize, and asking ourselves whether our insights from
being part of SNCC could be applied to other forms of injustice, such as inequality
for women. The document reflected our growth and enlarging understanding of how
to mobilize communities, how to strategize, how to achieve lasting change, and
was a manifestation of this expanding awareness. The title was Sex and Caste – A Kind of Memo. Caste is an ancient Hindu demarcation
that not only determines an individual's social standing on the basis of
the group into which one is born, but also differentiates and assigns
occupational and economic roles. It cannot be
changed. Casey and I thought of caste as comparable to the sex of one's birth.
Women endure many forms of prejudice, bias, discrimination, and cruelty merely
because they are female. For these reasons we chose the term caste. We sent our
memorandum to forty women working in local peace and civil rights movements of
the United States. The anecdotal evidence is strong that it inspired other
women, who started coming together collectively to work on their own
self-emancipation in 'consciousness raising groups.' It had appeared in Liberation magazine of the War Resisters
League in April 1966 and was a catalyst in spurring the U.S. women's movement; indeed, the consciousness-raising
groups fuelled the women's movement in the United States during the 1970s. Historians
reflect that the article provided tinder for what is now called 'second-wave
feminism', and the 1965 original is anthologized as one of the
generative documents of twentieth-century gender studies.



We
have to remember that women's organizations are nothing new, but have been
poorly documented in history and that much information has been lost. Women
have been prime actors for nonviolent social change in many parts of the world
for a long time. New Zealand was the first country to grant women the vote, in
1893, after decades of organizing. Other countries followed: China, Iran, later
the United States and the United Kingdom. Women in Japan would not vote until
1946. IR expert
Fred Halliday contends that one of the most remarkable transnational movements
of the modern age was the women's suffrage movement. The movement to enfranchise women may have been the biggest
transnational nonviolent movement of human history. It was a significant
historical phenomenon that throws light on how it is sometimes easier to bring
about social and political change now than in the past.





Nonviolent movements seem to be growing
around the world, and not only in dictatorships but also in democracies in
Europe and the USA. How do you explain this?



I think that the sharing of
knowledge is the answer to this question. Study in the field of nonviolent
action has accelerated since the 1970s, often done by people who are both
practitioners and scholars, as am I. Organizing nonviolently for social justice
is not new, but the knowledge that has consolidated during the last 40 years
has been major. The works of Gene Sharp
have been significant, widely translated, and are accessible through the Albert EinsteinInstitution. His first major work, The Politics of Nonviolent
Action, in three volumes, came out in 1973 (Boston: Porter Sargent
Publishers). It marked the development of a new understanding of how this form
of cooperative action works, the conditions under which it can be optimized,
and the ways in which one can improve effectiveness. Sharp's works have since been
translated into more than 40 languages. Also valuable are the works and
translations of dozens of other scholars, who often stand on his shoulders.
Today there may be 200 scholar-activists in this field worldwide, with a great
deal of work now underway in related fields. Knowledge is being shared not only
through translated works, but also through organizations and their training
programs, such as the War Resisters League International and the International
Fellowship of Reconciliation, each of which came into existence in Britain around
World War I. Both are still running seminars, training programs, and
distributing books. George Lakey's Training for Change and a new database at Swarthmore College that
he has developed are sharing knowledge. So is the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict, which has built
a dramatic record in a short time, having run more than 400 seminars and
workshops in more than 139 countries. The three major films that ICNC has
produced (for example, 'Bringing Down a Dictator'), have
been translated into 20 languages and been publicly broadcast to more than 20
million viewers.



After its
success, leaders from the Serbian
youth movement Otpor! (Resistance) that in 2000 disintegrated the Slobodan Milošević dictatorship formed a network
of activists, including experienced veterans from civil-resistance struggles in
South Africa, the Philippines, Lebanon, Georgia, and Ukraine to share their
experiences with other movements. People can now more
easily find knowledge on the World Wide Web, often in their original language
or a second language, and they can find networks that share information about
their experiences, including their successes and failures.



I reject the Twitter explanation for
the increased use of nonviolent action or civil resistance, because all
nonviolent movements appropriate the most advanced technologies available. This
pattern is related to the importance of communications for their basic success.
Nonviolent mobilizations must be very shrewd in putting across their purpose,
their goals and objectives, preparing slogans, and conveying information on how
people can become involved. In order for people to join—bearing in mind that
numbers are important for success—it is critically important to make clear
what goal(s) you are seeking and why you have elected to work with civil
resistance. This decision is sometimes hard to understand for people who have
suffered great cruelty from their opponent, and who maintain 'but we are the
victims', making the sharing of the logic of the technique of civil resistance vital.





