Description

By (author) Mahlouly, Dounia

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This book offers a ten-year perspective on ongoing and evolving practices of digital activism across the Middle East and North Africa, drawing on interviews and ethnographic evidence collected between 2012 and 2022. It examines the shifting narrative around digital activism in the region, from the wake of the 2011 uprisings to the 2019 series of protests coined ‘the second wave of the Arab Spring’. It considers how media activists navigate the transition from the emergent to the mainstream in a climate of contentious politics, following the civil mobilisations of the pro-revolutionary youths in Tunisia, Egypt, and Lebanon. It outlines the particularities of these three different political contexts and media environments, featuring case studies of the Tunisian blogosphere, online campaigning in the Egyptian elections and interviews with social media activists. In light of this empirical evidence, the book offers a critique of the increasing prevalence of a security perspective through which online activism has been viewed and its deleterious effect on digital political engagement in the region.

Table of contents:

List of Figures

1.1. Introduction
2.2. From Utopia to Dystopia
3.3. From the Emergent to the Mainstream: The Cycle of Discursive Power
4.4. Emergent Media in Post-Revolutionary Tunisia and Egypt: A Study of Blogosphere
5.5. Mass-Media Campaigning on Twitter: Egypt and the 2012 Egyptian Constitution
6.6.Making Sense of the Revolution: Debating Online Ober the 2012 Egyptian Constitution
7.7.Looking back at the Revolution: Gathering Impressions from the Field after the 2013 Military Coup
8.8. The Agenda of Global Security and its Implication for Independent Media
9.9.Lebanon: Before, During and After the 2019 Revolution
10. 10. Conclusion: The Media as a Bridge Between the Political Theory and Political Praxis of the Revolution
B
Bibliography
Appendices

Review quote:
[Digital Political Cultures in the Middle East since the Arab Uprisings] takes on the complex topic of digital media and political space. The narrative examines Arab Spring voices from Egypt, Tunisia, and Lebanon. Mahlouly aptly notes, “Revolutions, by nature, introduce a more fluid political language to complete a transition of power, eventually substituting one institutional discourse for another” (p. 111). Hence, the Arab Spring”s legacy provides readers and researchers another angle of exploration into the movement, meaning, and afterlife.

Review quote:
This book provides a compelling argument about the role of informal communicative practices in oppositional and contentious politics in the Middle East and North Africa. Drawing on empirical evidence from Egypt, Tunisia and Lebanon, it offers a nuanced and critical understanding of how cultures of informal politics expressed through peripheral communication channels are crucial to emerging politics and transformation, highlighting the urgent need to refocus attention on agencyin the so-called post-truth age. The book is a timely critical contribution to the emerging scholarship on political communication theory and practice in the non-Western world.

Review quote:
Dounia Mahlouly explains why citizen protests and civil society uprisings have been frustrated in the region in the past decade. Digital connectivity often reduces the chances of a revolution achieving sustainable goals. This book shows activists” political creativity has been consistently outmanoeuvred or undone by the state or by wider structural forces. But Mahlouly’s rich interviews and ethnography provide evidence for why this creativity will not disappear — and what can be learnt from a decade of endeavour

Review quote:
This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the interpla