In Asia editor Alma Freeman recently caught up with author and social media expert Beth Kanter after a talk held at The Asia Foundation’s headquarters, organized by the Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy. Named one of the most influential women in technology by Fast Company and one of the BusinessWeek’s “Voices of Innovation for Social Media,” Kanter is the author of Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media for Social Change, and Visiting Scholar at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

GlobalWebIndex’s latest data shows that the internet now makes up 57 percent of global media consumption, with social media alone taking 26 percent of people’s media time, more than TV’s 23 percent. What does this trend mean?

If you think about the media landscape, it looks like a clover: you have traditional media, influencer blogs, and social media. People are now getting their information from all of those sources, especially in places with good broadband access. But this means that people, especially younger people, need to have a really good sense of digital literacy and be able to detect: Is this the whole story? Is it balanced? Is it the truth? Especially now that we have the filter bubble with Google, which is feeding us back what is likeable, as opposed to search results that are balanced.

Increased internet access, pervasive broadband, and the ability to get internet on the smartphone have made information so much more accessible. Things like the $25 tablet in India are making a huge difference. As the tools and technology become more accessible, the environment online becomes more socially interesting. But there’s always resistance to technology and social media – the argument of why should we do it now, it’s just a fad, it’s going to go away. Now, most of the nonprofits I work with view social media as an important part of their marketing, but there’s still the struggle that organizations have on getting everyone to participate. Navigating the personal and professional is also very tricky – many employees may be using it personally and care about the issues around the organization. Figuring out how to navigate and leverage that personal passion for your organization’s work in service of the mission is not an easy thing to do.

Internet usage is sky-rocketing in Asia, making it one of the fastest-growing social media regions in the world. How will this change social media and particularly, how non-profits and NGOs can use it?

That’s true, but when I go to India, I hear people say often that only 3 percent of the population is on Facebook, so why should I care? While that’s true, that 3 percent represents over 60 million people, which is the third largest country on Facebook. Most of those people are concentrated in urban areas, but that doesn’t mean that someone in a village with a smart phone can’t get that information and influence others off-line.

You have a deep connection to Cambodia, and helped raise money for the first Cambodian Bloggers conference in 2007 and recently attended another bloggers conference last year. What has changed?

I first started blogging in 2003 and had three blogs, one for non-profits, and two on Cambodia. I started getting comments from Cambodian young people, and became the bridge blogger for Global Voices, and started blogging and interacting with Cambodian bloggers more on a regular basis. Then I met Tharum, one of Cambodia’s first and most influential bloggers, and helped to get him a scholarship to go to London. He went on to become a very well-know blogger.
When I was first in Phnom Penh in 2000, there was one traffic light, and the only internet connection was in the fancy hotel that was a dial up and super slow. In 2004, there were a couple of internet cafes. Now it seems like there is Wi-Fi everywhere, and people are getting it to their phones. It has changed vastly.

What role can blogs play that traditional media cannot? Can they help increase transparency and citizen participation?

The later question is asking a lot, honestly. Unless everyone is working together, and has a tremendous amount of backing, I don’t know how realistic it is to expect bloggers and social media alone to be able to transform countries and governments. Although we have seen things like the Arab Spring which was driven by Facebook, we’re still watching to see the impact it had on lasting change. However, blogs can be an authentic, local voice. They can give a sense of what’s happening locally and how people are thinking about issues. That’s what attracted me to Global Voices. For example, during the viral online campaign to capture Uganda warlord Kony, I loved going and reading from the Ugandan bloggers. You found that what they were thinking and how they were talking about the event was completely different than here.
Social media is a double-edged sword. There is social media for good and social media for evil. It’s a question around the resilience of our networks. In September, I was supposed to be on a plane to Tunisia, but it was cancelled because of that video that triggered a wave of unrest in the region. So, I wrote a blog on why I’m not on a plane to Tunisia right now, and it was basically about how we need to build more resilience in our networks and civil society so that when something like this happens, people can rise up and resolve it, as opposed to just escalating the bad.

Last week, Asia Foundation trustee and Stimson Center president Ellen Laipson joined veteran journalist Robin Wright in a discussion moderated by new Asia Foundation executive vice president, Suzanne Siskel, on “After the Arab Spring: Prospects for Change.” The panel was part of the World Affairs Council’s annual 2-day conference in San Francisco.

In your article that you wrote for this blog in May of last year you talked about President Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech raising “some important and enduring conundrums about politics and identity that apply to Asia as well as the Middle East.” In what ways do you think these conundrums about politics and identity have evolved in the last year?