What would you say is the importance of
Nonviolent Resistance Studies in the field of International Relations and
Political Science? And how do you counter those who argue that some forms of
structural domination are only ended through violence?



In
this case we can look at the evidence and stay away from arguing beliefs or
ideology. Thanks to political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan,
who have produced a discerning work, Why Civil Resistance Works (2011), we now have
empirical evidence that removes this question from mystery. They studied 323
violent and nonviolent movements that occurred between 1900 and 2006 and found
that the nonviolent campaigns were twice as effective as violent struggles in
achieving their goals, while incurring fewer costly fatalities and producing
much greater prospects for democratic outcomes after the end of the campaign.
They found only one area in which violent movements have been more successful,
and that is in secessions. So, we don't need to dwell in the realm of opinion,
but can read their findings. Other scholars have written about the same issues
using qualitative data ― by doing interviews, developing case studies, and analytical
descriptions ― but the work of Chenoweth and Stephan is quantitative, putting
it in a different category due to its research methods.





Reading 'Why Civil Resistance Works' it
caught my eye that nonviolent campaigns seem less successful in the Middle East
and Asia than in other regions. Did you see that also in your own work? And if
so, do you have an explanation for it? In addition, do you believe that the
'Arab Awakening' is a significant turn in history, or did the name arise too
quickly and will it remain a temporary popular phrase?



What
I encountered in working in the Middle East was an expectation, notion, or hope
among people that a great leader would save them and bring them out of darkness.
This belief seems often to have kept the populace in a state of passivity.
Sometimes such pervasive theories of leadership are deeply elitist: one must be
well educated to be a leader, one must be born into that role, one must be
male, or the first son, etc. Such concepts of leadership discourage the taking
of independent civil action.



I think that the Arab Awakening has
been significant for a number of reasons. As one example, there had been a
widespread (and patronizing) assumption in the United States and the West that
the Arabs were not interested in democracy. We have heard from various sources
including Israel for decades that Arabs are not attracted to democracy. As a
matter of fact, I think that all people want a voice. All human beings
wish to be listened to and to be able to express their hopes and aspirations.
This is a fundamental basis of democracy and widely applicable, although
democracy may take different forms. The Arab Awakening rebutted this arrogant
assumption. This does not mean that the course will be easy. One of my Egyptian
colleagues said to me, 'We have had dictatorship since 1952, but after Tahir
Square you expect us to build a perfect democracy in 52 weeks! It cannot
happen!'



Among the first concessions
sought by the 2011 Arab revolts was rejection of the right of a dictator's sons
to succeed him. The passing of power from father to son has been a
characteristic of patriarchal societies, in the Arab world and elsewhere. Anthropologist John Borneman notes, 'The public renunciation of the son's claim to inherit the
father's power definitively ends the specific Arab model of succession that has
been incorporated into state dictatorships among tribal authorities'. In Tunisia to Egypt, Libya,
Syria, and Yemen (not all of which are successes), such movements have sought
to end the presumption of father-son inheritance of rule.



I believe that we are seeing the start of a broad democratization process
in the Middle East, not its end. The learning and preparation that had been occurring
in Egypt prior to Tahrir Square was extensive. Workshops had been underway for
10 to 15 years before people filled Tahrir Square. Women bloggers had for years
been monitoring torture and sharing news from outside. One woman blogger
translated a comic book into Arabic about the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr, from the 1960s, and had it distributed all over Cairo. Labor unions had
been very active. According
to historian Joel Beinin, from 1998 to 2010 some 3 million laborers took part
in 3,500 to 4,000 strikes, sit-ins, demonstrations, and other actions,
realizing more than 600 collective labor actions per year in 2007 and 2008. In the years immediately before the revolution, these
actions became more coherent. Wael Ghonim, a 30-year-old Google executive, set
up a Facebook page and used Google technologies to share ideas and knowledge
about what ordinary people can do. The April 6 Youth Movement, set up in 2008, three years before Tahrir, sent one of
its members to Belgrade in 2009, to learn how Otpor! had galvanized the
bringing down of Milošević. He returned to Cairo with materials and films,
lessons from other nonviolent movements, and workshop materials. This all goes
back to the sharing of knowledge. Yet the Egyptians have now come to the point
where they must assume responsibility and accountability for the whole and make
difficult decisions for their society. It will be a long and difficult process.
And it raises the question of what kind of help from outside is essential.





