The Other Side of Facebook in Myanmar

Posted by & filed under Civilians in Conflict, Culture and Conflict, Gender, Media

Facebook has been making headlines this year with what seems like scandal after scandal, from the Cambridge Analytica data breach to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifying in front of the United States Congress as a result. But perhaps one of the most serious scandals has been the social media platform’s role in Myanmar in spreading hate speech and inciting offline violence. In September, the United Nations Human Rights Council concluded in a report following its fact-finding mission in Myanmar that Facebook had been used to incite violence, in particular violence against the Rohingya Muslim community that amounted to genocide.

Social media user in Myanmar. Photo: Asian Development Bank/Flickr

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This Week in South Sudan – Week 45

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Monday 5 November The National Constitutional Amendment Committee held its first meeting in Juba. Tuesday 6 November Despite the release of 900 child soldiers so far in 2018, the UN reported that thousands of child soldiers are unlikely to be freed any time soon due to lack of funds for aid agencies. Vice President James… Read more »

‘Security, Economy, Population’- A comment to Jacqueline Best

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Jacqueline Best’s article ‘Security, Economy, Population’ is a welcome addition to the evolving discussion of ‘exceptionalism’ in the critical social sciences. As Best suggests, over the past fifteen years much discussion of emergency governance and exceptionalism has been shaped by post-9/11 security measures. I fully endorse her call to bring other forms of emergency government—particularly… Read more »

A Political Economy of ‘the Exception’? A comment to Jacqueline Best

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One of the most noteworthy responses to the election of Donald J. Trump came from politically radical African-Americans. In light of the longue durée of racial supremacy and the experience of those exploited by America’s economic system, it was not surprising or exceptional that aracist, misogynist, xenophobic plutocrat could succeed the first black President of the… Read more »

‘Security, Economy, Population’ – A response to Owens and Collier

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What are the analytical and political stakes of thinking about political economic practice through the lens of exceptionalism? These I take to be the fundamental questions underlying the very insightful comments by Patricia Owens and Stephen Collier, two scholars whose work I greatly admire, on my Security Dialogue article ‘Security, Economy, Population’. Best and Collier’s remarks… Read more »

This Week in South Sudan – Week 44

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Wednesday 31 October Riek Machar returned to Juba for the first time in two years to participate on the peace celebrations. During the peace celebrations, President Salva Kiir apologized for “the immense suffering” caused by the civil war. Special representative of the Secretary General and head of UMISS, David Shearer’s speech at the peace celebrations… Read more »

Drought displacement and implications for conflict

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Human migration driven by weather variability and environmental change (see, e.g., here, here, and here) has been identified as a possible link between global warming and violent conflict (see, e.g., here, here, and here). Despite academic and public policy discussions about these and similar topics, the relationship between climate change and regional migration within developing… Read more »

The Good Drone

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Edited by Kristin Bergtora Sandvik, Maria Gabrielsen Jumbert. Abingdon: Routledge, 2018, 202 pp.:  9780367000844 (hbk) Kristin Bergtora Sandvik and Maria Gabrielsen Jumbert’s collected volume entitled ‘The Good Drone’ highlights the materiality of the drone in the context of humanitarian applications and questions. While the book primarily deals with the question of materiality in the context… Read more »

Does terrorism work?

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Does Terrorism Work? A History by Richard English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 368pp., £25.00 (h/b), ISBN 9780199607853 The renewed proliferation of terrorism studies that rapidly followed the 9/11 attacks has been well-documented, and the post-9/11 wave that is now nearly two decades old, has focused predominantly on an elusive, universally-accepted definition of terrorism. Efforts… Read more »