The Obama administration has fully embraced the changes that began in late 2010 through the middle of 2011 as a very positive development – the universal call for freedom and dignity. Officials see these events as a powerful and compelling chapter in human history. If we look at President Obama’s Cairo speech or how Secretary of State Hillary Clinton talks about these transitions, we see that they resonate with U.S. officials at a fundamental level of values and principles. But that’s the big picture. In the real world and in real time, the Administration has had to deal with all kinds of shades of grey and predicaments and challenges. If you put in the same basket democracy, economics, Islam, and security, you will find that not everyone agrees on which is the push and which is the pull, and which American interest should be the determinant of our policies.

During your World Affairs Council panel, Robin Wright warned that at least in the early stages, the transition is not likely going to be good for women. Do you agree?

I completely agree with Robin that this issue hovers over the transition, and will present some hard choices for Western aid donors and for how we engage with these Arab societies in transition. I think that Arab women who have lived in largely secular but non-democratic systems aspired to live in a more democratic environment, but if that democratic environment turns out to be very socially conservative, they are now having second thoughts. There are women who are deeply worried about how constitutions are being rewritten. Some educated, elite women are quite frightened, and don’t really have the skills or experience to engage at the political level, to get in the game. They have to fight for the language that they think will protect gender equality, and they certainly hope that western activists will support them in that quest. When we were in Tunisia recently, we saw YouTube videos of Salafi women – very conservative – insisting that only in a sharia-ruled society are women truly free. So, you can see that there is a real war of ideas going on. There are some very powerful, politically assertive women who are saying the opposite of what the secular women are saying.

Are there other countries that underwent similar transitions to democracy that the post-Arab Spring nations can look to as a model?

In Egypt, the analogy that interests people the most is Turkey, a country that went through a much earlier democratic transition and has been a multi-party democratic system for 80 years now. Its relevance to Egypt is in at least three ways. One is the transition to civilian control of the military, and the recognition by the military that they are not above the state; and a second is the rise of an Islamist-oriented political elite that nonetheless preserves a secular constitution. A third part of the “Turkish model” can be seen as positive or negative, depending on one’s political values. The Turkish military maintained for many decades the belief that it alone could be the guarantor of democracy: we will decide if the political system is going off the rails, and is leaning towards extremism or other forms of instability; we’ll pull it back on track. In the case of Turkey, that meant three military coups in 30 years when politics, parties, and constitutions were temporarily suspended. Today’s Supreme Council of the Armed Forces of Egypt may see that as a positive model, but most of the newly empowered actors in Egyptian politics, including the Muslim Brotherhood, would like to see the military take a more modest role in national life.

I also think that experiences in democratic transitions in non-Arab Muslim societies, not just Malaysia but also Indonesia, and even Bangladesh are relevant. New democrats in the Middle East are interested in learning that the transitions and struggles that these countries went through didn’t happen overnight, that this type of change takes a decade or more. The committees writing the new Tunisian constitution, for example, told us they have been meeting with experts from Southeast Asia to learn more about their experiences.

Is there scope for multilateral finance institutions to support development in the region?

For sure. The IMF is the one out in front in trying to get the Egyptian economy to a more stable place. The Egyptians are hemorrhaging their foreign exchange, and have failed to reassure investors and donors that they know how to stabilize the economy and generate new economic activity. The U.S. sent a high level delegation to persuade the Egyptians to make a deal with the IMF so that money from other sources would start to flow. The Egyptians sort of said yes, and now they are still haggling over the terms. The scale of what the Egyptians need in terms of job creation may be more than what those institutions are willing to commit in the short run. We’ve heard from some Arab entrepreneurs who are thinking of trying to do a private sector fund but they want to bypass the Egyptian government. They’d like to make big investments in infrastructure and important things, but they so mistrust the new political actors that they aren’t comfortable with who would be their partner.

President Obama’s May 19 speech about change in the Middle East raises some important and enduring conundrums about politics and identity that apply to Asia as well as the Middle East. The U.S. wants to be on the right side of history, and has newly embraced the demand for reform and democracy as a higher-order determinant of U.S. policy priorities than the earlier emphasis on stability.

Protesters in Egypt hold up home-made signs promoting Facebook. Photo by Essam Sharaf.

So change is now better than stability, at least in those places where the citizens demand it. It’s a very tricky process, to wean our official discourse and rhetoric from the past in those places where change has already occurred, and to preserve a more traditional posture where change has not happened, or where change may not be desirable from a U.S. point of view. The peaceful leadership transitions in Tunisia and Egypt were relatively easy to embrace; the violent upheavals in Libya and Yemen have resulted in international calls for leadership change, even without knowing what will follow. The crackdowns against protestors in Bahrain and Syria have kept us on the fence; we call for dialogue in the former and are slowly creeping to a call for President Assad to leave power in the latter. As the president’s recitation of this case-by-case approach indicated, in periods of dramatic transition, it’s hard to invoke universal principles when the realities of political change are messier and more confusing.

