It’s time to let citizens tackle the wickedest public problems


Gabriella Capone at apolitical (a winner of the 2018 Apolitical Young Thought Leaders competition): “Rain ravaged Gdańsk in 2016, taking the lives of two residents and causing millions of euros in damage. Despite its 700-year history of flooding the city was overwhelmed by these especially devastating floods. Also, Gdańsk is one of the European coasts most exposed to rising sea levels. It needed a new approach to avoid similar outcomes for the next, inevitable encounter with this worsening problem.

Bringing in citizens to tackle such a difficult issue was not the obvious course of action. Yet this was the proposal of Dr. Marcin Gerwin, an advocate from a neighbouring town who paved the way for Poland’s first participatory budgeting experience.

Mayor Adamowicz of Gdańsk agreed and, within a year, they welcomed about 60 people to the first Citizens Assembly on flood mitigation. Implemented by Dr. Gerwin and a team of coordinators, the Assembly convened over four Saturdays, heard expert testimony, and devised solutions.

The Assembly was not only deliberative and educational, it was action-oriented. Mayor Adamowicz committed to implement proposals on which 80% or more of participants agreed. The final 16 proposals included the investment of nearly $40 million USD in monitoring systems and infrastructure, subsidies to incentivise individuals to improve water management on their property, and an educational “Do Not Flood” campaign to highlight emergency resources.

It may seem risky to outsource the solving of difficult issues to citizens. Yet, when properly designed, public problem-solving can produce creative resolutions to formidable challenges. Beyond Poland, public problem-solving initiatives in Mexico and the United States are making headway on pervasive issues, from flooding to air pollution, to technology in public spaces.

The GovLab, with support from the Tinker Foundation, is analysing what makes for more successful public problem-solving as part of its City Challenges program. Below, I provide a glimpse into the types of design choices that can amplify the impact of public problem-solving….(More)

The Janus Face of the Liberal Information Order


Paper by Henry Farrell and Abraham L. Newman: “…Domestically, policy-makers and scholars argued that information openness, like economic openness, would go hand-in-glove with political liberalization and the spread of democratic values. This was perhaps, in part an accident of timing: the Internet – which seemed to many to be inherently resistant to censorship – burgeoned shortly after the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Politicians celebrated the dawn of a new era of open communication, while scholars began to argue that the spread of the Internet would lead to the spread of democracy (Diamond 2010;Shirky 2008).

A second wave of literature suggested that Internet-based social media had played a crucial role in spreading freedom in the Arab Spring (Howard 2010; Hussain and Howard 2013). There were some skeptics who highlighted the vexed relationship between open networks and the closed national politics of autocracies (Goldsmith and Wu 2006), or who pointed out that the Internet was nowhere near as censorship-resistant as early optimists had supposed (Deibert et al. 2008). Even these pessimists seemed to believe that the Internet could bolster liberalism in healthy democracies, although it would by no means necessarily prevail over tyranny.

The international liberal order for information, however, finds itself increasingly on shaky ground. Non-democratic regimes ranging from China to Saudi Arabia have created domestic technological infrastructures, which undermine and provide an alternative to the core principles of the regime (Boas 2006; Deibert 2008).

The European Union, while still generally supportive of open communication and free speech, has grown skeptical of the regime’s focus on unfettered economic access and has used privacy and anti-trust policy to challenge its most neo-liberal elements (Newman 2008). Non-state actors like Wikileaks have relied on information openness as a channel of disruption and perhaps manipulation. 

More troubling are the arguments of a new literature – that open information flows are less a harbinger of democracy than a vector of attack…

How can IR scholars make sense of this Janus-face quality of information? In this brief memo, we argue that much of the existing work on information technology and information flows suffers from two key deficiencies.

First – there has been an unhelpful separation between two important debates about information flows and liberalism. One – primarily focused on the international level – concerned global governance of information networks, examining how states (especially the US) arrived at and justified their policy stances, and how power dynamics shaped the battles between liberal and illiberal states over what the relevant governance arrangements should be (Klein 2002; Singh 2008; Mueller 2009). …

This leads to the second problem – that research has failed to appreciate the dynamics of contestation over time…(More)”

How to Prevent Winner-Takes-All Democracy


Kaushik Basu at Project Syndicate: “Democracy is in crisis. Fake news – and fake allegations of fake news – now plagues civil discourse, and political parties have proved increasingly willing to use xenophobia and other malign strategies to win elections. At the same time, revisionist powers like Vladimir Putin’s Russia have been stepping up their efforts to interfere in elections across the West. Rarely has the United States witnessed such brazen attacks on its political system; and rarely has the world seen such lows during peacetime….

