Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the Internet Worldwide. Pippa Norris. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 303 pp. $60 hbk., $20 pbk. Forecasts that the Internet heralds a world of more democracy and less poverty seem as inflated as dot.com stocks. This rosy view has electronic voting, political chat rooms, and email access re-engaging apathetic publics in politics. Digital technologies redress economic disparities, and the benefits of the Internet percolate down to transform poor societies. Equally exaggerated is the gloom of naysayers. The Internet Age has done little to narrow the gap between rich and poor countries, the information haves and havenots, cyber-skeptics contend. Indeed, digital technologies could create new inequalities and reinforce the dominance of power elites. In her new book, Digital Divide, Pippa Norris, associate director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, steps into this fusillade of cyber-hyperbole, lowers the decibel with a well-written and thoughtful examination of Internet use and access in 179 countries and dissects the claims and counter-claims. Her research and findings place her on middle ground, somewhere between current reality and optimism. The Internet era seems to be changing "politics as usual" in a number of countries, expanding and loosening information about governments and politics, allowing the entrance of new political players, and fostering international movements on the environment, women's rights, and other issues across borders. The disappointment is that digital technologies are activating the already politically active and passing up the disengaged and uninterested. A major challenge to digital democracy is the gulf between the United States, Scandinavia, and other early Internet adopters and the rest of the world. That gap is now so wide that at the turn of the century, more than three-quarters of the online community lived in the developed world. Internet use tracks the path of economic and technological development. But that situation could begin to change, Norris says. The Internet is in its technological adolescence. Costs of access are falling. And governments can make a difference if policymakers take the initiative. We have the historical patterns of other communication technologies to study. Norris examines theories of technological diffusion and points out that the American response to the Internet is more akin to the rapid spread of televisions and VCRs than the slower adoption of telephones and radios. American dominance could recede as Internet access grows worldwide. Contrary to what officials of the Bush Administration contend, Norris finds that the digital divide between rich and poor within the United States remains substantial. Europe mirrors that trend. In the long run, the Internet could become more accessible to the excluded: lower income families, minorities, and women. …

Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the Internet Worldwide

The Trouble with the Congo suggests a new explanation for international peacebuilding failures in civil wars. Drawing from more than 330 interviews and a year and a half of fi eld research, it develops a case study of the international intervention during the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s unsuccessful transition from war to peace and democracy (2003–2006). Grassroots rivalries over land, resources, and political power motivated widespread violence. However, a dominant peacebuilding culture shaped the intervention strategy in a way that precluded action on local confl icts, ultimately dooming the international efforts to end the deadliest confl ict since World War II. Most international actors interpreted continued fi ghting as the consequence of national and regional tensions alone. Diplomats and United Nations staff viewed intervention at the macro levels as their only legitimate responsibility. The dominant culture constructed local peacebuilding as such an unimportant, unfamiliar, and unmanageable task that neither shocking events nor resistance from certain individuals could convince international actors to reevaluate their understanding of violence and intervention. Through this in-depth analysis , The Trouble with the Congo proposes innovative ways to address civil wars in Africa and beyond.

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Introduction to "The Trouble With the Congo: Local Violence and the Failure of International Peacebuilding"

Mobile phones are a crucial mode of communication and welfare enhancement in poor countries, especially those lacking an infrastructure of fixed lines. In recent years much has been written about how mobile telephony in Africa is rapidly reducing the digital divide with developed countries. Yet, when one examines the evidence it is not at all clear what is really happening. In one country, Tanzania, for example, some observers point to the fact that 97% of the population lives under the mobile footprint, while others show that ownership is very limited. These extreme values prompted us to review the situation in Africa as a whole, in an effort to discover what is really going on.

Mobile phones in Africa: How much do we really know?

At present, there is a consensus that the digital economy provides a new impetus for sustainable economic development. Based on domestic and foreign literature reviews, this paper focuses on representative industry sectors; we present China’s 2011–2018 digital economy development index, for 173 cities, from a three-level perspective—internet development, digital literacy, and industrial efficiency improvement. Various models, such as the instrumental variable method, the double difference method, the intermediary effect model, and the spatial econometric model were used to quantitatively analyze the impact of digital economic development on urban economic growth in China. The study finds that: (1) digital economic development in China has a positive effect on urban economic growth, and a heterogeneity of effects exists between different cities. (2) Urban employment is the “effect mechanism” of digital economic growth on urban economic growth. (3) The direct effect of digital economic development on urban economic growth in China is positive, the spillover effect is positive, the direct effect is greater than the spillover effect, and the total effect is positive. The research results enrich the measurement methods used in urban digital economic development in China, providing new perspectives for studying the influence mechanisms of digital economic development on urban economic growth.