As posts in this blog informed us in recent weeks, Asians went through similar convulsions a generation ago, with some of the same outcomes. Youth protestors ousted a dictatorship in Indonesia, the revolution in the Philippines was a reminder that positive political change does not guarantee relief from poverty, and some authoritarian regimes hold on for longer than thought possible. The belief in a democratic tsunami is often belied by weather patterns that change course and affect different locales in distinctly different ways.

So Obama’s speech somewhat awkwardly juxtaposed the universal cry for freedom, the right to self-determination, and other lofty global values with the national politics and cultures of places as different as Yemen, Bahrain, and Tunisia. Each Arab country has its own history; reform processes are playing out differently in the monarchies and in the republics, and the legitimacy quotient varies widely across the region. Those republics, including Egypt and Syria, which two generations ago were the champions of secular modernization, atrophied under leaders who didn’t know when to leave, while at least some of the monarchies prospered economically and pursued incremental reforms for publics that were largely quiescent and complacent. The secular republics could not deliver basic social services, and their legitimacy eroded slowly but surely. The short-term explosions of anger and frustration over the past decade did not seem to threaten the basic power equation within each of these Arab societies. U.S. policy often focused on near-term cooperation and shared interests in regional trends, such as keeping the Soviets at bay, or, more recently, thwarting Iranian ambitions or al-Qaeda predations, rather than on questions of political legitimacy and long-term domestic stability.

Yet today it is tempting, as in Asia a generation ago, to make some broad assertions about an inevitable pattern of change and the empowerment of Arab citizens across borders. The contagion effect of the uprising in Tunisia was surprising and yet not so. Pan-Arabism was a rallying cry in the 1960s that had cultural resonance (shared language, religion, history) and political meaning – the struggle for Palestine. Over the years, the belief in deeply shared identities was replaced with the particularisms of politics at the nation-state level, and young Arabs lost faith in the unity theme, and, for a while, seemed to lose interest in Palestine as the defining issue for Arab identity. Yet the rise of pan-Arab media (and the declining credibility of state-run media) and the recently demonstrated power of social media managed to unite a new generation of Arabs, who have shared ideas and methods for mobilizing themselves and their societies in unprecedented ways. As outsiders, when we praise and encourage the political goals of Arabs in a place that is liberating itself, we run the risk of disappointing the would-be democrats in places where change is not underway or not likely to be. In a world of fast and borderless communications, it will be hard to manage the identity politics of a new generation of Arabs that feel connected yet live in very different political systems. As in Asia, the processes of reform and change happen at different paces and in distinct cultural settings. As tempting as it is to see broad patterns and strategic trends, the real work of improving lives and opening political space is a balancing act of how those big ideas play out in very varied locales.

Asia Foundation trustee Ellen Laipson is president and CEO of the Henry L. Stimson Center. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the individual author and not those of The Asia Foundation.

Over the last months, the world has watched as uprisings and revolutions have spread across the streets and squares of the Arab world. In Egypt, entire families – mothers, wives, daughters, grandmothers, showed remarkable courage in standing shoulder-to-shoulder with their brothers, sons, and fathers in the face of black-clad riot police calling for the ouster of Hosni Mubarak. Youth in Syria, Libya, and beyond continue to risk their lives, calling for lower food prices, job opportunities, and, most importantly, political reform. The future of these nations is far from certain, but few can argue that the recent events mark one of the most dramatic global political developments since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The protests that toppled governments in Tunisia and Egypt, and that are de-stabilizing other Arab regimes, have been youth-led and technology-enabled. Above, a protester waves a flag in Egypt's Tahrir square. Photo by M. Soli.

According to a new poll conducted by the Pew Research Center – the first major poll in Egypt since Mubarak’s ouster – “Egyptians are looking forward with extraordinary confidence and enthusiasm to their first free and fair elections this fall after the defining revolution of the Arab spring.” As the new president of The Asia Foundation, and former president of the American University in Cairo, this news, and the events that led to its unfolding, are powerful, instructive illustrations of what a lack of good governance, civic participation, and a functioning civil society can look like at full tilt. Our mission to improve governance and increase citizen participation in Asia requires we deeply examine the factors and forces that led to the sudden collapse of such entrenched regimes.

Arab youth truly have been at the vanguard of the revolution. The protests that toppled governments in Tunisia and Egypt, and that are de-stabilizing other Arab regimes, have been youth-led and technology-enabled. For example, in Egypt, it was YouTube images of an innocent torture victim in Alexandria, combined with 70,000 volunteers on Facebook that galvanized the first major protests on Tahrir square on January 25. So, we ask ourselves, what does all of this mean for the rest of the world?

