Is it enough to give a voice to the voiceless?

At a radicalisation conference last week in Singapore I had a chance to talk about, 'Communication Rights and Democratic Resilience', which led to useful debate among policymakers and scholars from North America, Europe and across Asia about the difficulty governments face in actively listening to groups feeling disenfranchised or ignored while at the same time respecting majority opinion. Yes, there are the consultations, citizens' panels and focus groups that governments have done, and the proliferation of news channels and social media spaces that aspire to 'give voice to the voiceless'. But what is the point of having a voice if you aren't listened to or don't have any influence? It was refreshing to discuss matters of democracy and pluralism at a radicalisation conference, instead of the usual narrow focus on what causes terrorism (usual answer: "the internet!").

The event was organised jointly by the Rajaratnum School for International Studies (RSIS) and the University of Warwick. Many thanks to the organisisers.

Nuffield Foundation grant: Study of Iraq civilian casualty reporting

The NPCU has received a Nuffield Foundation small grant for a project, ‘Comparing British and International Civilian Casualties: Mining the Iraq Body Count’. The project is a collaboration with Prof. John Sloboda and colleagues at Iraq Body Count, beginning in February 2010.

As conflict in Iraq continues to claim civilian casualties, the project compares total information about civilian casualties available in the global media infrastructure per se with casualty information reported in different national media, and seeks to explain why such information is filtered differently in particular countries and cultures.

For more information please contact Ben.OLoughlin@rhul.ac.uk.

Trafigura and twitter

Trafigura must have known their attempt to stop The Guardian reporting Parliamentary questions about their oil dumping in the Ivory Coast would soon be exposed on twitter -- as it has been today -- so what is their real reason for getting the injunction? Are they naive or is something else going on?

By Ben O'Loughlin

Power and the imagination

Before 9/11 we had Independence Day. Before 7/7 we had the BBC “what if London was attacked” documentary. Now, a few weeks after I posted about the movie Angels and Demons, featuring terrorists removing anti-matter material from the Cern Large Hadron Collider for nefarious purposes, someone working at Cern has been arrested for having links to Al-Qaeda.

Anything that can be imagined to happen will happen, so to govern is to imagine. Government must be as visionary as the devil. On occasion, what movie directors imagine then happens. What if it is the case too that what governments imagine might happen will happen? This has become an ethical dilemma for policymakers. Governments imagine worst case scenarios because they are responsible for preventing them, and you can't prevent what you can't foresee. Does this mean worst case scenarios will happen? Is it more responsible not to imagine, not to foresee? But what if something happens that's worse than the worst case scenarios policymakers foresee - a failure of imagination? Policymakers' own imaginations have become a source of insecurity to them, and possibly to us.

By Ben O'Loughlin