Insight from San Francisco, U.S.A.

Last week I was in San Francisco to present at the International Studies Association (ISA) Annual Conference.  I was presenting two papers.  One paper was on my own research about online communities and political mobilization and the other was about a project I work on for the Jackson School called the Knowledge Network of World Events & News (KNOW) project. With the KNOW project, we are trying to create a learning portal contextualizes current international events with historical, political, social, and cultural information. We have been working on this project for more than two years now and have made a lot of progress, although it is not yet live.

Many people associate San Francisco with the Golden Gate Bridge or with hippies in the 1960s or as one of the brave beginning places of the gay rights movement. But, whenever I’m in San Francisco I think of my father.

From December 1970 to March 1972, my father was in the U.S. Army stationed in San Francisco. The only son of an impoverished single mother, he had done everything he could to avoid being sent to Vietnam—including very seriously considering leaving for Canada as tens of thousands of people did. In the end, he accepted his fate and went to boot camp. At the last minute before being sent to fight in a war he did not believe in and that he was sure would leave him broken, a miracle occurred. As part of his B.S. degree, chosen and dragged out to avoid the draft, he had worked in a lab and an Army lab in San Francisco needed someone with his type of experience.

The army base where my father was sent was at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge in such a picturesque spot that it is now an expensive luxury resort. This moment of grace is one that he still talks about with huge gratitude. Not only was he saved from a war that left so many broken, but he was stationed with my mother’s long time on-again off-again boyfriend, setting the stage for what he still says was the most fortunate moment in his life, meeting my mother.

I associate this city—both the imagined and the physical—with my father as a young man, far younger than I am now myself. When he talks about that time he says he was, “just walking around and looking stupid.” But I think about him, saved from Vietnam and unknowingly connected to the man who would change his life by introducing him to my mother in 1972. And the picture that I have in my head when I hear the name San Francisco is of him as a young man riding his motorcycle across the Golden Gate Bridge in the sunshine, laughing.

During this trip to San Francisco to present my work along with hundreds of academics at the ISA conference, I spend my time wondering what is different and the same in this city where his decommissioned army base is now a luxury resort.

By 1970 the war in Vietnam was wildly unpopular in the U.S. Many viewed it as illegitimate and many believed the U.S. involvement there was a mistake. The more democratic nature of the Vietnam draft meant that, as my mother says, by the time my father was drafted 1970 everyone she knew had a friend, family member, or acquaintance who had died in Vietnam. This cruel reach of the war was particularly true for her home state.

(This is not to say that the draft was democratic. Certain socioeconomic and racial groups were far less likely to be able to receive a draft deferment by attending college and there was controversy about the distribution of the numbers. For example, experts in this draft would not be surprised to hear that my father had a low draft number as men born before 1951 in November or December had disproportionately low numbers.)

In addition, contributing directly to this perception of the war was the press. Heroic journalists sent back photos and accounts of what they were seeing—often becoming part of the story themselves. In SIS 201, Joel Migdal often uses the photo of Phan Thị Kim Phúc running down the road, her clothing burned off by napalm, as an example of the power of photojournalism and the media in the 20^th Century. Nick Ut, the man who snapped the photograph took her and the other injured children to the hospital, where he continued to visit her while she recovered. More than 63 journalists died in Vietnam, giving their lives to provide a window to the horrors that humans can visit upon each other.

During the Vietnam War, the U.S. went through a media revolution in the form of the television. While it is debated whether changes in news coverage mirrored American opinion of the war or helped lead it, through their televisions the U.S. public was given a front row seat on the realities of war and the consequences of American foreign policy choices, both for American soldiers as well as the people in Vietnam—and, unknown to many, to the people in Cambodia and Laos as well.

The valiant reporting done in Vietnam is a story that runs parallel to the release of the Pentagon Papers and the role of major news providers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post in printing the classified documents that revealed systemic lying and corruption at the highest levels of government and across political parties. Between these changes and the brave reporting of the Watergate scandal, many view this as a golden age in reporting. It is often cited as exemplary of the essential role that the media plays in a healthy democracy.

However, my students now think of the media as untrustworthy, corrupt, and partisan. Last quarter in a class on technology and social movements I asked my students how many of them trusted the media. The answer was none.

Where does this leave us? Most who study democracy agree that for a democracy to function a free press is necessary to serve as a counterweight to power. But today, people do not trust the media and the media itself is going through a time of incredible disruption and change.

