The 2023 Shorenstein Journalism Award Honors Indian Magazine The Caravan at a Discussion Featuring Hartosh Singh Bal, Executive Editor of The Caravan

A soft tyranny is a state that maintains the façade of constitutional processes, retaining their structure while foregoing their spirit. For those looking at India from the outside, it appears elections are held regularly, judicial processes are in place, and a large and diverse private media continues to thrive. The reality, however, is that in India today, the Constitution is subservient to a ruling ideology that is majoritarian and violative of its spirit. The government acts according to this new set of values, while institutions meant to check its overreach have largely been rendered powerless.

Join APARC as we honor The Caravan, India’s reputed long-form narrative journalism magazine of politics and culture, winner of the 2023 Shorenstein Journalism Award. The Shorenstein Award recognizes outstanding journalists and news organizations for excellence in coverage of the Asia-Pacific region. The 2023 award honors The Caravan for its steadfast coverage that champions accountability and media independence in the face of India's democratic backsliding.

The award discussion will feature Hartosh Singh Bal, executive editor of The Caravan.

Mr. Bal's keynote will be followed by a conversation with two experts: Kalyani Chadha, an associate professor of journalism at Northwestern University's Medill School for Journalism, Media, and Integrated Marketing Communications, and Larry Diamond, Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. The event will conclude with an audience Q&A session.

Moderator: Raju Narisetti, publisher at McKinsey Global Publishing, McKinsey and Company, who is also a member of the selection committee for the Shorenstein Journalism Award.

Speakers   
 

Hartosh Singh Bal is the executive editor at The Caravan. He formerly worked as the magazine’s political editor for ten years. He has worked with a number of Indian publications including The Indian Express and Tehelka. He has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, and Foreign Affairs, and is the author of Waters Close Over Us: A Journey Along the Narmada and the co-author of A Certain Ambiguity, A Mathematical Novel. He is trained as an engineer and a mathematician.

Kalyani Chadha is an associate professor of journalism at Northwestern University's Medill School for Journalism, Media, and Integrated Marketing Communications. Her research is primarily centered around the examination of journalistic practice as well as the societal implications of new media technologies in varied contexts. Informed by critical and sociological theorizing, her scholarship is international in its orientation, with a particular emphasis on journalism-related developments in India and media globalization in Asia. Her recent work focuses on the implications of the rise of right-wing media in India. Additionally, she is also co-editing a collection on journalism and precarity.

Chadha’s work has appeared in a variety of journals such as Journalism Studies, Journalism Practice, Digital Journalism, Journal of Media Ethics, the International Journal of Communication and Media, Culture and Society, as well as several edited anthologies and encyclopedias. Chadha currently serves on the editorial boards of Journalism Practice and Digital Journalism and is vice-head of AEJMC’s Mass Communication and Society Division.

Prior to joining Medill, Chadha was on the faculty of the University of Maryland’s Merrill College of Journalism. While at Maryland, she directed the Media, Self and Society program, a living-learning community for academically talented undergraduates and was awarded the Annual Undergraduate Studies Teaching Award in 2015.

Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is also professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford. He leads the Hoover Institution’s programs on China’s Global Sharp Power and on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region. At FSI, he leads the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy, based at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which he directed for more than six years. He also co-leads with (Eileen Donahoe) the Global Digital Policy Incubator, based at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center. He is the founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and also serves as senior consultant at the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy.

His research focuses on democratic trends and conditions around the world and on policies and reforms to defend and advance democracy. His most recent book, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, analyzes the challenges confronting liberal democracy in the United States and around the world at this potential “hinge in history,” and offers an agenda for strengthening and defending democracy at home and abroad. He has also edited or coedited more than forty books on democratic development around the world.

Moderator

Raju Narisetti is a career journalist who has served as publisher at McKinsey Global Publishing, McKinsey and Company since 2020. From July 2018 to December 2019, he was a professor of professional practice and director of the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship Program at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. His journalism career spans roles with major international news and media organizations. At The Wall Street Journal, he served as a reporter, deputy national editor of the American edition, managing editor and editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe, and deputy managing editor in charge of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa for the newspaper's global brand. He was also managing editor, digital at The Washington Post, and senior vice president of growth and strategy for News Corporation. He was the founding editor of Mint and facilitated the publication's emergence as India's second-largest business newspaper.    

Narisetti photo by Niccolò Caranti, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Webinar Description:
The Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE) and Stanford Global Studies (SGS) are excited to offer a professional development workshop for community college instructors who wish to internationalize their curriculum. The workshop will feature a talk by Stanford historian Dr. Bertrand Patenaude on the major famines of modern history, the controversies surrounding them, and the reasons that famine persists in our increasingly globalized world. Workshop participants will receive a copy of Dr. Patenaude’s book Bread + Medicine: American Famine Relief in Soviet Russia, 1921–1923 (Hoover Institution Press, 2023). Published in June, the book recounts how medical intervention, including a large-scale vaccination drive, by the American Relief Administration saved millions of lives in Soviet Russia during the famine of 1921–23.

Register at https: http://bit.ly/474cpK2.

Featured Speaker:

Dr. Bertrand M. Patenaude

Dr. Bertrand M. Patenaude teaches history, international relations, and human rights at Stanford, where he is a Lecturer for the International Relations Program, a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Innovation in Global Health (CIGH). Patenaude teaches courses at the Stanford School of Medicine as a Lecturer at the Center for Biomedical Ethics (SCBE). His seminars range across topics such as United Nations peacekeeping, genocide, famine in the modern world, humanitarian aid, and global health.

