On May 31 2011 Dr Daoudy shared her thoughts about the events in Syria with St. Antony’s students and faculty over a lunch seminar organised by Warden MacMillan. Ever since it started at the end of January, the Syrian uprising has been continuously in the news. Dr Daoudy discussed the opposition, the army, and the potential future scenarios for Syria. The opposition, it shares some characteristics with that of Egypt and Tunisia. It’s led by youth with no overriding ideology or religious affiliation. Dr Daoudy points out that the advantage of this type of opposition is that it can be labeled as anything, but the disadvantage is the lack of leadership and the inherent divisions within the opposition movement. The …

Many commercial legacy media organizations around the Western world are having a hard time these days, still hit by the impact of the recession on their revenues, and struggling with the different structural adjustments they will have to make as they move from the relatively stable and platform-specific media markets of the mid-twentieth century to the increasingly convergent and overlapping media environment of the 21st century. Newspapers in particular, from national flagship titles over regional powerhouses to local weeklies, are often in trouble. Changes in the business of journalism have potentially profound consequences for our democracies, because private media like newspapers have employed many of the journalists who inform us all (and occasionally misinforms us) about what goes on in …

Sounds unlikely.  Did Twitter? Nobody really seems to claim so, though Evgeny Morozov erroneously claims that Andrew Sullivan claims so, though Sullivan actually only raised the question and linked to Ethan Zuckerman, who … wait, back to the fax machine. I met Marc Plattner yesterday, who edits the Journal of Democracy and is a veteran of both academic and policy discussions around issues of democracy and democratization. He told me about how some people used to claim the fax machine “caused” (or at least played a large part in) the collapse of the Soviet Union. You can imagine all the arguments that could be marshalled. (“Between them, television, the fax machine and word of mouth have banished fear,” writes John …