While the internet means that we can access unprecedented amounts of information, we live in an age in which major news providers are unable to sustain old commercial models. The gatekeepers of information find themselves going bankrupt and the number of foreign bureaus supported by news organizations has been in strict decline. Out of financial necessity, news providers are using the same correspondents, stories, and accounts of stories as a way to cut costs—homogenizing news coverage. Single reporters based out of cities thousands of miles away from “the action” are now the “on the ground” journalist for major events. And, many international events are never even covered.

Meanwhile, internet technology is leading to a democratization of news provision. Anyone who can get online and can make a free blog can become a reporter. Anyone with a cell phone can now record events in real time. As Zeynep Tufekci reports, within an hour of any important thing happening in the world, a new video of it is uploaded to YouTube. This perhaps makes it the largest news provider in the world. Sites such as YouTube and WikiLeaks give us countless amounts of information at our fingertips, but it is an explosion of information without editing, filtering, or structures to provide meaning. Certainly, this has its own power and virtues, but it also presents a new set of challenges. We continue to try to understand what all of this means—and, in a “post Arab Spring” world, what it means for democratization, in particular. What does it mean for democracy?

When our students read about what is happening in Syria, they often come to their instructors and ask us to explain to them what is happening. They ask us because they trust us to give them the full sweep of history behind an event and they know that most of us will try to present the information with as little bias as we can. I have had students ask me about topics such as Middle East politics or WikiLeaks and tell me that they don’t know if they can trust what they find in online searches. They don’t trust the news providers and they feel overwhelmed by the firehose of information—and it’s not just our students, we all feel this way to some extent.

As I mentioned at the start of the post, this is what I was presenting about in San Francisco. The KNOW project is intended to step into the space created by the decline in foreign coverage and the sea of uncontextualized and unedited information available about the world online. As we work on building this tool, we have been using undergraduate students in the continual process of building resources so as to provide an information source that educates, but that also educates as it is produced.

In fact, this blog is part of that effort and the stories shared here will one day serve to contextualize events that are happening on the ground in the moment. Our hope is that drawing on the personal experiences of our community members will give people a tactile feel for the grit and beauty of the places all over the world where people just like you and me are living, loving, and riding a motorcycle, laughing at the glory of being young and having cheated death for just a moment.

If you are interested in the project, please feel free to monitor our project blog.

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Jessica L. Beyer is a postdoc in the Center for Global Studies in the Jackson School where she works with Sara Curran on the KNOW project. She is also an alumnus of the B.A. program (International Political Economy track!). She studies online communities and political mobilization and maintains a research blog on her website.

The photo at the start of this post is of her father, Richard Beyer, in his uniform.

Insight from Tehran, Iran.

In the news in the past months, scenes of currency riots in Iran have taken hold of international coverage. I visited Iran over the summer and was able to a limited degree witness some of the stress. In some regards, Iran’s economic woes are very real, as I would often hear complaints about skyrocketing food prices. In other regards, Iranians were doing better than when I last visited six years prior. Below, I have described what I had witnessed and a glimpse into the reality of Iranian life.

When I first stepped out of Iran’s newly built airport in the outskirts of Tehran, I noticed an unusual site: a long line of SUVs. Last time I was in Iran, SUVs were definitely around but a pretty rare sight. My uncle began to load our ridiculous load of luggage into the back of his Hyundai Sante Fé. Throughout my time there, my uncle would blast Persian music as the music video would play in the front dashboard of his car. He was not the only family member who purchased a Hyundai Sante Fé; I noticed them often around Tehran. I was told that Iran has a high import tax and I was unofficially quoted 160% of the retail value was the amount of the tariff. This makes purchasing of foreign cars very difficult and what makes a Hyundai, a relatively better priced brand in the United States, a significant purchase in Iran. When I travelled to North Tehran, a richer neighborhood, I saw a surprising number of Mercedes Benz, Lexus, and Porsche vehicles among others. Apparently, Porsche SUVs are a big hit with rich Iranian soccer players. With the risky driving in Iran, I am not sure how they could convince themselves to drive them in traffic.

Outside of the automobile world, high tech items were common. I saw many advanced Android cell phones and iPhones were a common sight. I was asked several times in Iran when the iPhone 5 was going to come out, and much like in the United States, my Windows Phone was looked at with suspicion, “isn’t the iPhone better?” to my personal amusement. Around Tehran, Samsung Galaxy S3 billboards were a very common sight. Also, high definition televisions made by the same brands here in the United States were very common as well. For example, one apartment I went into had a large high definition television with surround sound speakers, and their son had an Xbox 360 and a small high-definition television in his room. This was very similar to a how a typical house in the United States may be set up. Of course, many of the internet capabilities were limited but they got to enjoy the same games that I found at home, albeit copies.

