CIS cultivates deep collaborations with research partners in Africa, connecting MIT faculty and students to centers of excellence and innovation across the Continent.
It’s projected that by 2100 over a third of the world’s population will reside in Africa — highlighting its growing impact and influence on the global stage. To uphold MIT’s role as a future-facing institution, CIS aims to build upon its current partnerships while fostering new strategic collaborations in the region.
Students and faculty work closely with African scholars through global student experiences, fellowships, and seed funding opportunities. CIS faculty also apply their expertise in areas like political economy development, bureaucracy and public administration, and electoral politics to research and partnerships with field-leading institutions across the Continent. And through our innovative MIT-Empowering the Teachers program, CIS brings Nigerian computer scientists to MIT to take part in a one-of-a-kind teaching fellowship.
CIS makes it possible for MIT students to experience the world while advancing knowledge, tackling tough challenges, and preparing for lives of impact, service, and leadership in an interconnected global society.
Hassan, Mai. “Coordinated Dis-Coordination.” The American Political Science Review 118, no. 1 (2024): 163–77. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055423000291.
Dissidents mobilizing against a repressive regime benefit from using public information for tactical coordination since widespread knowledge about an upcoming event can increase participation. But public calls to protest make dissidents’ anticipated activities legible to the regime, allowing security forces to better stifle mobilization. I examine collective action during Sudan’s 2018–19 uprising and find that mobilization appeared to be publicly coordinated through social movement organizations and internet and communicative technology, consistent with common channels identified by existing literature. Yet embedded field research reveals that some dissidents independently used public calls to secretly organize simultaneous contentious events away from publicized protest sites, perceiving that their deviations would make the regime’s repressive response relatively less efficient than the resulting efficiency losses on the movement’s mobilization. These findings push future work to interrogate more deeply the mechanisms by which dissidents use coordination channels that are also legible to the regime they are mobilizing against.