Colloquium: Prof. Dr. Anita R. Gohdes
Tuesday, 28th November 2017, at 17.15 - 18.30
ETH Zurich, UNO B 11, Universitätstrasse 41
Repression in the Digital Age: Internet Controls and State Violence in the 21st Century
The digital revolution has been celebrated by policy makers, human rights groups and scientists across the world, as an empowering new way for ordinary people to collectively mobilize against repressive rulers. The fact that anyone with a working Internet connection can now access, generate, and exchange content on the Internet has widely been recognized as a fundamental game changer in the struggle for democracy, legitimacy, and citizen empowerment. However, amidst all these euphoric accounts, one crucial question remains unanswered: Why should power-hungry states, with de facto control over citizens’ access to social media, impassively concede to defeat by these new tools? The simple answer is: They do not. Behind the scenes, governments across the world have been extremely active in developing and refining a whole arsenal of tools to surveil, manipulate, and censor the digital flow of information in the realm of their authority. How these tools of digital control inform states’ larger strategies of violent repression is the subject of this book.
About Prof. Dr. Anita R. Gohdes
Anita Gohdes is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at the external page Department of Political Science at the external page University of Zurich, and a member of the Center for Comparative and International Studies. Previously, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at the external page Belfer Center and the external page Women and Public Policy Program in the external page Harvard Kennedy School. Prior to that she worked at the external page Chair for Political Science IV at the University of Mannheim, where she obtained her PhD.
Her research focuses on political violence, state repression and the measurement of human rights. Her book project theoretically and empirically investigates how governments use digital communication technology to inform their strategies of violent repression. The book is based on her dissertation, which was awarded the 2014-2016 external page Walter Isard Dissertation Award (given every two years by the external page Peace Science Society International, and the external page Deutscher Studienpreis2015 (German Dissertation Prize) for the Social Sciences.
She spends a lot of time thinking about how to accurately quantify violence. And writing code that does that. Her work has been covered by various external page news outlets and appears in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, Significance, Journal of Human Rights, and at Oxford University Press.
Since 2009, she has been working for the external page Human Rights Data Analysis Group. Read the UN report on the documented death toll in Syria Download here. They have just published a report on the number of killings in Syrian detention centers, which you can read Download here.