For lessons from the past, we can look to Asia for some examples. In 1998, in Indonesia, a student-led movement toppled a dictator of 32 years, unleashing similar fears to those felt in Egypt that extremist forces would fill the power void. In the years immediately after Suharto’s fall, however, Indonesia’s reform process was remarkable, Robin Bush, our country representative in Jakarta, recently recounted on In Asia. But, she quickly cautioned, as “reformists in Egypt start to chart their course through a democratic reform process, and experts begin increasingly to view Indonesia as a “Model for Egypt’s Transition,” it behooves us to take a closer look at where Indonesia’s reform has taken the country 13 years later. Many observers and analysts in Indonesia today feel that reform has stagnated for years now, and in some areas, is actually regressing.” (Read Robin’s new post this week, where she offers lessons from Indonesia’s democratic transition.)

On the 25th anniversary of the 1986 People Power Revolution that ousted Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Steven Rood our country representative in the Philippines, blogged from Manila that although the anniversary offers a “lens to view the same kind of peaceful ouster that played out in Egypt…..history’s verdict will depend on how much the new dispensation improves the lives of citizens.” Both countries suffer from poverty, and although in both cases the revolutions changed the government, they left uncertain consequences for development.

And Asia Foundation Korea expert Scott Snyder wrote on the idea of a “Libya Model” for North Korea, warning that this model “does suggest that the path to inevitable and necessary political change in North Korea may be inescapably violent, chaotic, and unsettling not only to North Korea, but to its neighbors and the world.”

This week I’m guest-editing In Asia, and our experts examine some of the most pressing issues and implications for Asia. Preeminent China scholar and Asia Foundation Vice Chair Harry Harding looks at China’s continuing political stability; while Stanford’s Don Emmerson asks, what is “the Muslim World?”  Our trustee, National Geographic’s Terry Adamson, examines how brands and products influence global values, and John Brandon, who directs our International Relations program, wonders if current events might distract from U.S. commitment to Asia. Korea expert Scott Snyder looks to East Asia for clues to democratic consolidation.

David Arnold, Asia Foundation president and former president of the American University in Cairo, visits Kabul University.

Today, I began a global speaking tour; the first stop was Stanford University in the Silicon Valley, where I joined Larry Diamond, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Stanford University, and Don Emmerson, to discuss the dramatic political developments sweeping North Africa and the Middle East, and the implications of those developments for the rest of the world. From the Bay Area, I’ll head to Jakarta, and then on to Sydney, Australia, where I’ll speak at the Lowy Institute for International Policy, and then on to New York for The Asia Foundation’s inaugural Lotus Leadership Awards, where we’ll honor visionary AIDS researcher Dr. David Ho, and finally, later this fall, to The Economist’s Banyan conference in Singapore.

We can of course only speculate about the path that various Arab countries may follow over the next decade. However, in the current global communications age, simply adopting a “wait and see” posture is probably not an option. As with the collapse of the Berlin Wall more than two decades ago, the reverberations of the “Arab Awakening” are being felt well beyond the Middle East.

David D. Arnold joined The Asia Foundation as president in January 2011. He can be reached at president@asiafound.org.

Many observers both inside and outside China have come to perceive the country’s political system as remarkably resilient. Sustained economic growth, greater political responsiveness, and considerable public satisfaction with the status quo have seemingly created a high degree of political stability. This widely shared assessment of Chinese politics was reflected in the title of a recent op-ed in the International Herald Tribune comparing the situation in China with the “jasmine revolutions” in the Middle East: “Why It Won’t Happen in China.”

And yet, there is reason to believe that China’s own leaders are less confident about their country’s stability than these foreign observers. Recent crackdowns on political activists suggest to some a growing nervousness about the future. Are Chinese leaders worrying needlessly?  Or do they accurately perceive that their country’s political system may be subject to increasing strain?

Perhaps the most important cause for concern is the increasing level of inflation in China, the result of the flood of foreign capital into the country, China’s chronic foreign trade surpluses, growing labor shortages, and rising global prices for food, energy, and raw materials. If not brought under control, inflation has the potential to create a high degree of popular dissatisfaction. Over the last 20-odd years, China has been beset by numerous public protests over issues ranging from environmental pollution to contaminated food. But almost all of those grievances have been localized and the number of people affected by them has been limited. In contrast, inflation will affect virtually everyone in China, and is already leading to grumbling over rising energy costs and strikes for higher wages.

Second, China is on the verge of a political succession, with a new generation of leaders to be elected at the Eighteenth Party Congress in 2012. Although the succession procedures are now highly institutionalized and the policy differences within the leadership are far less than they were in the 1980s, there remains considerable uncertainty about the composition of the new leadership and how it will address the country’s problems. Moreover, one characteristic pattern of Chinese political life historically has been that dissenters may be emboldened to speak out and act up if they perceive there to be differences among the top leadership.

