As published for the blog tech President on April 9th, 2010:

by Nancy Scola

Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush are two peas in a cyber-dissident pod, it seems:

The Conference on Cyber Dissidents: Global Successes and Challenges is the inaugural event of the The George W. Bush Institute’s Area of Focus on Human Freedom, and includes the Institute’s first two Visiting Fellows in Human Freedom: Oscar Morales, from Colombia, and Mohsen Sazegara, from Iran. The Conference deals with political movements in repressive societies seeking to promote greater freedom of speech, religion, political and economic participation. The event will bring to Dallas a number of active dissidents from China, Cuba, Iran, Russia, Syria and Venezuela, all of whom make significant use of the Internet and other digital media tools in their advocacy for greater freedom in their countries. These dissidents from around the world will be joined by scholars, democracy advocates and current and former officials of the U.S. Department of State in a discussion of trends in cyber-dissent, both on their own and within the broader context of dissident activity and the movement for freedom around the world.

Some of the names here, and in the list of other participants, are familiar. No Mas FARC’s Morales, for example, is in addition to being a George W. Bush Institute fellow, is an active participant in theAlliance of Youth Movements supported that has worked closely with Hillary Clinton’s State Department. It’s a measure of how quickly “21st century statecraft” has become a central strain of thinking in foreign policy without, frankly, all that much in the way of deep critique in the merits and challenges of the approach. (Thanks, Ari Melber)

While “George W. Bush” might not be the first person that pops into your head when you think about cyber dissidence, there’s some sense to it. For one thing, you can see this approach mesh well with the sort of hand-on democracy promotion he leaned towards at times during his terms. More directly and perhaps more importantly, the executive director of the GWB Institute is James Glassman, who was aggressive on the public diplomacy front at State during the Bush years. Heck, it sounds like a fascinating conference. Let’s hope there’s a webcast.

Oh, also, for what it’s worth, it turns out that GeorgeBushInstitute.com runs on WordPress.

Read the article here