How can all of this be happening in democracies, and what can be done about it?

On the first question, one hypothesis is that new digital technologies are changing the structural incentives for corporations, political parties, and other major institutions. Consider the case of corporations. The wealth of proprietary data on consumer preferences and behavior is producing such massive returns to scale that a few giants are monopolizing markets. In other words, markets are increasingly geared toward a winner-take-all game: multiple corporations can compete, but to the victor go the spoils.1

Electoral democracy is drifting in the same direction. The benefits of winning an election have become so large that political parties will stoop to new lows to clinch a victory. And, as with corporations, they can do so with the help of data on electoral preferences and behavior, and with new strategies to target key constituencies.

This poses a dilemma for well-meaning democratic parties and politicians. If a “bad” party is willing to foment hate and racism to bolster its chances of winning, what is a “good” party to do? If it sticks to its principles, it could end up ceding victory to the “bad” party, which will do even more harm once it is in office. A “good” party may thus try to forestall that outcome by taking a step down the moral ladder, precipitating a race to the bottom. This is the problem with any winner-takes-all game. When second place confers no benefits, the cost of showing unilateral restraint can grow intolerably high.

But this problem is not as hopeless as it appears. In light of today’s crisis of democracy, we would do well to revisit Václav Havel’s seminal 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless.” First published as samizdat that was smuggled out of Czechoslovakia, the essay makes a simple but compelling argument. Dictatorships and other seemingly omnipotent forms of authoritarianism may look like large, top-down structures, but in the final analysis, they are merely the outcome of ordinary individuals’ beliefs and choices. Havel did not have the tools of modern economic theory to demonstrate his argument formally. In my new book The Republic of Beliefs, I show that the essence of his argument can be given formal structure using elementary game theory. This, in turn, shows that ordinary individuals have moral options that may be unavailable to the big institutional players….(More)”.

China’s Aggressive Surveillance Technology Will Spread Beyond Its Borders


Already there are reports that Zimbabwe, for example, is turning to Chinese firms to implement nationwide facial-recognition and surveillance programs, wrapped into China’s infrastructure investments and a larger set of security agreements as well, including for policing online communication. The acquisition of black African faces will help China’s tech sector improve its overall data set.

Malaysia, too, announced new partnerships this spring with China to equip police with wearable facial-recognition cameras. There are quiet reports of Arab Gulf countries turning to China not just for the drone technologies America has denied but also for the authoritarian suite of surveillance, recognition, and data tools perfected in China’s provinces. In a recent article on Egypt’s military-led efforts to build a new capital city beyond Cairo’s chaos and revolutionary squares, a retired general acting as project spokesman declared, “a smart city means a safe city, with cameras and sensors everywhere. There will be a command center to control the entire city.” Who is financing construction? China.

While many governments are making attempts to secure this information, there have been several alarming stories of data leaks. Moreover, these national identifiers create an unprecedented opportunity for state surveillance at scale. What about collecting biometric information in nondemocratic regimes? In 2016, the personal details of nearly 50 million people in Turkey were leaked….

China and other determined authoritarian states may prove undeterrable in their zeal to adopt repressive technologies. A more realistic goal, as Georgetown University scholar Nicholas Wright has argued, is to sway countries on the fence by pointing out the reputational costs of repression and supporting those who are advocating for civil liberties in this domain within their own countries. Democracy promoters (which we hope will one day again include the White House) will also want to recognize the coming changes to the authoritarian public sphere. They can start now in helping vulnerable populations and civil society to gain greater technological literacy to advocate for their rights in new domains. It is not too early for governments and civil society groups alike to study what technological and tactical countermeasures exist to circumvent and disrupt new authoritarian tools.

Seven years ago, techno-optimists expressed hope that a wave of new digital tools for social networking and self-expression could help young people in the Middle East and elsewhere to find their voices. Today, a new wave of Chinese-led technological advances threatens to blossom into what we consider an “Arab spring in reverse”—in which the next digital wave shifts the pendulum back, enabling state domination and repression at a staggering scale and algorithmic effectiveness.

