The East Asia Institute (EAI) held the third Asia Democracy Research Network (ADRN) online workshop on August 19, 2020. At the workshop, ADRN members from South Asia delivered their final presentation on their 'Social Media, Democracy, and Disinformation' research of the past year. The presentations were on the cases of Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka in South Asia and following the presentations, the members exchanged their opinions during Q&A session.

Due to COVID-19, EAI decided to substitute the 11^th ADRN Workshop at Taiwan—originally scheduled for August—with a series of online workshops. The first online ADRN workshop was held on the first week of August, focusing on the Northeast Asian cases for the same research, while the second online ADRN workshops was held last week, focusing on the South Asian cases.

ADRN was launched in 2013 under EAI’s leadership in order to analyze challenges against democracy in Asia and promote cooperation on pragmatic research projects that can contribute to democracy promotion and consolidation in the region. Democracy-related research think tanks from fourteen Asian countries including Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, and Thailand are participating in this network. EAI is currently serving as a secretariat of the ADRN.

Presenters

S M Zubair Ali Kahn, Director, Manusher Jonno Foundation (Bangladesh)
Kaustuv Bandyopadhyay, Co-Representative, Asia Democracy Research Network and Society for Participatory Research in Asia (India)
Aasiya Riaz, Joint Director, Pakistan Institute for Legislative Development and Transparency (Pakistan)
Pradip Pariyar, Executive Chairperson, Samata Foundation (Nepal)
Rochel Canagasabey, Research Assistant, Verité Research (Sri Lanka)

Program Manager

Jinkyung Baek, Research Associate at EAI