Third, whatever foreign observers may say, Chinese leaders do appear to be worried about the “jasmine revolutions” in the Middle East and the “color revolutions” that have occurred elsewhere in the world. Theirs is not simply a generalized fear of contagion, but a more specific perception that the same communication technologies that sparked the protests in the Middle East could have an impact on China as well. Recent reports indicate that Chinese activists working both inside and outside the country have begun to create networks that cross local and provincial boundaries, creating a virtual version, however embryonic, of the independent nationwide political organizations that Chinese leaders have long tried to prevent.

And finally, there is the widespread perception that political liberalization in China has stalled. Chinese leaders have once again made clear that pluralistic democracy is not on the agenda, and the pace of more limited types of political reform appears to be controversial. This perception can itself become a further cause of grievance and instability.

All of these developments – increasing inflation, apparent differences within the political elite, revolutionary protest in the Middle East, and the continuing revolution in communication technologies – make it easy to see why Chinese leaders might be concerned about their country’s stability, and why they are imposing stricter controls on political expression.

China’s political system remains resilient, and there is still considerable popular satisfaction with the country’s achievements. But the odds are starting to shift in ways that suggest that the resilience of that system may be increasingly tested.

Harry Harding is dean of the University of Virginia’s Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy and vice chair of The Asia Foundation’s Board of Trustees. Recognized as one of America’s preeminent China scholars, Harding’s publications include The India-China Relationship: What the United States Needs to Know (co-edited with Francine Frankel, 2004); A Fragile Relationship: The United States and China Since 1972 (1992); and Sino-American Relations, 1945-1955: A Joint Reassessment of a Critical Debate (co-edited with Yuan Ming, 1989), among others. Harding’s first book, Organizing China, was awarded the 1986 Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize, and a subsequent book, A Fragile Relationship, was named an “Outstanding Academic Book” by Choice magazine. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the individual author and not those of The Asia Foundation.

“Bin Laden Dead: Muslim World Reacts,” announced ABC-TV. An Afghan rickshaw driver likened him to “a hero in the Muslim world.” Far from a hero, said a Pakistani professor, “he was a problem for the whole Muslim world.” “For the Muslim world,” his death was like the lifting of a curse, wrote the Islamic Society of North America. According to the staff of eCanadaNow, “the Muslim world is reeling” because Bin Laden was buried at sea in violation of the Muslim tradition that allows for that practice only if the deceased actually died there.

It is both intriguing and disconcerting that the death of one particular man, however iconic a figure he was and will remain, should trigger such a spate of imputations – as if the diverse 1.4 billion Muslims living in diverse circumstances that are in diverse ways and to varying degrees associated with this or that variety of Islam could possibly think and feel in any one single way.

What is “the Muslim world”? No agreed definition exists. The Muslim world that the Organization of the Islamic Conference says it represents, for example, is strictly official, consisting as the Conference does of 56 states plus Palestine. All of them are often referred to as Muslim-majority countries, but that description is incorrect. Of the 57 members, 10 do not have Muslim majorities, and two are borderline cases whose populations are apparently half-Muslim, half-not.

A radical Islamist in Lebanon regretted Bin Laden’s death because “the ummah” – the global community of Muslims – was “in need of” a charismatic leader along Osama’s lines. But if a state-based and Muslim-majoritarian construction of the Muslim world is misleadingly political and demographically arbitrary, to cast that world in extreme-communitarian terms is to advance an even less probable claim: that the religious sensibilities of all of the individual Muslims on earth are sufficiently similar and strong to inform and sustain one single community of like belief and like behavior, including a shared “need” for a new Bin Laden.

Muslims have no monopoly on wishfully romantic generalizations. Think of the Rorschach that is the largely Western and sometimes self-servingly invoked coinage known as “the international community.”  The point is not to stop using ambiguous terms, but rather to maintain an awareness of the complexities and contradictions they conceal, while at the same time recognizing their normative power.

Consider the sense in which belief in “the Muslim world” is at stake in the currently contested destiny of the hopefully-named “Arab Spring.”

When Muslims incline their bodies toward Mecca in the act of prayer, or when they go there on the haj, they embody or enact the theological geography of the Muslim world. But the demographic center of that world is not Arab. It is Asian. One-fifth of Muslims are Arab, and most Muslims do not speak Arabic, notwithstanding their varying kinds and degrees of acquaintance with the Qur’an.

Developing countries in “the Arab world” – another unitary construction – have long been categorized as less modern, less cosmopolitan, and less democratic than developing countries in other regions, including the Asian Muslim-majority states of Malaysia and Indonesia. A succession of Arab Human Development Reports, researched and written by Arab analysts and published by the United Nations since 2002, has documented this lagging status.