Americans are absolutely right to be urgently focused on countering Russian weaponized hacking and leaking as its primary beneficiary sits in the Oval Office. But we also need to be more proactive in countering the tools of algorithmic authoritarianism that will shape the worldwide future of individual freedom….(More)”.

Democracy Is a Habit: Practice It


Melvin Rogers at the Boston Review: “After decades of triumph,” The Economist recently concluded, “democracy is losing ground.” But not, apparently, in the West, whose “mature democracies . . . are not yet in serious danger.” On this view, reports of the death of American democracy have been greatly exaggerated. “Donald Trump may scorn liberal norms,” the reasoning goes, “but America’s checks and balances are strong, and will outlast him.” The truly endangered societies are those where “institutions are weaker and democratic habits less ingrained.”

It has become a common refrain, even among those critical of Trump’s administration. “Our democracy is hard to kill,” Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky said in an interview about his new book with Daniel Zeblatt, How Democracies Die. “We do still have very strong democratic institutions. We’re not Turkey, we’re not Hungary, we’re not Venezuela. We can behave quite recklessly and irresponsibly and probably still muddle through that.”

Is democracy in the United States really so robust? At the outset of World War II, American philosopher John Dewey cautioned against so easy a conclusion—and the simplistic picture of democratic society that it presumes. In Freedom and Culture (1939), he worried that democracy might succumb to the illusion of stability and endurance in the face of threats to liberty and norms of decency. According to Dewey, we must not believe

that democratic conditions automatically maintain themselves, or that they can be identified with fulfillment of prescriptions laid down in a constitution. Beliefs of this sort merely divert attention from what is going on, just as the patter of the prestidigitator enables him to do things that are not noticed by those whom he is engaged in fooling. For what is actually going on may be the formation of conditions that are hostile to any kind of democratic liberties.

Dewey’s was a warning to be wary not just of bad governance but of a more fundamental deformation of society. “This would be too trite to repeat,” he admits, “were it not that so many persons in the high places of business talk as if they believed or could get others to believe that the observance of formulae that have become ritualistic are effective safeguards of our democratic heritage.”…

Dewey may seem like an odd resource to recall in our current political climate. For if we stand in what Hannah Arendt once called “dark times,” Dewey’s optimistic faith in democracy—his unflinching belief in the reflective capacity of human beings to secure the good and avert the bad, and in the progressive character of American democracy—may look ill-equipped to address our current crisis.

Yet this faith was always shaped by an important insight regarding democracy that many seem to have ignored. For Dewey, democracy’s survival depends on a set of habits and dispositions—in short, a culture—to sustain it. …

“The democratic road is the hard one to take,” Dewey concluded in Freedom and Culture. “It is the road which places the greatest burden of responsibility on the greatest number of human beings.” Precisely for this reason, Dewey believed the culture of democracy—the habits and sensibilities of the citizenry—in greater need of scrutiny than its constitution and procedures. For what are constitutions and procedures once you have deformed the ground upon which their proper functioning depends?…(More)”.

America’s Problem Isn’t Too Little Democracy. It’s Too Much.


Joshua A. Geltzer at PoliticoMagazine: Democracy’s lamentations sometimes seem deafening these days. “Democracy is dying,” proclaimed a recent article in Foreign Policy—and another in the Guardian, and yet another in Quartz. We’ve reached “the end of democracy,” avows a new book—as well as an op-ed in the Washington Post.

But what if these perspectives have it all backwards? What if our problem isn’t too little democracy, but too much?

There’s no doubt that democracy in the United States appears on shaky ground. That’s not because 2016 marked the first time in American history that the presidency was captured by a candidate with no political or military experience. It’s not even because Donald Trump did so despite losing the popular vote by almost 3 million ballots, with his adversary garnering the most votes ever cast for a losing presidential candidate.

It’s because the 2016 election revealed new vulnerabilities in our democracy, generated by social media’s explosion and utilized by Russia and Russian-linked actorspossibly including Trump’s team itself. And it’s also because the aftermath of that election has laid bare a Congress so polarized, gridlocked and downright incapacitated that it has proved unable even to keep our government from shutting down and has consistently failed to fulfill its responsibility to exercise meaningful oversight of the executive branch.