Why do you raise this point; do you think
outside help is essential?



I know from having
studied a large number of nonviolent movements in different parts of the globe
that the sharing of lessons laterally among mobilizations and nonviolent
struggles is highly effective. African American leaders were traveling by
steamer ship from 1919 until the outbreak of World War II to the Indian
subcontinent, to learn from Gandhi and the Indian independence struggles. This
great interchange between black leaders in the United States and the Gandhian
activists, as the historian Sudarshan Kapur shows in Raising
Up A Prophet (1992), was critically significant in the
solidification of consensus in the U.S. black community on nonviolent means. I have written about how the knowledge moved from East
to West in my book Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Scholarly exchanges and interchanges among activists
from other struggles are both potentiating and illuminating. Most
observers fail to see that nonviolent mobilizations often have very deep roots
involving the lateral sharing of experience and know-how.





You have written a book about the first
uprising, or 'intifada', in the Occupied Palestinian Territories between 1987
and 1993. The second Palestinian uprising did not contain much nonviolent
tactics though. Do you foresee another uprising soon? If not, why? If yes, do
you think that Nonviolent Actions will play again an important role in that
uprising, or is it more likely to turn violent?



Intifada is linguistically a
nonviolent word: It means shaking off and has no violent implication
whatsoever. (This word is utterly inappropriate for what happened in the
so-called Second Intifada, although it started out as a nonviolent endeavor.)
In the 1987 intifada, virtually the entire Palestinian society living under
Israel's military occupation unified itself with remarkable cohesion on the use
of nonviolent tools. The first intifada (1987-1993, especially 1987-1990)
benefited from several forces at work in the 1970s and 1980s, about which I
write in A Quiet Revolution (2007), one of which came from Palestinian activist
intellectuals working with Israeli groups, who wanted to end occupation for
their own reasons. These Israeli peace activists thought the occupation
degraded them, made them less than
human, in addition to oppressing Palestinians. The second so-called intifada
was not a 'shaking off'. For the first time, it bade attacks against the
Israeli settlements, which had not occurred before.



Let me put it this way: in virtually every situation, there is some
potential for human beings to take upon themselves their own liberation through
nonviolent action. We may expect that such potential is dormant and waiting for
enactment. Disciplined nonviolent action is underway in a number of
village-based struggles against the separation barrier in the West Bank right
now, in which Israeli allies are among the action takers. As another example,
the Freedom Theatre in Jenin is using Freedom Rides, a concept
adopted from the U.S. southern Civil Rights Movement, riding buses to the South
Hebron Hills villages and along the way using drama, music, and giant puppets
as a way of stimulating debate about Israeli occupation. Bloggers and writers
share their experiences (see e.g. this post by Nathan Schneider). For
the first time, as we speak, the Freedom Bus will travel from the West Bank to
make two performances in historic pre-1948 Palestine (Israel), in Haifa and the
Golan, in June 2013. A Palestinian 'Empty Stomach' campaign, led by Palestinian
political prisoners in Israel, has had some success in using hunger strikes to
press Israeli officials for certain demands. With the purpose of prevailing
upon Israel to conform to international resolutions pertaining to the
Palestinians and to end its military occupation, Palestinian civic
organizations in 2005 launched a Boycott, Divestment Sanctions (BDS) campaign,
drawing upon the notable example of third-party sanctions applied in the
anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. The Palestinian Authority has called
for non-state observer status at the United Nations and supports the boycotting
of products from Israeli settlements resistance.



More and more Palestinians are now
saying, 'We must fight for our rights with nonviolent resistance'. Many
Israelis are also deeply concerned about the future of their country. I
recently got an email from an Israeli who was deeply affected by reading Quiet
Revolution and has started to reach out to
Palestinians and take actions to bring to light the injustices that he
perceives. Tremendous debate is underway about new techniques, novel processes,
and how to shift gears to more effective mutual action. The United States
government and its people continue to pay for Israel's occupation and
militarization, which has abetted the continuation of conflict, although it is
often done in the name of peace! The United States has not incentivized the
building of peace. It has done almost nothing to help the construction of
institutions that could assist coexistence.



