There are lots of things about Facebook that annoy me (mostly how it went from being a useful way to find out what your coolest friends were doing, listening to or reading to becoming an echo chamber of your most annoying friends’ scores on idiotic quizzes, but that’s a different blog post on a different blog) but the thing that bothers me most these days is all the groups and petitions devoted to “supporting” various democratic movements.

Moldova introduced itself to hundreds of thousand clicktivists earlier this year. Then there was Iran. (The online response to China’s cracking some Uighur skull has been, at best, muted, at least in my network. I suspect it’s because there aren’t as many hot girls involved). The most recent example comes from Baku, where two Azeri youth activists were beaten up by sportsmenki and tossed in jail for doing little more than having dinner at a downtown Baku restaurant.

Since this happened, I have been invited to no fewer than six groups that express support for them, but have not joined one. I feel bad about this, but the only things less effective than Azeri youth activists are the Facebook groups set up to “draw international attention” to their situation. (Harsh? I know from Azeri youth activists).  Furthermore, they fail to achieve even that amorphous goal: the tepid support most of the groups receive does little but illustrate what is already screamingly obvious — very few outside Azerbaijan care what goes on there.  And after generating all the international attention, then what?

Like Twitter, Facebook democracy support groups bug me for several reasons.

First, Facebook groups prolong the illusion held by many in opposition movements in the Former Soviet Union that democratic change can come from anywhere but inside the country.  One of the Azeri opposition’s favorite strategies for achieving power was writing lots of letters to foreign leaders, taking expensive junkets to Brussels and beseeching visiting OSCE diplomats plaintively. Really, who can blame them for wanting to spend more time in Vienna than Yevlax? However, challenging despots requires hard, risky groundwork, convincing skeptical voters in your own country that you’re responsible enough to be trusted with the reins of power and that it’s worth the risk to join you.

Second, it prolongs the illusion that organizing is as easy as clicking a button. It’s a lot more fun to organize several thousand Europeans and Americans to support your “cause” than it is to mobilize IDPs still living in train cars 14 years after the oil-rich country lost a war. It’s a lot easier to broadcast a Twitter to the universe than it is to go out and talk to people in Lenkoran who don’t have electricity, much less internet, face to face.

Third, it diminishes the stakes. If people in Azerbaijan truly want to boot the kleptocrats (and there is plenty of evidence to suggest most don’t), they have to join civil society organizations or political parties or labor unions that oppose the government. They have to volunteer to monitor elections. As a result, jobs will be lost, university places sacrificed, nights spent in jail and heads cracked. The idea that it can be done any other way is an insult to the people who have tried and succeeded (or, tried and failed).

The situation in Azerbaijan right now is terrible. It was terrible before Facebook and will continue to be terrible long after Facebook joins Friendster and MySpace in the dust-bin of social networking history. If you’re going to click, click on something like Daily Puppy or your favorite porn site. It will have about as much impact on Azerbaijan.

Paul Goble, over at Window On Eurasia, found a guide to civic activism in Russia on Live Journal (Russia’s main blog platform) from a blogger called Noblesse Oblige. Noblesse Oblige has come up with several principles for “Civic Activists in Russia who Don’t Want to Get Beat in the Head.” Paul has translated and I’ve copied his text, so blame him if you don’t like it (unfortunately, his links to the original don’t work).

These are by far the most useful guidelines for FSU civic activism that I’ve come across. More importantly, they are applicable to most of the countries in the FSU, not just Russia. I say that as someone who spent three years trying, without any measurable success, to encourage civic activism in Ukraine and Azerbaijan. My only quibble is that NO could have elaborated a little bit more. I’d love to read some examples of how these principles have or haven’t worked in real life.

What I really like about them is that they are lessons that can only be taught by someone who understands the political environment of the FSU at a native level and who has learned from personal experience that many of the principles taught by well-meaning “experts” from western Europe or America are pretty much useless. It might be retitled “Think like an Apparatchik!”

(more…)

I’m a little tired of “colored revolution” talk, mostly because what we’ve learned lately from Georgia and Ukraine is that getting rid of a bad government is the easy part; figuring out ways to institutionalize democratic governance is much, much harder.

There’s not a lot of good news coming out of either country. Saakashvili has revealed himself to be the garden-variety post-Soviet tyrant that many already believed he was and the Ukrainians just this week forming a ruling coalition two months after the election.

So, when talk starts about a “Saffron Revolution” in Iran starts, I roll my eyes a bit. Be careful for what you wish for.
(more…)

I’m never surprised when data from non-EU countries come back showing low internal public support for EU membership. Too often, opinion leaders are far, far ahead of the electorate in terms of support for EU-accession. According to the recently Transatlantic Trends Survey released by the German Marshall Fund, 40% of Turks think that Turkey’s membership in the EU would be a “good thing.” Frankly, I’m surprised it’s that high.
(more…)

A few weeks back, the New York Times ran a short article that laments how clan dynamics that affect public opinion and voter behavior in Central Asia are overlooked or disregarded by policymakers. I agree.

Clans are a part of the picture in obvious places like Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia, but also in places with more developed political cultures, like Turkey, and obscure places like Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan. In the absence of sustainable political parties, they provide a structure for communication and dissemination of political power. Understanding clan-based societies is important from both a democracy promotion and public opinion perspective for many of the same reasons.

(more…)

Spending 80 million YTL in public funds for rallies, flags and posters? That’s how the CHP, the leading secular party in Turkey, plans to allocate its resources this election, according to the Turkish Daily News.

It’s hard to know where to start describing everything that’s wrong with that approach. As a noted opponent of rallies and posters of party leadership as a political communications strategy, I hope they have simply decided to tell a reporter that they plan to do all these ineffective, wasteful activities, so they could keep their real plans under wraps. Why else would they reveal their strategy to a reporter?

Rallies do nothing but make your base feel good. They organize no one, they persuade no one and are huge drains of time and resources that could be better spent organizing and communicating with swing voters. If my party was in the low double digits, I might spend more time identifying messages that persuade people sitting on the fence to support me. Flags don’t do that. Buttons don’t do that.

I am not privy to the AKP’s plan, but their political behavior, ranging from calling early elections to the banners “He’s still got a lot of work to do” I see hanging around town, suggests they use strategic polling to guide their activities. That message is appropriate for an incumbent party that has concrete accomplishments to point to. It provides a concrete rationale for voters to stick with the incumbent. Turkish voters are no different than voters anywhere else in the world: they want to know what a party is going to do for them personally. AKP’s message assumes that voters want more of what they’ve been doing.

Another TDN article describes what happened when a woman reporter approached different party branches inquiring about how to get involved in the campaign. It’s less revealing about the parties’ efforts to engage women than their general approach to organizing, period.