Now, Iranians are obviously under a lot of financial pressure, but the impressions I got were greatly contrasting. I witnessed people complaining about the prices of common items, while the material wealth around them seemed to significantly approve since the last time I was there. I remember one Iranian telling me that “Iranians are tired” and frustrated with the economy. He even equated the poor driving culture to how Iranians are feeling. However, another Iranian I spoke to had a very different analysis. He told me Iranians are used to poor economic times: “we had 8 years of war, a decade of sanctions afterwards [in the 1990s], and now we have some more sanctions… so if chicken is more expensive tomorrow, we just pay more and go along.” Later he made a joke about what he saw as an overreaction by Americans to the 2008 financial crisis: “they are sensitive to it, so they try to inflict on us like we react and care the same… Americans are not used to hardship, we are.” Essentially, he described sanctions as inconsequential. Although one could easily make an argument about Iranians’ special resolve for hard times, it’s hardly inconsequential.

In Tehran, my father went in to exchange U.S. dollars for rials. In Iran, there is an official exchange rate set by the Government that is only used for essential goods; otherwise the dollar-rial exchange rate is set by the black market. The black market is much more commonly used and also more susceptible to fluctuations. At the first exchange location (black market), the dollar was going for 21,750 rials. My dad went down the street to check the price at another currency exchange to find the price set at 21,770 where he made his exchange. On his way back, the price at the initial location went up to 21,800 rials. One week later in Isfahan, my dad exchanged his dollars for 23,050 rials. While we were making that exchange a man walked in to ask for the price, where he exclaimed “it was just 22,000 down the street!” On our last day in Iran, I woke up to “the dollar exploded!” and was informed it became 27,000 rials (this was the day after the Isfahan price). I later found out it “exploded” to 25,000 rials, not 27,000. The 27,000 came from the exchange of $20 bills instead of $100 bills. Yes, in the black market exchange rate lower denominations are worth more (quick tip, if you plan on travelling to Iran soon, bring lots of $1 bills).

With a well-educated youth and influx of high-tech items and material wealth, Iran has lots of potential. There is a misconception in the West about Iran’s economic status as being much more backwards than it really is. Even this quarter in my nuclear non-proliferation class, a few people would compare North Korea and Iran’s economy in regards to sanctions. They are not even close. The youth in Iran and in the West may both be carrying the latest smartphones, but they experience them in completely different environments.

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Shahed Ghoreishi is a International Studies major (International Political Economy track). Currently, he is representing University of Washington students as a Senator in the Associated Students of the University of Washington. Also, he is interning at Senator Maria Cantwell’s Seattle office.

Shahed was born and raised in Seattle’s eastside and is fluent in Persian. He was first inspired to study international relations when he visited Iran in 7th grade. Shahed will graduate in 2013 and hopes to continue his studies in International Studies.

Shahed was in Iran to see family and attend a cousin’s wedding. It was his first visit to Iran since he was 15 and he hoped to gain a more mature perspective on Iran, particularly in light of his education in the Jackson School. His visit also helped to perfect his formal Persian speaking skills.

Shahed posted previously about trust in the Islamic Republic.

Insight from Bucharest, Romania.

It’s hot. It’s so hot I can’t breathe and I wish this taxi had air-conditioning. I never wish for air-conditioning but all four windows are wide open and I still feel like I am suffocating. It is so bright outside that the industrial buildings stretching from the airport to Bucharest city are white-washed, bleached as if my eyes are a camera, set on over-expose. The driver is smoking and talking on his phone and looking over his shoulder at me at the same time. He has the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen. Walking through the airport I was struck over and over again by blue, blue eyes and dark, dark skin. Later at my hotel I will Google “blue eyes Romania.” I end up in a rabbit hole of stories about blue-eyed Arabs, and dating sites for men to meet hot young Romanian women, conspiracy theorists talking about blue-eyes sometimes being a dominant gene instead of a recessive one, and a Wikipedia article about how Estonia’s population is 99% blue eyed.  I scour the television stations to catch sight of these blue eyes again. But the airport is the only place I see them.

I am in Bucharest, Romania for two weeks to work for the secretariat of an international environmental treaty on wetlands, biodiversity and climate change–the Ramsar Convention. It is their triennial COP, or Conference of the Parties, where delegates from about 153 different countries come together to negotiate environmental policy, which they will then take home with them and implement.