Also,
it is very important for the entire world, including Israelis, to recognize
intentional nonviolent action when they see it. The Israeli government
persisted in denying that the 1987 Intifada was nonviolent, when the Palestinian
populace had been maintaining extraordinary nonviolent discipline for nearly
three years, despite harsh reprisals. Israeli officials continued to call it
'unending war' and 'the seventh war'. Indeed, it was not perfect nonviolent discipline,
but enough that was indicative of a change in political thinking among the
people in the Palestinian areas that could have been built upon. Although some
Israeli social scientists accurately perceived the sea change in Palestinian
political thought about what methods to use in seeking statehood and the
lifting of the military occupation, the government of Israel generally did not
seize upon such popularly enacted nonviolent discipline to push for progress.
My sources for Quiet Revolution
include interviews with Israelis, such as the former Chief Psychologist of the
Israel Defense Force and IDF spokesperson.





Your latest book is about the transitions
of the Eastern European countries from being under Soviet rule to independent
democracies. You chose to illustrate these transitions with New York Times
articles. Why did you chose this approach; do you think the NY Times was
important as a media agency in any way or is there another reason?



There
is another reason: The New York Times
and CQ Press approached me and asked if I would write a reference book on the
nonviolent revolutions of the Eastern bloc, using articles from the Times that I would choose upon which to
hang the garments of the story. The point of the work is to help particularly
young people learn that they can study history by studying newspapers. The book
gives life to the old adage that newspaper reporters write the first draft of
history. In the book's treatment of these nonviolent revolutions, I chose ten Times articles for
each of the major ten struggles that are addressed, adding my historical
analysis to complete the saga for each country. It had been difficult for Times reporters to get into Poland, for
example, in the late 1970s and the crucial year of 1980; they sometimes risked
their lives. Yet it's in the nature of journalism that their on-the-spot
reportage needed additional analysis; furthermore newspaper accounts often
stress description.



After
the 1968 Prague Spring, when the Soviet Union sent 750,000 troops and tanks
from five Warsaw Pact countries into Czechoslovakia, crushing that revolt,
across Eastern Europe a tremendous amount of fervent work got underway by small
non-official committees, often below the radar of the communist party states.
This included samizdat (Russian for
'self published'), works not published by the state publishing machinery,
underground publications that were promoting new ways of thinking about how to
address their dilemma. Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Lithuania were the most
active in the Eastern bloc with their major but covert samizdat. As it was
illegal in Czechoslovakia for a citizen to own a photocopy machine, 'books'
were published by using ten pieces of onion-skin paper interspersed with carbon
sheets, 'publishing' each page by typing it and its copies on a manual
typewriter.



The
entire phenomenon of micro-committees, flying universities, samizdat boutiques,
seminars, drama with hidden meanings, underground journals, and rock groups
transmitting messages eluded outside observers, who were not thinking about
what the people could do for themselves. The economists and Kremlinologists who
were observing the Eastern bloc did not discern what the playwrights, small
committees of activist intellectuals, local movements, labor unions,
academicians, and church groups were undertaking. They did not imagine the
scope or scale of what the people were doing for themselves with utmost
self-reliance. In essence, no one saw these nonviolent revolutions coming, with
the exception of the rare onlooker, such as the historian Timothy Garton Ash. Even today the
peaceful transitions to democracy of the Eastern bloc are sometimes explained
by saying 'Gorby did it', when Gorbachev did not come to power until 1985. Or by
attributing the alterations to Reagan's going to Berlin and telling Gorbachov
to tear down the Wall. 



By
December 1981, Poland was under martial law, which unleashed a high degree of
underground organizing, countless organizations of self-help, reimagining of
the society, and the publishing of samizdat. Still, even so, some people
believe that this sweeping political change was top-down.  It is indisputably true that nonviolent
action usually interacts with other forces and forms of power, but I would say
that we need this book for its accessible substantiation of historically
significant independent nonviolent citizen action as a critical element in the
collapse of the Soviet Union.





You also mention Al Jazeera as an
important media agency in your most recent blog post at 'Waging Nonviolence'.
You wrote that Al Jazeera has an important role in influencing global affairs.
Could you explain why? And more generally, how important is diversification of
media for international politics?



Al
Jazeera generally has not been taking the point of view of the official organs
of governments of Arab countries and has usually not reported news from
ministries of information. Additionally, it often carries reports from local
correspondents in the country at issue. If you are following a report from
Gaza, it is likely to be a Gazan journalist who is transmitting to Al Jazeera.
If it is a report from Egypt, it may well be an Egyptian correspondent. Al
Jazeera also has made a point of reporting news from Israel, and utilizing
reporters in Tel Aviv, which may be a significant development. Certainly in the
2010-2011 Arab Awakening, it made a huge difference that reports were coming
directly from the action takers rather than the official news outlets of Arab
governments.