Asian Muslims do not have a “need” to admire the Arab world. Yet their view of the Muslim world will likely be affected if and when current movements to reform the Arab world succeed. That success could, for some Asian Muslims, lessen the cognitive dissonance and attendant discomfort caused by the contrast between the valued status of the Arab Middle East as Islam’s historic birthplace and ritual hub and the center of Islamic learning, on the one hand, and its regressive politics and lack of modernity on the other.

If tyranny does finally yield to democracy, if Winter does not overtake the Arab Spring, Muslim democrats in Asia will have greater reason to believe in a Muslim world that is more than a superficial construct open to manipulation by simplistic analysts, solipsistic jihadists, and self-dealing elites.

The point is not to deny the resonance or utility of “the Muslim world,” least of all its relevance for Muslims themselves. It is to acknowledge the complexity, diversity, and dynamic changeability of the reality behind the label – and to understand that the fit between the name and the named is itself in flux, as events alternately strengthen and belie the solidarity among Muslims that their supposedly singular “world” implies.

Donald K. Emmerson heads the Southeast Asia Forum, where he is also affiliated with the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies and the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. He is a co-author of Islamism:  Contested Perspective on Political Islam (2010). The views and opinions expressed here are those of the individual author and not those of The Asia Foundation.

Much has already been said about the parallels between Indonesia’s transition to democracy in the late 1990s, and protests in Egypt that led to the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak in February. Both are large, Muslim-majority countries, ruled for approximately three decades by authoritarian leaders who were ultimately toppled by popular, youth-led movements demanding greater democratic freedoms.

Indonesia’s own transition to democracy has been evolving for the past 13 years, and the country has made some remarkable achievements, though in some areas challenges remain. Above in Jakarta, farmers protest for additional rights. Photo by Jonathan McIntosh.

In both cases, the authoritarian president was relatively popular for a portion of his tenure, and brought significant development gains to his country before allowing family members and cronies to take a disproportionate share of the wealth, and before military repression of civil rights became intolerable. Economic suffering, unemployment, and poverty, in both cases, played a major catalytic role in the transition.

Of course each country in the Middle East, and Egypt in particular, has its own unique history and culture, which makes it dangerous to draw facile comparisons or linkages regarding something as multi-faceted and complex as democratic transition. That said, the globalized context we live in precludes the possibility of any culture or people existing in a vacuum. It is also inevitable that both leaders and young people in the Middle East are paying close attention to examples of democratic reform and economic growth and vitality in Asia.

Indonesia’s own transition to democracy has been evolving for the past 13 years, and the country has made some remarkable achievements, though in some areas challenges remain, as I’ve discussed in this blog before. While Indonesia is still fine-tuning and strengthening its democracy, it has learned some lessons which may be helpful to others embarking on democratic transition.

One crucial factor to the sustainability of Indonesia’s democracy has been the insistence from the beginning of removing the military from politics. Immediately after Suharto fell while public demand for democracy was strong, Indonesian leaders acted fast and separated the police from the military and revoked the right for active-duty military officers to sit in parliament or to hold political party positions. The military was allowed to retain its business holdings, though this was to be gradually phased out as well. This combination of removing a political role, yet allowing the military to remain economically engaged has proven to be an effective compromise that has to date withstood pressures for the military to reassert a political presence.

Another key factor to Indonesia’s successful democracy is its rich and vibrant civil society that – despite 30 years of authoritarianism – managed to maintain a strong presence in society. Given the opportunity after Suharto’s ouster, civil society groups moved quickly into both watchdog and technical support roles for the new democratic state institutions such as the judiciary and the legislature. The capacity of civil society was in part due to the investment and support that international groups gave over many years during the New Order, despite the fact that a democratic transition looked unlikely.

Indonesia’s highly influential religious groups also played a critical role in Indonesia’s successful transition. Student groups affiliated with Muslim mass-based organizations Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and Muhammadiyah were part of student protests that brought down the New Order, but in addition to that, during the reform period, women and student groups as well as NGOs affiliated with NU and Muhammadiyah were active in voter education and election monitoring, developing democracy education curriculum in schools, promoting human rights and pluralism, and strengthening religious freedom within the new democracy. Due to their credibility and legitimacy within communities throughout the country, these two Muslim organizations played a vital role in the relatively quick integration of democratic values within Indonesian society.

Of course, none of these factors can be replicated precisely across vastly different historical and cultural contexts. Nevertheless, they may simply provide inspiration, or hope, as other reformist movements across the Middle East seek to chart their own courses.

Robin Bush is The Asia Foundation’s country representative in Indonesia. She can be reached at rbush@asiafound.org. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the individual author and not those of The Asia Foundation.

Journalist David Ignatius recently wrote on Foreign Policy‘s website that the “Arab Spring” may be part of a “global political awakening,” a concept he borrows from former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Protesters in Egypt hold up home-made signs at protest rallies. Photo by Essam Sharaf.