In the taxi I remind myself that the areas around airports are always ugly–that what I am seeing is not going to be indicative of what the city or the rest of Romania will be like. I’m right. As we drive down the Bulevardul Regina Elisabeta I see towering old buildings; buildings that rival places I have seen in Paris. Except these buildings are crumbling and covered in graffiti–colorful spray paint and ancient gold rooftops. The taxi driver is giving me the scenic tour. I have a feeling that this is going to cost me, but I am just glad I didn’t have to take the bus.  At the airport the idea of figuring out public transport in this heat seemed staggering.

The taxi driver decides I need a tour guide. I speak English, Afrikaans, and very basic French and Persian. He speaks French, Italian, broken English and Romanian. He keeps trying to tell me about the buildings we see in Italian. I just shake my head and smile. Parks and crumbling megaliths pass by me. The heat is unbearable but it begins to feel good to my heat starved skin. I’m surprised that no one honks at us. This man drives with a cigarette and a cellphone and rarely has a hand on the steering wheel. I keep smiling. I wonder who he is talking to.  I can’t tell if it’s me, or the person I can hear on the phone. It doesn’t seem to matter to him.  He keeps talking, mentioning the Pentagon, wildly, waving his hands and veering into oncoming traffic.

At the hotel I pay the taxi driver 150 Ron, three times what my ride should have cost. I sleep all afternoon and straight through the night. The next day I sit at the registration desk in the Palace of the Parliament, where we are holding this summer’s COP. The secretariat staff is small, and at the conference is expected to take on many different jobs and roles. It is the host country’s responsibility to pay for the meeting, and to supply extra volunteers.  One of the Romanian volunteers, a man of 20 has been smiling at me all morning. Finally he works up the courage to sit down next to me. He asks me where I am from and what I’m doing here. We talk about school. He is studying law at the University of Bucharest. He had to pull strings to get an invitation to work at the COP. He wants to work for the government. I soon learn from the volunteers that everyone in Romania wants to work for the government. It could just be that I have a biased sample, but it reminds me of an article I read at home about Morocco and how the children of the country’s elite all have government jobs waiting for them when they graduate. I think of growing up in South Africa. There is something about the chaos and bizarre dichotomy between rich and poor, first world Lamborghinis and third world poverty, I see here that I recognize. I feel oddly at home.

The volunteer is trying to tell me about Romania. I ask him about the people and he tells me about the gypsies. He says they are awful. They are an embarrassment to Romania. They are “welfare suckers.” I try to keep smiling and ask him what he means. I want to know what he thinks. Gypsies in my mind seem romantic. To Romanians they aren’t. I wonder if they are blue eyed. I ask him about the blue-eyed people. He says, “Oh no, those are fine.”

I have been having my ideas of ethnicity, national identity and race challenged constantly since leaving South Africa, where there were only two races, black and white.  I left South Africa and came to an America that perceived race in places I had never been asked to look, and now, here, to a country that defines race amongst people I can’t tell apart. Nobody in the government building has blue eyes. I am at a loss for how to ask about this.

I become uncomfortable talking to him.  Our conversation slowly fizzles out. He moves on to more interesting targets. He walks like an old man, and has the hunched back and the flat-pooched belly and the hands of an old man. He is the type of twenty year old that looks and behaves like he should be 80; his ideas about people and government are just as dated. I wonder about what will happen when he becomes a government official.

For the first few days of the conference the Romanian staff is running around us wheeling plants and flower pots, rolling out carpets and putting up signs. The bulk of the volunteers don’t arrive till three days in.

The secretariat staff is from all over the world. I am working next to an American woman who is in her 50’s and stands like a flamingo on one leg. She becomes our daily news broadcaster. We spend most of the duration of the conference talking about this building with its enormous foyers and vast wings of empty unused rooms. And its ghosts.

On the evening of the first night over drinks a co-worker tells me that the Palace of the Parliament, the grand, ornate building we are working in was only built 40 years ago. That it is the second largest building in the world, second only to the Pentagon. Suddenly I understand what the taxi driver had been trying to tell me.

It is as hot inside the building as it is outside. We are told over and over again that there is no air-conditioning in the building. We ask about the huge vents we see everywhere, and we apologize to the delegates that start to arrive en-sweating masse. The women I work with and I sit and gossip with an intimacy that is forged by close living and working quarters.  Between registering 800 delegates and observer parties, we fan ourselves desperately with pamphlets meant for delegates, we fight over rationed pens that keep going missing. Languages snake past me at lightning speed. The convention works in three languages so as a rule most of the staff speak two and often three. But the delegates speak thousands, and all day snippets of conversation drift by me. The staff alters their language according to whom they are speaking to, and I sit and listen to stories in French and Spanish. I blink every time someone speaks to me in Romanian. It takes us a few seconds to realize I don’t understand what they are saying.

