Who Speaks for the Governed? Civil Society and the World Summit on the Information Society
All are welcome to this "Fourth Thursday" talk series on research issues in interdisciplinary information technology. The seminar this month will be presented by Paula Chakravartty, Assistant Professor of Communication. Bring your lunch; desserts and beverages will be served.
Global disparities over access to Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) formed the basis of the call for an UN-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) that took place in two phases in Geneva (2003) and Tunis (2005). In addition to the private sector and state delegates, accredited civil society organizations were, for the first time, invited to the table to participate in debates over financing ICT for development (ICT4D), ensuring cultural diversity, negotiating the future of intellectual property rights and debating the merits of a new system of Internet governance. The presence of a wide range of civil society organizations was meant to serve as a moral check to the official process of summitry, although most involved agreed that their influence on policy outcome had been limited if not disappointing. In this paper, I critically examine the role of civil society in proposing a “humanitarian agenda” that contests the dominant neo-liberal mode of governance within the WSIS process. Specifically, I consider why narrow claims for recognition—expressed in the right to freedom of information—eclipsed more expansive claims for both recognition and redistribution in terms of access to ICT infrastructure and content. I draw from feminist insights into the normative dimensions of global social justice after more than two decades of theory and praxis around transnational activism and the challenges of deliberation through difference.