What ails us? The current vogue is to place the blame on the inadequacies of our incarnation of democracy. The brilliant Yascha Mounk, for example, argues that the American people may think they’re living in a democracy, but—unbeknownst to them—it’s really all a charade. On Mounk’s account, Americans speak at town halls, organize on behalf of candidates and cast ballots; but, because the game’s been rigged by the powerful, all of that activity doesn’t really matter compared to the influence of the well-placed and well-heeled. In the words of two political scientists quoted favorably by Mounk, what we think of as democracy in action really amounts to “a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

Some suggest that democracy’s insufficiencies are global, and the defining problem of our times. In his magisterial account of democracy’s fading allure in Hungary and Poland, Roger Cohen echoes earlier scholars in seeing democracy now eclipsed by “competitive authoritarianism, a form of European single-party rule that retains a veneer of democracy while skewing the contest sufficiently to ensure it is likely to yield only one result.”

But while these commentators are right that the cracks are there, the cause is the very opposite of what they claim, at least when it comes to America. The problem isn’t that democracy is in short supply in the United States. It’s that technology has helped to unleash hyper-democratization—a shift away from the mediated, checked republic that America’s founders carefully crafted toward an impulsive, unleashed direct democracy that’s indulging the worst impulses of our most extreme elements.

To put it bluntly, we’re increasingly ruled by an online mob. And it’s a mob getting besieged with misinformation…(More)”.

What Democracy Needs Now


The RSA Chief Executive’s Lecture 2018 by Matthew Taylor: “In 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall still echoing, Francis Fukuyama prophesied the global triumph of liberal democracy and the end of history. Thirty years on it is not history in jeopardy but liberal democracy itself.

China – the rising global power – is thriving with a system which combines economic freedom with political autocracy. There is the growth of what Yascha Mounk calls illiberal democracies – countries with notionally free elections but without the liberal foundations of accountability, civil liberties and cultural openness. The issue with nations like Russia, Hungary and Turkey, and with those exhibiting a backlash against liberalism like America and Italy, is not just how they operate but the tendency for populism – when given the excuse or opportunity – to drift towards authoritarianism.

While the alternatives to the liberal democratic system grow more confident the citizens living in those systems become more restless. Politicians and political institutions in countries are viewed with dismay and contempt. We don’t like them, we don’t trust them, we don’t think they can solve the problems that most matter to us. The evidence, particularly from the US, is starting to suggest that disillusionment with politics is now becoming indifference towards democracy itself.

Will liberal democracy come back into fashion – is this a cycle or is it a trend? Behind the global patterns each country is different, but think of what is driving anger and disillusionment in our own.

Living standards flat-lining for longer than at any time since the industrial revolution. A decade of austerity leaving our public services threadbare and in a mode of continual crisis management. From social care to gangs, from cybercrime to mental health, how many of us think Government is facing up to the problems let alone developing solutions?

Inequality, having risen precipitously in the 1980s, remains stubbornly high, fuelling anger about elites and making not just the economic divide but all divisions worse.

Social media – where increasingly people get their information and engage in political discourse – has the seemingly in-built tendency to confirm prejudice and polarise opinion.

The great intertwined forces shaping the future – globalisation, unprecedented corporate power, technological change – continue to reinforce a sense in people, places and nations that they have no agency. Yet the hunger to take back control which started as tragedy is rapidly becoming a farce.

If this is the warm climate in which disillusionment has taken root and grown it shows few signs of cooling.

For all its many failings, I have always believed that over the long term liberal democracy would carry on making lives better for most people most of the time. As a progressive my guiding star is what Roberto Unger has called ‘the larger life for all’. But for the first time, I view the future with more fear than hope.

There are those who disparage pessimism. To them the backlash against liberalism, the signs of a declining faith in democracy, are passing responses to failure and misfortune. Populism will give the system the wake-up call it needs. In time a new generation of leaders will renew the system. Populism need neither be extreme nor beget authoritarianism – look at Macron.

This underestimates the dangers that face us. It is too reminiscent of those who believed, until the results came in, that the British people would not take the risk of Brexit or that the Americans would reject the madness of Trump. It underestimates too how the turn against liberal democracy in one country can beget it in another. Paradoxically, today nationalists seem more able to collaborate with each other than countries ostensibly committed to internationalism. Chaos spreads more quickly than order. Global treaties and institutions take years to agree, they can breakdown overnight.

Of course, liberal democracy has failed over and again to live up to its own promise. But the fact that things need to change doesn’t mean they can’t get a whole lot worse.