President
George W. Bush did not want Al Jazeera to come to the United States, because he
considered it too anti-American. I remember reading at the time that the first
thing that Gen. Colin Powell said to Al Jazeera was 'can you tone it down a
little?' when asking why Al Jazeera couldn't be less anti-American in its news.
To me, either you support free speech or you do not; it's free or it's not: You
can't have a little bit of control and a little bit of freedom.



Until
recently, Al Jazeera was not easily available in the United States, except in
Brattleboro, Vermont; Washington, DC; and a few other places. It was difficult
to get it straight in the United States. I mounted a special satellite so that
I could get Al Jazeera more freely. This does not speak well for freedom of the
press in the United States. This may change with the advent of Al Jazeera
America, although we still do not know to what degree it will represent an
editorially free press.



News
agencies are important for civil-resistance movements for major reasons.
Popular mobilizations need good communications internally and externally!  People need to understand clearly what is the
purpose and strategy and to be part of the making of decisions. Learning also crucially
needs to take place inside the movement: activist intellectuals often act as
interpreters, framing issues anew, suggesting that an old grievance is now
actionable. No one expects the butcher, the baker, or the candlestick maker,
and everyone else in the movement to read history and theory.



When
news media are interested and following a popular movement of civil resistance,
they can enhance the spread of knowledge. In the U.S. civil rights movement,
the Southern white-owned newspapers considered the deaths of black persons or
atrocities against African Americans as not being newsworthy. There was
basically a 'black-out', if you want to call it that, with no pun. Yet dreadful
things were happening while we were trying to mobilize, organize, and get out the
word. So SNCC created its own media, and Julian Bond
and others and I set up nationwide alternative outlets. Eventually we had 12
photographers across the South. This is very much like what the people of the
Eastern bloc did with samizdat — sharing and disseminating papers, articles,
chapters, even whole books. The media can offer a tremendous boost, but
sometimes you have to create your own.





Last question. You combine scholarship
with activism. How do you reconcile the academic claim for 'neutrality' with
the emancipatory goals of activism?



To
be frank, I am not searching for neutrality in my research. Rather, I strive
for accuracy, careful transcription, and scrupulous gathering of evidence. I
believe that this is how we can become more effective in working for justice,
environmental protection, sustainable development, pursuing human rights, or
seeking gender equity as critical tools to build more peaceable societies.
Where possible I search for empirical data. So much has been ignored, for
example, with regards to the effects of gendered injustice. I do not seek
neutrality on this matter, but strong evidence. For example, since the 1970s, experts
have known that the education of women has profoundly beneficial and measurable
effects across entire societies, benefiting men, children, and women. Data from
Kerala, India; Sri Lanka; and elsewhere has shown that when you educate women
the entire society is uplifted and that all indicators shift positively. The
problem is that the data have for decades been ignored or trivialized. We need
much more than neutrality. We need to interpret evidence and data clearly to
make them compelling and harder to ignore. I think that we can do this with
methodologies that are uncompromisingly scrupulous.





Mary Elizabeth King is professor of peace and conflict studies at the
UN-affiliated University for Peace and and is Scholar-in-Residence in the
School of International Service, at the American University in Washington, D.C.
She is also a Distinguished Fellow of the Rothermere American Institute at the
University of Oxford, in the United Kingdom. Her most recent book is The
New York Times on Emerging Democracies in Eastern Europe (Washington, D.C.:
Times Reference and CQ Press/Sage, 2009), chronicling the nonviolent
transitions that took place in Poland,  Hungary, East Germany,
Czechoslovakia, the Baltic states, Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine in the late
1980s and early 1990s. She is the author of the highly acclaimed A
Quiet Revolution: The First Palestinian Intifada and Nonviolent Resistance (New
York: Nation Books, 2007; London: Perseus Books, 2008), which examines crucial
aspects of the 1987 uprising overlooked or misunderstood by the media,
government officials, and academicians. 





