[Air-L] Prospects for Peace & Democracy in Russia (Barry Wellman)

[Inna Kouper]

I hope that the book by Metta Spencer is much more complicated and
that the abstract of the talk misrepresented it. We already have
claims made by scholars that there would be no orange revolution in
Ukraine without livejournal, that facebook and twitter brought changes
to Egypt, and so on. Such claims are not only technologically
deterministic, they lack historical, sociological, and ethnographic
sensibilities. Grassroots movements in Russia need much more than
skype (or any new media for that matter) to "proliferate transnational
dialogues". It would benefit us as scholars and activists to at least
acknowledge that even if we don't have means to theorize and practice
it.


Inna



> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Speaker: Metta Spencer
>
> Date: Thursday March 31st
> Dept of Sociology, U of Toronto, 725 Spadina Avenue, 1200-1:30
>
> Title: "The Prospects for Peace and Democracy in Russia"
>
> Abstract:
>
> Metta Spencer's new book, The Russian Quest for Peace and Democracy, is
> based mainly on hundreds of interviews between 1982 and 2010 that she
> conducted in Russia and Eastern Europe. It reflects not only the stories of
> leading members of Gorbachev's advisers, but also intellectuals and
> dissidents. Focusing on the remarkable interactions between Russian and
> foreign elites, especially during the Gorbachev years, it shows how markedly
> his democratic and peaceable political, foreign, and military policies came
> from Western peace workers. Because those transnational civil society
> organizations were obviously "bridging" groups (in Putnam's terminology)
> they were especially conductive to democracy. For twenty years, however,
> such associations have diminished-largely because Putin, to prevent a
> Russian color revolution, has blocked international political projects. For
> the sake of  democratization, Spencer proposes that the new media (e.g.
> Skype) now be used to proliferate thousands of sustained transnational
> dialogues at the grassroots level.
>
>
>
>
>