If this is so, there are bound to be reverberations in Asia, but thus far, the biggest signs of this have been a political crackdown on dissent in China and evidence that North Korea is digging in its heels to resist steps toward denuclearization such as those that Libya took in 2003. The evidence of the impact of the Arab Spring on East Asia to date has come primarily in the form of backlash rather than contagion.

For every Twitter feed and Facebook post that might have worked in Egypt, there is a Chinese wall denying access to the Twitterverse in China. Chinese leaders seem to be well-versed at fending off color revolutions, be they orange revolutions from the Ukraine or jasmine revolutions from Egypt. North Korea’s nascent mobile phone network has created a symbol of a new elite, as cell phone ownership in North Korea had reportedly expanded to almost 400,000 by the end of 2010, a four-fold increase in just one year. But even if North Korean customers know that their new mobile phone service has been provided since 2008 by the Egyptian firm Orascom, they appear to have kept any perceived irony to themselves. Chinese and North Korean leaders are clearly awake to the potentially subversive properties of technology. This does not mean that the firewall is necessarily working, but technology alone is only a single ingredient in the recipe for political change; other factors within these societies must also come into play to create conditions for any transition to a new political system in these countries. Chinese leaders are clearly aware of the stakes involved, while North Korean leaders may indeed take cues from the Libyan model by using all means available to suppress dissent if it materializes.

Of course, East Asia has had prior experiences with the springtime of political reform – a generation ago in South Korea and the Philippines in 1986 and in Indonesia in 1998. The experiences of that generation with democratic consolidation may be more relevant to developments in the Middle East than the further spread of revolution. South Korean and Indonesian democracy activists have matured through the raucous and messy experience of democratic consolidation. These mature idealists have much vital experience to offer to their Middle Eastern counterparts who now uphold the banner of democratic freedom, but still must find ways to channel hopes for political reform into effective action and to practically implement reform agendas in ways that meet the needs of their own societies. The task of democratic consolidation is a tricky one, but one that can be nurtured if newly successful Middle Eastern democracy activists can translate the right lessons from the experiences of their Asian predecessors.

Scott Snyder directs The Asia Foundation’s Center for U.S.-Korea Policy. He can be reached at ssnyder@asiafound-dc.org. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the individual author and not those of The Asia Foundation.

Wael Ghonim is the 30-year-old Google marketing manager in Egypt who received considerable attention for his role in this year’s popular uprising in Egypt. At a recent TED conference, he reflected, “No one in Egypt was a hero; everyone was a hero; everyone contributed something.”

The ever expanding tide for more open societies is both historical, and a continuum. New communication technologies have helped strengthen collective action around protest movements, particularly most recently in Egypt and Tunisia. But there is another important ingredient in these demands for a better world and better institutions that is less recognized and that has been an influencing factor in the periphery: an increasing global desire for better quality of life resulting from products, values, education, and transparent institutions.

Was it not a plus to Ghonim’s credibility in the eyes of many that the youthful and self-effacing leader was known by his association with Google? Are not common values and beliefs discussed and fostered around tables at the local Starbucks in Cairo or Beijing? Or that cohesion and grounding and some synthesis of ideas flow from products and brands, whether emanating from Canon or Sony, Ford or Boeing, Apple or Microsoft, the NBA or PGA, the Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund, or National Geographic.

At National Geographic this past October, we launched an Arabic edition of National Geographic Magazine in a venture with Abu Dhabi Media Company. As a 120-year-old non-profit organization with a mission to inspire people to care about the planet and its people, National Geographic’s ability to bring that mission to people in their own languages is extraordinarily important. We now have 33 language editions of the magazine, in addition to English. I was surprised to learn that our new Arabic distribution in Egypt continued to grow during the early months of this year, even while the upheavals there were at their most intense. The established name brand no doubt helped, but a major part of the calculus is the thirst of a populace for credible, non-biased information about the world.

While thinking about this, vivid memories of an evening several years ago in Jakarta come to mind. I was privileged to be part of a celebration on March 25, 2005, for the launch of the Bahasa edition of National Geographic Magazine in collaboration with our partner PT Gramedia. It was just a few months after the devastating tsunami in coastal South Asia. It was happenstance that this event coincided with our global magazine cover and the subject of a television documentary on the National Geographic channel: a photograph of a skull found on the Indonesian island of Flores of a new species, homo floresiensis,  a woman more than 18,000 years old we affectionately called “Flo.”

Above, a skull found on the Indonesian island of Flores of a new species, homo floresiensis, a woman more than 18,000 years affectionately called “Flo.”

Flo, or “Hobbit” as some called her, was with us that night, along with some of the Indonesian archeologists responsible for finding her. Also participating was the democratically elected president of Indonesia, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. I learned at dinner that President Yudhoyono was a long-time subscriber to the English-language edition of National Geographic Magazine from his days as a student at Webster University in the United States. (Though he did later tell me that he would now switch over to the Bahasa edition.)

