Fellow Profile: Charmaine Stanley

Charmaine Stanley is a fourth-year PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Toronto working under the supervision of Dr. Paul Kingston. Her previous degrees, a BA (hons) in International Relations and an MA in Political Science, are also from the University of Toronto.

Charmaine’s research lies at the nexus of information and communication technology (ICT), civil society, and peacebuilding. While much of the ICT literature argues that technologies such as the Internet and mobile phones empower civil society networks vis-à-vis the state, more critical voices suggest that ICT is presently evolving in directions that consolidate state control. Peacebuilding theorists share the assumption that conflict zones require special theoretical lenses, yet the impact of ICT in these contexts remains largely unexplored despite the proliferation of ‘ICT4Peace’ projects and advanced ICT infrastructures in conflict zones in recent years.

Through her dissertation, “The Mouse That Roared? ICT, Civil Society and Peacebuilding in Israel/Palestine,” Charmaine explores whether ICT empowers civil society in efforts to engage peacebuilding processes. While the state has traditionally been conceived as a provider of security for its citizens, it is often itself a key source of insecurity. Civil society thus has a vital role to play as a watchdog and advocate for local communities. It can promote sustainable peace underpinned by human rights, socioeconomic justice and the protection of vulnerable communities. Charmaine is interested in whether ICT can counteract the ‘elite bias’ that typically limits popular participation in peacebuilding contexts. Treating virtual spaces as continually contested through strategic interactions between civil society and the state, she poses a number of questions. To what extent can civil society appropriate ICT to create spaces and networks that transcend the violence, displacement and barriers to physical mobility that characterise conflict zones? To what extent does the conflict serve as a pretext for greater state control of ICT, legitimising censorship, surveillance and the repression of cyberdissidents? Do inequalities emerging from the conflict shape and reinforce digital divides? Do virtual spaces bridge ‘enemy lines’, or reinforce existing divisions and strengthen militants?

As a CCHS Human Security Fellow, Charmaine will spend four months conducting field research in Israel and Palestine. She will interview a diverse range of civil society activists, as well as a small number of government officials and experts. Her project will also draw on the latest data collected by the Open Net Initiative at the University of Toronto on Internet censorship and surveillance in Israel and Palestine. Committed to policy-relevant research, Charmaine views her work as an opportunity to make the case for the integration into peacebuilding processes of ICT promotion, policy and infrastructure development in a context-sensitive manner that meets the needs of civil society, as well as the special challenges to accessibility and freedom that exist in conflict zones.

Following a year at the Canadian Institute for International Affairs, Charmaine became acquainted with the Middle East while working for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Cairo, Egypt. Her interest in ICT was born through founding an independent online magazine called Shout! of which she served as editor-in-chief. Viewing the Internet as a potential alternative to the commercial media, she conceived Shout! as a venue for more in-depth analysis of international affairs and for perspectives often missing from print and broadcast sources. Charmaine received the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Student Award in Israeli Studies in 2004, and held Ontario Graduate Scholarships in 2005 and 2006.

Charmaine can be reached at charmaine.stanley (at) utoronto.ca.

Recent Conference Presentations:

“The Mouse That Roared? ICT, Civil Society and Peacebuilding in Israel/Palestine,” presented at the Research Forum on Arab and Muslim Media, King’s College University of London, April 28, 2007.