One of the French women working with me tells me she hates this building. She talks about the 80’s and watching the video of Elena and Nicolae Ceaușescu’s execution, which was aired on national television. She is upset at having to work in a building that is so symbolically linked to them. The American woman tells me about how a friend had to escape Romania during the 1980’s, leaving her family behind  never to be seen again.

Most of Bucharest’s architecture is made up of buildings built during the Communist era and the Palace of the Parliament, in all its ornate marbled splendor, is no exception. Nicolae Ceaușescu demolished huge portions of the historic center of Bucharest in order to construct it. He literally razed the previously historic sections of the city and built his Paris of the East from scratch in his project of systemization.

I now understand what the taxi driver had been pointing at, during my very expensive and unsolicited guided tour. Tens of thousands of houses had been destroyed. Later that night, walking to a supermarket in search of snacks a co-worker explained that in the 1980’s 40,000 people were evicted with only a day’s notice as he razed an 8 square kilometer area, as part of his redevelopment scheme. Back when the world was divided in three. Back when I was born. A whole twenty-six years ago. His ghost is still here, in this building,  in this city, and amongst us, people from far away places and distant time.

As the days and the heat blur together and conversations snippet in and out around me, I feel like time starts to resemble a stop animation film, and I am constantly trying to puzzle this place together. Slowly, like drip filtration I become aware that there is something else happening in this building. There are parts we aren’t allowed to access, that contain the seat of government. On the second day, the American woman announces that there is going to be a coup. That the current president Traian Basescu is being ousted by Prime Minister Victor Ponta over allegations he had abused his powers. We suddenly find we are unwitting participants in this drama, by simple accident. Every now and then a lost politician comes in the wrong door and walks past us, at one point Basescu and Ponta are standing in front of me shaking hands. Angela Merkel walks by me.

Everything starts to get very exciting. In between long days of work, and the political dramas in the convention itself, we are riveted by what is happening in the building around us.

Information comes to us in bits and pieces, some of it is nonsense, and some of it is accurate. It takes time to sort out which is which. It’s impossible to find English news in Romania. You can watch Xena the Warrior Princess on repeat and Chuck Norris movies and old American television. There is CNN Europe, but everything is happening so fast that it seems like the rest of the world hasn’t caught on yet. Locked in the building all day working we don’t really now what’s happening outside, there are reports of burning buildings which turn out to be standard house fires, student uprisings, which turn out to be small and talk of a coup d’etat keeps resurfacing.

Being a part of what happens and trying to understand it at the same time is very difficult. The only source of information we have is an opinion piece by Paul Krugman in the New York Times.  I think about a class I took with Ellis Goldberg on the Arab Spring and realize this is what he was talking about when he described being in Cairo at the start of the Egyptian uprising.

The next day we learn that it is not a coup after all, but that the parliament has voted to impeach President Traian Basescu.

On my final day I have some free time. The volunteer, who first told me about gypsies also told me that the video of the Ceaușescu’s execution was available on YouTube if I was interested. I had politely declined. But, I go see their graves though in a final bid to my morbid curiosity. I want to say goodbye to this person who’s building I have been hosted in, who’s streets I have walked in and who has left such a strange legacy behind.

The final evening is hot. We wonder the old town district and seek tables in the vast oceans of outdoor seating, between thick clouds of smoke and faces of all ages and expensive cars and taxis and gypsies and beautiful, beautiful Romanian women. There are Gypsies everywhere. I think about South Africa again in relation to this new democracy also still dealing with the vapors of its past. A lot of it is very similar and then a lot of it is not

It will take time for me after leaving to put all this information into perspective and I will finally relent and watch the video. It is sad and hollow, and leaves me feeling intense grief, for both the atrocities committed by Nicolae and Elena, but also for the horrific way in which they died. The narrator uses a quote by Karl Marx at the end of the video, and it seems fitting; “Men make their own history but they do not make it as they choose.”

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Rachel Brown is a Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations major and Editor for the Jackson School Journal of International Studies.  She is also the Assistant Director for the Odegaard Writing and Research Center. In her spare time she is a certified mediator working in Washington state.

Rachel has worked with the Ramsar Convention for the last two Conference of the Parties, in South Korea and in Romania. The next one will be in Uruguay. Rachel grew up in South Africa and moved to the US in 2008. She will graduate from UW in 2014 and intends to spend her senior year at the Sciences Po in France studying Arabic and French and completing her thesis.