We are also in danger of underestimating the coherence and confidence of liberalism’s critics. Last month Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban made a powerful speech defending his brand of nationalist populism and boasting of his growing alliances across Europe. He appealed to the continent’s centre-right to recognise that it has more in common with conservative nationalism than the EU’s liberal establishment. There are aspects of Orban’s analysis which have an understandable appeal to the mainstream, but remember this is also a man who is unashamedly hostile to Islam, contemptuous of humanitarianism, and who is playing fast and loose with democratic safeguards in his own country.

We may disagree about how malign or dangerous are figures like Orban or Erdogan, or Trump or Salvini, but surely we can agree that those who want to defend the open, pluralistic, inclusive values of liberal democracy must try to make a better case for what we believe?

In part this involves defending the record of liberal societies in improving lives, creating opportunities and keeping the peace, at least between themselves. But it also means facing up to what is going wrong and what must change.

Complex problems are rarely addressed with a single solution. To ever again achieve the remarkable and unprecedented economic and social advances of the three decades after the Second World War, liberal democracy needs profound renewal. But change must start some place. This evening I want to argue that place should be the way we do democracy itself…(More) (Video)”.

The promise and peril of military applications of artificial intelligence


Michael C. Horowitz at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: “Artificial intelligence (AI) is having a moment in the national security space. While the public may still equate the notion of artificial intelligence in the military context with the humanoid robots of the Terminatorfranchise, there has been a significant growth in discussions about the national security consequences of artificial intelligence. These discussions span academia, business, and governments, from Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom’s concern about the existential risk to humanity posed by artificial intelligence to Tesla founder Elon Musk’s concern that artificial intelligence could trigger World War III to Vladimir Putin’s statement that leadership in AI will be essential to global power in the 21st century.

What does this really mean, especially when you move beyond the rhetoric of revolutionary change and think about the real world consequences of potential applications of artificial intelligence to militaries? Artificial intelligence is not a weapon. Instead, artificial intelligence, from a military perspective, is an enabler, much like electricity and the combustion engine. Thus, the effect of artificial intelligence on military power and international conflict will depend on particular applications of AI for militaries and policymakers. What follows are key issues for thinking about the military consequences of artificial intelligence, including principles for evaluating what artificial intelligence “is” and how it compares to technological changes in the past, what militaries might use artificial intelligence for, potential limitations to the use of artificial intelligence, and then the impact of AI military applications for international politics.

The potential promise of AI—including its ability to improve the speed and accuracy of everything from logistics to battlefield planning and to help improve human decision-making—is driving militaries around the world to accelerate their research into and development of AI applications. For the US military, AI offers a new avenue to sustain its military superiority while potentially reducing costs and risk to US soldiers. For others, especially Russia and China, AI offers something potentially even more valuable—the ability to disrupt US military superiority. National competition in AI leadership is as much or more an issue of economic competition and leadership than anything else, but the potential military impact is also clear. There is significant uncertainty about the pace and trajectory of artificial intelligence research, which means it is always possible that the promise of AI will turn into more hype than reality. Moreover, safety and reliability concerns could limit the ways that militaries choose to employ AI…(More)”,

Israeli, French Politicians Endorse Blockchain for Governance Transparency


Komfie Manolo at Cryptovest: “Blockchain is moving into the world’s political systems, with several influential political figures in Israel and France recently emerging as new believers in the technology. They are betting on blockchain for more transparent governance and have joined the decentralized platform developed by Coalichain.

Among the seven Israeli politicians to endorse the platform are former deputy minister and interior minister Eli Yishay, deputy defense minister Eli Ben-Dan, and HaBait HaYehudi leader Shulamit Mualem-Refaeli. The move for a more accountable democracy has also been supported by Frederic Lefebvre, the founder of French political party Agir.

Levi Samama, co-founder and CEO of Coalichain, said that support for the platform was “a positive indication that politicians are actively seeking ways to be transparent and direct in the way they communicate with the public. In order to impact existing governance mechanisms we need the support and engagement of politicians and citizens alike.”

Acceptance of blockchain is gaining traction in the world of politics.

During last month’s presidential election in Russia, blockchain was used by state-run public opinion research center VTSIOM to track exit polls.

