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How Technology Is Redefining Diplomacy

united-nations

I have been in New York City covering various UN Week events, including the Social Good Summit and the Clinton Global Initiative.  Now more than ever the diplomatic world uses technology to reach their constituencies and find solutions to many global problems.

“Leaders around the world are coming together at the United Nations seeking solutions for some of the toughest challenges we might face,” said US State Secretary Hillary Clinton in her remarks to the Social Good Summit. “At the same time a revolution in social media is helping people everywhere take part in a global conversation about how we can work together to advance the common good.”

Up until recently the State Department had been accused of being late to adapting to social media.  But with the inauguration of the “first Internet President” Barack Obama, it seems like US diplomats are forging a new digital frontier.  According to Victoria Esser, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Public Affairs for Digital Strategy at the State Department, the Department has 300 Twitter profiles and 400 Facebook pages.  Esser also said the Department recently began using Google Hangout and hosted an event in Persian for Iranian journalists and bloggers as a way to reach out to a country the United States doesn’t have a diplomatic relationship with currently.

“Social media is an integral part of how we’re conducting our diplomacy around the world,” Esser said.  “To me, it’s about creating virtuous circles online and offline — nothing will replace face-to-face diplomacy, but social media is an important way to connect with people and cut away time, distance and diplomatic rank barriers and have a real conversation.”

However, recent riots in the Islamic world attributed to the Innocence of Muslims YouTube video has put e-diplomacy in a poor light.  Specifically, a tweet from the US embassy in Cairo may have further instigated the deadly chaos.

Former State Department spokesman James Glassman says this incident shouldn’t deter other diplomats from using social media, but rather be more mindful of what they are saying in the future.

…A bigger problem, however, is that I suspect the Obama administration did not have a clear policy on how to handle scurrilous videos, cartoons, and the like. The rioting that followed the Danish cartoon controversy in 2005 caused Bush officials, me included, to work hard preparing for another such event. We were sure it would happen again.

The right response today, I believe, has three parts, and the order is important: 1) violence is never acceptable, and America will take strong action if its people and property are attacked, 2) we believe in the principle of free speech, and 3) all religions deserve respect.

Effective public diplomacy begins with clear ends (which, as an aside, I am not so sure the United States has in Egypt or other parts of the Middle East), and leaders have the responsibility to communicate up and down the line both those ends and the right messages to achieve them. Get that right, and then liberated diplomats on the ground can use the amazing tool of social media — a gift, really — to powerful effect.

Esser indirectly discussed the public relations disaster the Cairo embassy created.  “We’ve devolved [control] so missions in the field are responsible, with general guidance from Washington. You can’t manage a tweet at a time, and it’s important not to or it won’t be authentic to the community you’re trying to engage with. We recognize there will be bumps along the road, but as my colleague Alec Ross points out, the twenty-first century is a terrible time to be a control freak. If you want to engage in this dialogue, there’s a certain loss in control involved.”

Nonetheless, many diplomats are teaching themselves how to be tech-savvy, like Indonesian Ambassador to the United States Dino Patti Djalal, who boosted about how social media literally made his birthday wish come true.

“I recently made a tweet… I have about 100,000 followers.   I said, ‘if you want to give me a gift for my birthday, do one act of kindness.’ A few hours later, the hundreds of replies I got were amazing: ‘I proposed to my girlfriend,’ ‘I kissed my mom on the cheek.’ That’s when I realized. . .the power of social media. It has a remarkable use for the field of diplomacy,” said Ambassador Djalal.

Former US Ambassador to Zimbabwe Charles Ray says he became known for his Facebook use, but the Zimbabwean government wasn’t too pleased.  He started using Facebook because there was hostility from Robert Mugabe’s regime about having meetings with young Zimbabweans in person.

“When the government discovered our face-to-face meetings with young people were having an effect,” he said.  “They started disrupting meetings. They hated it with a passion. So we came up with an alternative, which was a wild suggestion at the time: A live Facebook chat, along with SMS, Twitter, and YouTube. In the first one, 20 people enrolled and we had 250 comments in the first 30 minutes.”

US Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice says she was a skeptic about social media at first, as “it might cheapen the coin.”  But she realized quickly that so much good can come out of social media.  Rice is now an avid user of Twitter, tweeting about global humanitarian efforts and says she has used YouTube to post videos encouraging women to vote and run for office.

The diplomatic world is also taking Internet policy more seriously as well.  Yesterday the Broadband Commission for Digital Development released its report, The State of Broadband 2012: Achieving Digital Inclusion for All.  It is their first ever country-by-country assessment of broadband deployment.

…The report reveals that while household Internet access has seen strong growth over the past year and is on track to achieve the Commission’s target for Connecting Homes to Broadband, individual Internet use continues to lag behind. ITU analysts believe that mobile broadband could prove the platform for achieving the boost needed to get progress back on track – at end 2011, there were already almost twice as many mobile broadband subscriptions as fixed broadband connections…

“The question here is whether broadband is a luxury or a basic human right,” says ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Touré.  “I believe it is a basic human right.”

Touré says he is working with UNESCO and other human rights groups within the UN system to figure out a clear definition for human rights and how to include broadband access.  Touré stressed that we have to find a baseline for basic rights, and at this time in history, access to information online counts towards advancing social change and equality.

As Ambassador Rice said at the Social Good Summit, everyone has to be working together for the same goals to make the world a better place.

“It’s not about working for change, it’s about being the change,” Rice said.

