I’m thrilled to introduce Evgeny Morozov, our 2009-2010 Yahoo! Fellow at Georgetown University.

Evgeny is a contributing editor to Foreign Policy and runs the magazine’s influential and widely-quoted “Net Effect” blog about the Internet’s impact on global politics.  Prior to his Yahoo! Fellowship, he was a fellow at George Soros’s Open Society Institute, where he remains on the board of the Information Program (one of the leading and most experimental funders for technology projects that have an impact on open society and human rights). Before moving to the US, Evgeny was based in Berlin and Prague, where he was Director of New Media at Transitions Online, a media development NGO active in 29 countries of the former Soviet bloc. Evgeny’s work has appeared in The Economist, Newsweek, The Washington Post, The International Herald Tribune, The Boston Globe, Slate, Le Monde, The San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Review, Foreign Policy, Project Syndicate, Dissent and many other publications. He has appeared on CNN, CBS, SkyNews, CBC, Al Jazeera International, France 24, Reuters TV, NPR, BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Service.

Here is what Evgeny is working on, in his own words:

“The rapid spread of new communications technologies around the globe promised a new age of politics, where citizens would be able to educate themselves about important political issues of the day, form ad-hoc groups about the most important such issues, and use new media to strategically challenge the power of their governments. This was a very appealing narrative, because it also matched the rapid spread of freedom and democracy across the world, particularly in the 1990s.

Looking at some of these early predictions – about the end of nationalism or the demise of the nation state or the global triumph of Web-powered freedom – one easily detects the naiveté that underlined much of our thinking on these issues. As it turns out, conventional (and often brutal) politics still matters, even in the age of easy mobilization dominated by blogs and social networking.

In my own research – including my one year at Georgetown on a Yahoo fellowship – I’m focusing on how governments – especially those that are not particularly famous for their respect for democracy and human rights – have been adapting to the digital threat posed by this new era and minimizing the democratizing effects of these new technologies. Comparing the approaches in China, Russia, much of the Middle East, I came to see that the governments – and groups and networks affiliated with/ and supportive of what they do – have made a remarkable use of the very same technologies that have become favorite tools of the activists and NGOs. Similarly, many of the new public spheres that formed in digital spaces have also been receptive to numerous nationalist and extremist ideas that were not very conducive to deliberative democracy. How do we still promote activities of the “virtual civil societies” without empowering its enemies, who are sometimes even more dangerous than the authoritarian governments themselves? Were we too quick to assume that promoting democracy and freedom – as well as engaging in public diplomacy – would necessarily become easier and quicker in this new digital age?

These are some of the questions that I’m asking in my research and various events at Georgetown and that I’ll be discussing in my upcoming book about the Internet and democracy (to be published by PublicAffairs in late 2010).”

We are looking forward to bringing Evgeny to Yahoo!’s campus early next year to talk about his work. Congratulations, Evgeny!