In the US, budding political group Indie Party wants to redefine the country’s political environment by providing an alternative to the established two-party system with a political marketplace that uses blockchain and cryptocurrency….(More)”

Examining Civil Society Legitimacy


Saskia Brechenmacher and Thomas Carothers at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: “Civil society is under stress globally as dozens of governments across multiple regions are reducing space for independent civil society organizations, restricting or prohibiting international support for civic groups, and propagating government-controlled nongovernmental organizations. Although civic activists in most places are no strangers to repression, this wave of anti–civil society actions and attitudes is the widest and deepest in decades. It is an integral part of two broader global shifts that raise concerns about the overall health of the international liberal order: the stagnation of democracy worldwide and the rekindling of nationalistic sovereignty, often with authoritarian features.

Attacks on civil society take myriad forms, from legal and regulatory measures to physical harassment, and usually include efforts to delegitimize civil society. Governments engaged in closing civil society spaces not only target specific civic groups but also spread doubt about the legitimacy of the very idea of an autonomous civic sphere that can activate and channel citizens’ interests and demands. These legitimacy attacks typically revolve around four arguments or accusations:

  • That civil society organizations are self-appointed rather than elected, and thus do not represent the popular will. For example, the Hungarian government justified new restrictions on foreign-funded civil society organizations by arguing that “society is represented by the elected governments and elected politicians, and no one voted for a single civil organization.”
  • That civil society organizations receiving foreign funding are accountable to external rather than domestic constituencies, and advance foreign rather than local agendas. In India, for example, the Modi government has denounced foreign-funded environmental NGOs as “anti-national,” echoing similar accusations in Egypt, Macedonia, Romania, Turkey, and elsewhere.
  • That civil society groups are partisan political actors disguised as nonpartisan civic actors: political wolves in citizen sheep’s clothing. Governments denounce both the goals and methods of civic groups as being illegitimately political, and hold up any contacts between civic groups and opposition parties as proof of the accusation.
  • That civil society groups are elite actors who are not representative of the people they claim to represent. Critics point to the foreign education backgrounds, high salaries, and frequent foreign travel of civic activists to portray them as out of touch with the concerns of ordinary citizens and only working to perpetuate their own privileged lifestyle.

Attacks on civil society legitimacy are particularly appealing for populist leaders who draw on their nationalist, majoritarian, and anti-elite positioning to deride civil society groups as foreign, unrepresentative, and elitist. Other leaders borrow from the populist toolbox to boost their negative campaigns against civil society support. The overall aim is clear: to close civil society space, governments seek to exploit and widen existing cleavages between civil society and potential supporters in the population. Rather than engaging with the substantive issues and critiques raised by civil society groups, they draw public attention to the real and alleged shortcomings of civil society actors as channels for citizen grievances and demands.

The widening attacks on the legitimacy of civil society oblige civil society organizations and their supporters to revisit various fundamental questions: What are the sources of legitimacy of civil society? How can civil society organizations strengthen their legitimacy to help them weather government attacks and build strong coalitions to advance their causes? And how can international actors ensure that their support reinforces rather than undermines the legitimacy of local civic activism?

To help us find answers to these questions, we asked civil society activists working in ten countries around the world—from Guatemala to Tunisia and from Kenya to Thailand—to write about their experiences with and responses to legitimacy challenges. Their essays follow here. We conclude with a final section in which we extract and discuss the key themes that emerge from their contributions as well as our own research…

  1. Saskia Brechenmacher and Thomas Carothers, The Legitimacy Landscape
  2. César Rodríguez-Garavito, Objectivity Without Neutrality: Reflections From Colombia
  3. Walter Flores, Legitimacy From Below: Supporting Indigenous Rights in Guatemala
  4. Arthur Larok, Pushing Back: Lessons From Civic Activism in Uganda
  5. Kimani Njogu, Confronting Partisanship and Divisions in Kenya
  6. Youssef Cherif, Delegitimizing Civil Society in Tunisia
  7. Janjira Sombatpoonsiri, The Legitimacy Deficit of Thailand’s Civil Society
  8. Özge Zihnioğlu, Navigating Politics and Polarization in Turkey
  9. Stefánia Kapronczay, Beyond Apathy and Mistrust: Defending Civic Activism in Hungary
  10. Zohra Moosa, On Our Own Behalf: The Legitimacy of Feminist Movements
  11. Nilda Bullain and Douglas Rutzen, All for One, One for All: Protecting Sectoral Legitimacy
  12. Saskia Brechenmacher and Thomas Carothers, The Legitimacy Menu.(More)”.