Related links





King's personal page 
Read the book edited by
King on Peace Research for Africa
(UNU, 2007) here (pdf) 
Read the book by King Teaching Model: Nonviolent Transformation of
Conflict (UNU, 2006) here (pdf)










Print version of this Talk (pdf)





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CEGA's Director of Operations Lauren Russell and Executive Director Carson Christiano share the center's ambitions for 2023.Spring is upon us and we're cleaning CEGA's proverbial house. This means reflecting on our priorities and commitments, and tidying our goals for the year — each of which we hope will bring us closer to a world where people are better off because decision-makers use insights and tools backed by rigorous, inclusive, and transparent evidence.A woman in India assembles a jharu, a broom made of grass, used for cleaning | Hewlett FoundationBelow we outline five strategic ambitions for CEGA that we believe will generate new insights and tools leaders can use to improve policies, programs, and lives.Incubating new research portfolios on forced displacement, conflict and security, and gender and agency.These are topics of central importance to decision-makers and researchers, for which data and evidence remain lacking. We have made headway on each: a new suite of CEGA studies is focused on generating more and better data (including panel data) on the refugee and host community experience, as well as the effectiveness of interventions designed to improve outcomes for both. Meanwhile, we are building a portfolio on conflict and security, leveraging an ongoing project on post-conflict security structures in Latin America. Finally, we're scoping a new, cross-cutting research portfolio on gender and agency, designed to answer important questions about social norms, wellbeing, and measurement, and to inform improvements to social programs that affect underserved groups.Promoting the use of novel data and data-intensive analytical approaches by the development research community.New types of data — including call detail records, sound and text data, and satellite data — and new methods to analyze them (like machine learning and AI) can generate more accurate, nuanced, and useful insights on global poverty and development than traditional surveys. Through our Data Science for Development (DS4D) portfolio, CEGA is seeding frontier research leveraging these data and approaches — like employment matching, new poverty estimates, and using historical satellite imagery to predict growth — and building the capacity of early-career researchers and partners, including in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), to use similar tools. In parallel, our Digital Credit Observatory (DCO) recently launched a new focus on data privacy, which is generating evidence on the effectiveness of privacy enhancing technologies.Centering the voices of women, LMIC scholars, and other underrepresented groups in our work.CEGA continues to promote diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ) in all that we do, for example, by empowering African scholars to generate policy-relevant research through fellowships, networking and dissemination opportunities, and access to dedicated research funding and mentorship. This year, our Collaboration for Inclusive Development Research (CIDR) is taking a structural view to investigate the need for — and effectiveness of — various inclusion strategies, in close partnership with the Network of Impact Evaluation Researchers in Africa (NIERA). Finally, CEGA works tirelessly to make social science research more transparent, benefitting underrepresented scholars by increasing access to knowledge (more below). We are eager to expand these activities, and to serve as a partner and resource to other organizations seeking to make development research more open and inclusive.Advancing open and transparent research.In 2023, CEGA is redoubling efforts to promote ethical, transparent, and reproducible research practices that can improve scientific integrity and inspire better public policy, while making the entire research process more inclusive. We are particularly excited to grow our Cost Transparency Initiative (CTI), which will drive new efficiencies in global development by helping to standardize the way the cost (and cost-effectiveness) of development interventions is measured. Importantly, we are further investing in our work on Open Policy Analysis (OPA), a crucial element of democratic and effective policymaking, which is advancing through an ongoing collaboration with the Ministry of Finance in Chile.Investing in partnerships to strengthen policy impact.The pathways by which evidence improves people's lives are rarely linear (or even clear). CEGA's impact stories highlight some of the many circuitous ways in which evidence-based tools and insights have guided improvements in programming, policy, and practice. Our approach to policy engagement has long involved investing in LMIC researchers, facilitating the co-creation of research through strategic matchmaking activities, and prioritizing demand-driven research in our competitive grantmaking. This year, CEGA seeks to partner with organizations in LMICs that can inform our research agendas and deliver key insights to decision-makers at opportune moments. Meanwhile, we are continuing to investigate our own impact to understand how CEGA investments have contributed to policy change so that we can incorporate lessons into our evolving policy engagement strategy.Marie-Kondo-ing our annual goals renews our motivation to continue advancing rigorous, transparent research that informs critical decisions impacting people experiencing poverty. We are deeply grateful for our diverse and committed network of affiliated faculty, LMIC scholars, partners, supporters, and staff. We invite you to engage with the CEGA community by reading about our research, attending our events, following us on social media, and sharing our data and resources as we work to meaningfully improve people's lives.Spring Cleaning: Refreshing CEGA's Annual Priorities was originally published in CEGA on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.