The Notion of Anti-Colonialism

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I had a chance to see the controversial new film 2016:Obama’s America.  I hadn’t paid much attention to it until it became the highest grossing conservative documentary of all time.   After seeing the film, I felt quite bemused by the story line.  The film is based on conservative activist Dinesh D’Souza’s 2010 book titled The Roots of Obama’s Rage.  The book and film claim that the basis for Obama’s political ideology comes from the radical “Founding Fathers” in his life, such as Palestinian scholar Edward Said, Weather Underground founder Bill Ayers, liberation theologian Jeremiah Wright and communist writer Franklin Marshall Davis.  However, Obama was apparently mostly influenced by his biological father Barack Obama Sr. – a man he had only met once as a child.  The elder Obama was a staunch anti-colonial socialist who played a role in Kenya’s independence.

And from this D’Souza theorizes that President Obama has a yearning to carry out his late father’s radical beliefs, as if he were a modern day Robin Hood stealing from the West to give back what was “stolen” from the developing world.

“He is trying to reduce America’s footprint in the world by stepping on America,” said D’Souza before a recent gathering hosted by Americans for Prosperity.

But what is so wrong with anti-colonialism, or the notion of anti-colonialism?

Last time I checked, the United States was a country built upon the ideals of anti-colonialism.  D’Souza must have forgotten about the original “tea party” that fought against British tax policies by throwing tea into the Boston Harbor.  D’Souza was born in India, a country that has its own colonial legacy with Britain.  He also says that he came to the United States to pursue the great “American Dream” by attending Dartmouth College and becoming an advisor for the Reagan administration – a dream he claims he would not have been able to pursue in India.

D’Souza contends that Obama is an  American (that’s right; D’Souza is not a birther) who also had the same opportunity for that American dream, but has instead used his opportunity by manipulating people using his biracial heritage and dynamic speaking ability from college to the White House, all while secretly harboring his Marxist ideas of bringing down the country.

In the movie, D’Souza cites a number of examples of Obama degrading America, such as cutting back financial and military support to Israel, siding with Argentina’s claim to the Falkland Islands and allegedly backing the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.  D’Souza went as far as getting the president’s half brother George Obama to admit that Kenya was better off under British colonial rule.

Coincidentally, this movie’s release came around the same time as the Non Alignment Movement (NAM) summit in Tehran.  NAM was set up in 1961 to create a buffer zone for newly independent countries that wanted to find their own identity instead of siding with the United States or the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

However, in recent years it has been criticized for not being relevant.  But given that 120 countries are represented at the summit and host country Iran has become the center of the world’s attention with its nuclear testing and its growing tension with Israel, NAM is possibly more relevant now than ever.  Iran is taking over as NAM’s chair through 2015, and this could make some big political waves in the near future.  Furthermore, many of the issues that were the foundation of NAM’s birth 50 years ago still exist in the formerly colonized world, such as racism, foreign aggression, hegemony and neo-colonialism.

Considering that D’Souza comes from one of the founding countries of NAM, it comes as a bit of a surprise that he would hold the views that being anti-colonial is being anti-American or even anti-freedom.  Doesn’t the world need less racism, foreign aggression, hegemony and neo-colonialism? If Obama wants to make the world a fairer place or be Robin Hood, is that really a bad thing? Isn’t this part of the American dream too?  It is outrageous to say otherwise.

Sapphire: Life After

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There are many writers who have been scribing for years before they suddenly write that one book that gains international notoriety, and the writer becomes an instant celebrity.  This is what happened to Ramona Lofton, or better known to the world as her pen name Sapphire.  The writer had been established in New York’s poetry scene long before publishing her groundbreaking book, Push, in 1996.  The story is about Claireece “Precious” Jones, an abused 16-year-old black teen living in 1980s Harlem.  The book arose from Sapphire’s own experience working with at-risk youth during that time.

The book was adapted into Lee Daniels’ 2009 Academy Award-winning film Precious.  However, with praise also came criticism about the portrayal of black women in the film version.  I talked to Sapphire at the Harlem Book Fair where she was doing a reading about the film’s backlash, what is great writing and what she is writing about these days.

Many black critics highlighted at the time of the film’s release that it portrayed the black family as dysfunctional, especially the relationship between Precious and her mother.  Sapphire said that she knew ahead of the movie coming out that there would be critics – or “haters” as she calls them – of the storyline.
“I knew people would be negative,” she said, “but I was more surprised by the movie which took a lighter approach than the book.”

The book was actually more graphic in many aspects than the film adaptation, but Sapphire said that this was possibly done to get a lower Motion Picture Association rating.  Furthermore, she said the film adaptation “didn’t need to go there.”

Sapphire was also surprised by the criticism of colorism in the film.  “I hated the comments about Precious being dark-skinned, and Blue Rain [Precious’ teacher] was light-skinned.  I just hated it when people made these comparisons.  They made no sense to me.”
Push has also been frequently included on many banned book lists.

Currently, she is promoting her latest book, The Kid, which is a sequel to Push.  The book follows Precious’ son, Abdul, as he goes through the foster care system, where he is both the victim and victimizer of sexual abuse and finding his calling as a dancer.

“I wanted to develop Abdul’s character in this book,” she said, “and I would like to write another book about Abdul in the future.  But for now I am writing another book on a totally different subject.”

On the subject of good writing, Sapphire said “anyone can learn to be a great writer,” regardless of their personality.  As a matter of fact, she said Emily Dickinson was one of the greatest writers, although she was a recluse who spent most of her life in her bedroom.

Whatever she is writing about, Sapphire said she wants to inspire her readers, no matter what other people might think.

“I became a writer because I really want to do something meaningful for others.”

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