About the Topic: The scholarly literature on Track Two in South Asia has traditionally held that the region is inhospitable to this kind of dialogue. Drawing on his extensive experience with facilitating Track Two dialogues in South Asia, Peter Jones will explore the ways in which the literature may not be properly capturing the situation.  He will also explore the positive role that Track Two can play in the region, and consider pitfalls that can arise if it is done badly.  The talk will include reflections on key issues that arise in facilitating such dialogues, such as: the questions of designing such projects and selecting the participants; how to transfer the results of such projects to the official track; dealing with those who oppose such projects; and maintaining momentum.

About the Speaker: Before joining the University of Ottawa, Peter Jones served as a senior analyst for the Security and Intelligence Secretariat of the Privy Council of Canada. An expert on security in the Middle East and track-two diplomacy, he led the Middle East Security and Arms Control Project at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) in Sweden in the 1990s. He is presently leading several Track Two initiatives in South Asia and the Middle East, and is also widely published on Iran.  Jones holds a Ph.D. in War Studies from Kings' College, London, and an MA in War Studies from the Royal Military College of Canada.

For years former diplomat and academic Kishore Mahbubani has closely studied the changing relationship between Asia and the United States and its consequences in works like Can Asians Think? and The New Asian Hemisphere. In The Great Convergence, his new book, he assesses East and West at a remarkable turning point in world history and reaches an incredible conclusion.

China stands poised to become the world’s largest economy as soon as 2016. Unprecedented numbers of the world’s population, driven by Asian economic growth, are being lifted out of poverty and into the middle class. And with this creation of a world-wide middle class, there is an unprecedented convergence of interests and perceptions, cultures and values: a truly global civilization.  

A full 88% of the world’s population lives outside the West and is rising to Western living standards, and sharing Western aspirations. But while the world changes, our way of managing it has not and it must evolve. The Great Convergence outlines new policies and approaches that will be necessary to govern in an increasingly interconnected and complex environment. Multilateral institutions and world-wide governing organizations must be strengthened. National interests must be balanced against global interests. The United States and Europe must share power and China, India, Africa and the Islamic world must be integrated. And the world’s increasing consumption must be balanced against environmental sustainability.

About the Speaker

From 1971 to 2004 Kishore Mahbubani served in the Singapore Foreign Ministry, where he was Permanent Secretary from 1993 to 1998, served twice as Singapore’s Ambassador to the United Nations (UN), and in January 2001 and May 2002 served as President of the UN Security Council.

Mahbubani is the author of Can Asians Think?, Beyond the Age of Innocence: Rebuilding Trust Between America and the World, and The New Asian Hemisphere: the Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East.

Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines have listed him as one of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world, and in 2009 the Financial Times included him on their list of Top 50 individuals who would shape the debate on the future of capitalism. In 2010 and 2011 he was selected as one of Foreign Policy’s Top Global Thinkers.

An army officer turned social entrepreneur, Vivek Garg will share his transition from combat to economic development work and present three case studies on how he used economic tools to foster peace among hostile communities in conflict affected regions of Kashmir and Northeast India.

Vivek Garg is Founder and CEO of a social venture called BAPAR (Business Alternatives for Peace, Action and Reconstruction), which focuses on impact entrepreneur incubation and early stage investment for the economic reconstruction of conflict affected regions of India. Prior to BAPAR, Garg served as an infantry officer with the Indian Army for over 10 years, wherein he led combat operations in Kashmir and Siachen Glacier. He coordinated operations and deployment of a division size force of 10,000 troops and managed a development aid budget of US$ 2.5M in insurgency infested, tribal regions bordering China and Myanmar. Garg is currently pursuing a degree with the Sloan Master’s Program at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Abstract: 
While the debate rages on regarding the role of social media technologies within the Egyptian revolution of 2011, and more generally the larger wave of ‘Arab Spring’ protests, the more relevant question of today is whether the 18 days of revolt may have done more for social media than vice versa. In different manners, social media technologies appear to be central to this discussion. From the Muslim Brotherhood’s use of technology to engage global publics, to activist uses of social media to build grassroots networks which bypass the barriers of infrastructure and access, or blogger uses of social media to impact older top-down media, social media technologies represent critical sites for analysis and critique. Building on two years of ethnographies and interviews, this paper identifies three key themes by which social media technologies shape political power: 1. Moving Past Bubbles, 2. Linking Older and Newer Media, and 3. Digital Subversion.

Dr. Ramesh Srinivasan, Assistant Professor at UCLA in Design and Media/Information Studies, studies and participates in projects focused on how new media technologies impact political revolutions, economic development and poverty reduction, and the future of cultural heritage. He recently wrote a front page article on Internet Freedom for the Huffington Post, an Op/Ed in the Washington Post on Social Media and the London Riots, an upcoming piece in the Washington Post on Myths of Social Media, and was recently on NPR discussing his fieldwork in Egypt on networks, actors, and technologies in the political sphere. He was also recently in the New Yorker based on his response (from his blog: http://rameshsrinivasan.org) to Malcolm Gladwell’s writings critiquing the power of social media in impacting revolutionary movements. He has worked with bloggers who were involved in overthrowing the recent authoritarian Kyrgyz regime, non-literate tribal populations in India to study how literacy emerges through uses of technology, and traditional Native American communities to study how non-Western understandings of the world can introduce new ways of looking at the future of the internet. He holds an engineering degree from Stanford, a Masters degree from the MIT Media Lab, and a Doctorate from Harvard University. His full academic CV can be found at http://rameshsrinivasan.org/cv