Digital Economic Development and Its Impact on Econimic Growth in China: Research Based on the Prespective of Sustainability

The UN is becoming increasingly data-driven. Until recently, data-driven initiatives have mainly been led by individual UN field missions, but with Antonio Guterres, the new Secretary-General, a more centralized approach is being embarked on. With a trend towards the use of data to support the work of UN staff, the UN is likely to soon rely on systematic data analysis to draw patterns from the information that is gathered in and across UN field missions. This paper is based on UN peacekeeping data from the Joint Mission Analysis Centre (JMAC) in Darfur, and draws on interviews conducted in New York, Mali and Sudan. It will explore the practical and ethical implications of systematic data analysis in UN field missions. Systematic data analysis can help the leadership of field missions to decide where to deploy troops to protect civilians, guide conflict prevention efforts and help preempt threats to the mission itself. However, predictive analysis in UN peace operations will only be beneficial if it also leads to early action. Finally, predictive peacekeeping will not only be demanding of resources, it will also include ethical challenges on issues such as data privacy and the risk of reidentification of informants or other potentially vulnerable people.

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Predictive Peacekeeping: Strengthening Predictive Analysis in UN Peace Operations

Peacekeeping operations, mandated through the United Nations and regional bodies, play an increasingly diverse role in the economic development of post-conflict countries A key way that missions c

Peacekeeping's Digital Economy: The Role of Communication Technologies in Post-conflict Economic Growth

Peacekeeping operations, mandated through the United Nations and regional bodies, play an increasingly diverse role in the economic development of post-conflict countries. A key way that missions can use their administrative capacity to support economic recovery is developing effective technology use and acquisition strategies in host countries, which is a peacekeeping-wide policy goal outlined in the high-level Performance Peacekeeping report. Our paper introduces the theoretical channels through which missions’ use of information communication technologies (ICTs) can support local economic development in post-conflict settings, making a theoretical argument that draws on both the literature on ICTs in peacekeeping and in economic development. We specify a Cobb–Douglas model that describes the potential impact of peacekeeping mission-led ICT investment on longer term economic development in combination with statistics on mission technology spending and internet use in host countries, providing a formal scaffold for our theoretical argument. Using this model and data in combination with a case study of the Central African Republic-based United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic mission, we argue that peacekeeping missions should use their purchasing power and stabilizing influence to attract value-added technology investment to support economic development.

Peacekeeping's Digital Economy: The Role of Communication Technologies in Post-Conflict Economic Growth

We examine the impact of various hardships on individual's consideration of migration as a coping mechanism. Previous studies fail to identify the microeconomic drivers of migration during crises, lumping all the potential consequences of a crisis into singular categories. We argue that migration is one of several coping strategies available to individuals and present an empirical model that motivates this proposition. Our approach also suggests that unobserved factors, such as ability, determine both returns to migration as well as the availability of domestic (non-migration) coping strategies, which curbs migration. We use new survey data covering over 1000 individuals in three large Venezuelan cities. This nation is undergoing a crisis caused by unprecedented levels of hyperinflation, which resulted in the worse migration crisis in Latin American history. We focus on hardships that characterise the Venezuelan situation: food insecurity; scarcity of health products/services; crime; and diminished purchasing power. We marry this information to data on stated preferences over migration. We recognise that individuals may desire to migrate temporarily or permanently and model those choices separately and subsequently treat them as competing options. Our preferred results suggest that falling victim to crime and poor health services motivate migration. We conclude with policy suggestions. 

Nicholas Bodanac

Papers

Peacekeeping's Digital Economy: The Role of Communication Technologies in Post-conflict Economic Growth

Peacekeeping's Digital Economy: The Role of Communication Technologies in Post-Conflict Economic Growth

The impact of economic hardships on the intent to migrate: Micro‐level evidence from Venezuela