Hicham Alaoui, Robert Springborg, Lindsay Benstead, Glenn E. Robinson, and Sean Yom join ARD to discuss their recently released book, Security Assistance in the Middle East: Challenges ... and the Need for Change (Lynne Rienner, 2023). To order, click here.

Why, given the enormous resources spent by the US and Europe on security assistance to Arab countries, has it led to so little success? Can anything be done to change the disheartening status quo? Addressing these thorny questions, the authors of this state-of-the-art assessment evaluate the costs and benefits to the main providers and recipients of security assistance in the MENA region and explore alternative strategies to improve outcomes for both.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Hicham Alaoui is the founder and director of the Hicham Alaoui Foundation, which undertakes innovative social scientific research in the Middle East and North Africa. He is a scholar on the comparative politics of democratization and religion, with a focus on the MENA region. In the past, he served as a visiting scholar and Consulting Professor at the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. He more recently served as postdoctoral fellow and research associate at Harvard University. He was also Regents Lecturer at several campuses of the University of California system. Outside of academia, he has worked with the United Nations in various capacities, such as the peacekeeping mission in Kosovo. He has also worked with the Carter Center in its overseas missions on conflict resolution and democracy advancement. He has served on the MENA Advisory Committee for Human Rights Watch and the Advisory Board of the Carnegie Middle East Center. He served on the board of the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University and has recently joined the Advisory Board of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard. He holds an A.B. from Princeton University, M.A. from Stanford University, and D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. His latest book is Pacted Democracy in the Middle East: Tunisia and Egypt in Comparative Perspective (Palgrave, 2022). His memoirs, Journal d'un Prince Banni, were published in 2014 by Éditions Grasset, and have since been translated into several languages. He is also co-author with Robert Springborg of The Political Economy of Arab Education (Lynne Rienner, 2021), and co-author with the same colleague on the forthcoming volume Security Assistance in the Middle East: Challenges and the Need for Change (Lynne Rienner, 2023). His academic research has been widely published in various French and English journals, magazines, and newspapers of record.

Robert Springborg is a Scientific Advisor of the Istituto Affari Internazionali and Adjunct Professor at SFU School for International Studies (Vancouver). Formerly he was Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, and Program Manager for the Middle East for the Center for Civil-Military Relations; the holder of the MBI Al Jaber Chair in Middle East Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where he also served as Director of the London Middle East Institute; the Director of the American Research Center in Egypt; University Professor of Middle East Politics at Macquarie University in Sydney Australia; and assistant professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. He has also taught at the University of California, Berkeley; the College of Europe; the Paris School of International Affairs of Sciences Po; the Department of War Studies, King’s College, London; and the University of Sydney. In 2016 he was Kuwait Foundation Visiting Scholar, Middle East Initiative, Kennedy School, Harvard University. His publications include Mubarak’s Egypt. Fragmentation of the Political Order (1989); Family Power and Politics in Egypt (1982); Legislative Politics in the Arab World (1999, co-authored with Abdo Baaklini and Guilain Denoeux); Globalization and the Politics of Development in the Middle East first and second editions, (2001 and 2010, co-authored with Clement M. Henry); Oil and Democracy in Iraq (2007); Development Models in Muslim Contexts: Chinese, ‘Islamic’ and Neo-Liberal Alternatives(2009) and several editions of Politics in the Middle East (co-authored with James A. Bill). He co-edited a volume on popular culture and political identity in the Gulf that appeared in 2008. He has published in the leading Middle East journals and was the founder and regular editorialist for The Middle East in London, a monthly journal that commenced publication in 2003.

Lindsay J. Benstead is Associate Professor of Political Science in the Mark O. Hatfield School of Government and Director of the Middle East Studies Center (MESC) at Portland State University. Her research on women and politics, public opinion, and survey methodology has appeared in Perspectives on Politics, International Journal of Public Opinion Research, Governance, and Foreign Affairs. She holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy and Political Science from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and served as a doctoral fellow at Yale University and a post-doctoral fellow at Princeton University. For more on her research, see https://pdx.academia.edu/LindsayBenstead.

Glenn E. Robinson is Professor of Defense Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey, California, and is also affiliated with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California at Berkeley.  He retired from NPS after 30 years in December 2021. He has authored or co-authored four books on Middle East politics as well as over 150 journal articles, book chapters, government reports and conference papers.  His most recent book, Global Jihad: A Brief History, was named by both Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy as a "Best Book of 2021."  He has won awards for his teaching at both Berkeley and NPS.  Robinson has been active in policy work, especially for USAID and DOD, and in his professional work for the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) and (as a Founding Board Member and Treasurer) for the Association for Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies (AGAPS).

Sean Yom is Associate Professor of Political Science at Temple University, Senior Fellow in the Middle East Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Project on Middle East Democracy in Washington, DC.  He is a specialist on regimes and governance in the Middle East, especially in Arab monarchies like Jordan, Kuwait, and Morocco. His research engages topics of authoritarian politics, democratic reforms, institutional stability, and economic development in these countries, as well as their implications for US foreign policy. His publications include the books From Resilience to Revolution: How Foreign Interventions Destabilize the Middle East (Columbia University Press, 2016); the co-edited volume The Political Science of the Middle East: Theory and Research since the Arab Uprisings (Oxford University Press, 2022); and articles in print journals like Comparative Political Studies, European Journal of International Relations, Studies in Comparative International Development, and Journal of Democracy.