Terry Adamson, right, greets Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono at a celebration to launch the Bahasa edition of National Geographic Magazine.

During the course of the evening, President Yudhoyono received a message at our dinner table that a serious earthquake had just struck the island of Nias, located on the western end of Sumatra. The news led him to talk in his remarks about an article in an old issue of National Geographic that he had seen on the unique culture of Nias, which I only later discovered was published in August 1931.

Such an occasion is quite sobering on one level and satisfying on another. Stewards of global brands that hope to build value for people around the world in all countries, cultures, and beliefs have the responsibility of sustaining and building that reputation by delivering quality products. One important byproduct is the possibility of contributing through these shared common attributes that are associated with our brands to the sea tide of events emerging through the Middle East and Asia.

Terry Adamson is executive vice president of the National Geographic Society. He is a trustee and former chair of The Asia Foundation’s Board of Trustees. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the individual author and not those of The Asia Foundation.

“Revolution is in the air … and there are thousands of people demanding their universal human rights. …We are witnessing attempts to suppress the aspirations of the people and this lends an urgency to this year’s event, which will provide an exchange of ideas on the rapidly unfolding events and what can be done to shape positive outcomes,” said the Brookings Institution’s Martin Indyk at the opening of the 2011 U.S.-Islamic World Forum.

Hillary Clinton delivers a keynote speech at the U.S.-Islamic World Forum. Photo courtesy of U.S.-Islamic World Forum.

The Forum, convened by the Brookings Institution and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the State of Qatar, is currently taking place in Washington, D.C., with the participation of business leaders, analysts, journalists, and religious figures from more than 30 Muslim-majority countries and the United States. The focus of this year’s Forum is the rapid, turbulent change currently taking place across the Middle East and the implications for Muslims around the world.

The forum includes sessions on issues critical to the Arab and Muslim worlds, including geo-strategic issues in the Middle East and South Asia, as well as working groups focused on building partnerships on key issues such as the role of Muslim civil society, U.S.-Muslim engagement, the role of the media and culture, religious minorities, and development. The forum also includes a significant portion of the agenda for working group discussions on issues of relevance to U.S.-Muslim engagement. The one I attended brought together members of the Muslim non-profit community from Somalia, Egypt, the UAE, the United Kingdom, and the United States to generate recommendations and new thinking on how Muslim leaders and organizations can work more effectively in community development and civil society.

In many of the sessions, participants highlighted the unfortunate proliferation of ineffective leadership training provided to the Muslim community – to Muslim spiritual leaders, Muslim youth, and Muslim women. One participant cautioned against the supply-side model of development assistance which so often dominates the provision of foreign aid, advising foreign government aid agencies to ask these communities “what do you want and what do you need?” rather than making assumptions and imposing an American model of civil society participation or empowerment. A leadership trainer from the UAE pointed to a lack of “vision” in much of such training, which has resulted in thousands of Muslims across the world having been trained to be “leaders” without a clear sense of their own mission and goals.  Another said there’s a need to educate government donors on how to effectively and appropriately provide support to Muslim communities. She used as an example a ludicrous request she had received from a donor to assess the success of a health services program they supported by measuring the reduction in the percentage of women in the target community who wear a headscarf or veil.

Alhough the forum included a session on Afghanistan and Pakistan, many parts of Asia, including the vast Muslim populations in Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, were underrepresented.  The Asia Foundation’s panel on the role of religious leaders in development was an exception.  Moderated by the Foundation’s Country Representative in Indonesia, Dr. Robin Bush, the panel brought together Muslim voices from Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, and the Philippines. Asia is home to the largest number of Muslims in the world, with, for example, more than 210 million in Indonesia alone. As the Asian Muslim world is undeniably influenced and shaped by events unfolding in the Middle East, the inclusion of these voices and perspectives is critical.

For me, attending this U.S.-Islamic World Forum, the first ever held in the U.S., one of the high points was Secretary Clinton’s keynote speech where she said, “The United States certainly does not have all the answers. In fact, here in Washington we’re struggling to thrash out answers to our own difficult political and economic questions. But America is committed to working as a partner to help unlock the region’s potential and to help realize its hopes for change.” She also addressed the unprecedented moment in history we now find ourselves in: “In the 21st century, the material conditions of people’s lives have greater impact on national stability and security than ever before. The balance of power is no longer measured by counting tanks and missiles alone. Now strategists must factor in the growing influence of citizens themselves – connected, organized, and frustrated.”

Rosita MacDonald is a senior program officer for The Asia Foundation’s Governance, Law, and Civil Society program, based in San Francisco. She can be reached at rmacdonald@asiafound.org.