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Teaching Case Social Media and the Velvet Revolution in Armenia
Abstract
Armenia is an ancient nation, but a young republic that has gained its independence less than 30 years ago after seven decades of Soviet rule. The country has strong traditions both in computer technologies and peaceful rallies/demonstrations, but it seems nobody ever thought before that the former may serve a promoting and organizing tool for the latter. That is, until the spring of 2018, when the Armenian Velvet Revolution overthrew the Prime Minister, and the rule of the governing Republican Party of Armenia that has been in power since 1999 with a grip on power which seemed indestructible. The opposition used social media to mobilize people discontented with the situation in the country, coordinate and organize actions in a self-managed manner, instantly share information that the government-controlled traditional media kept silent about and do many other things that made the revolution very efficient, effective and successful.
... Twenty-first-century citizens' mobilisations (e.g., Arab springs) are also characterised by the key role played by social media and the internet (Sánchez-Duarte & Magallón-Rosa, 2016). During the Velvet Revolution, citizen journalism was a very common practice and the Pashinyan leader's intense use of Facebook live-streaming to broadcast his marches to the capital and generate support was also noteworthy, all of this converted social media into an unprecedented mobilisation tool in Armenia (Khurshudyan, 2019;Odabashian et al., 2018). ...
p>Present Armenian media system overview is provided. To make it understandable for non-Armenian readers historical context is given, highlighting conflicts with neighbours: 1915 Turkish genocide and old intermittent war with Azerbaijan due the Nagorno-Karabaj territorial sovereignty. Peaceful social mobilization, the 2018 Velvet revolution, and its positive impact on democracy, also its progressive deterioration and how it affects the media is addressed. Methodology: 13 key informants in-depth interviews, half-dozen experts semiestructured interviews, discourses explored with content analysis using Hall&Mancini dimensions, field work carried out in Yerevan (2023). Main findings: there is no editorial independence because media are not economically self-sustainable (small and poor market), the government controls the public media (hand-picking is commonplace) and also part of the private sector (through the broadcasting licensing system and economic suffocation), most opposition media are owned by previous authorities and oligarchs, in short: media are used as means of power.
Also: there is plurality, albeit with high polarisation; there is no systematic censorship and there is freedom of expression, but defamation fines reinforce self-censorship; very few media are independent, exits a correlation between independent media and quality content. Internet freedom is high but also generates misinformation. Still, there is hope because there is professionalism in the media sector, it is foreseeable that if the economic situation improves, the media will become more independent and will be able to contribute to strengthening democracy.
</p
... When Serzh Sargsyan was nominated in 2018 for continued political leadership after having previously eliminated term limits in a constitutional reform, the small scale of previous protests turned large: Sargsyan's nomination was met by strong public resistance (Odabashian et al., 2018). In April of 2018, nationwide antigovernment protests unified the people of Armenia in the goal of removing former President Serzh Sargsyan from power. ...
The current study examined the motivations and outcomes of the Armenian Velvet Revolution through the voice of 18 protesters with qualitative interviews, exploring their motivations for joining the collective action, their perceptions of its implementation, and resultant psychological changes. Participants distinguished between individual‐ and group‐level processes and bypassed social divisions through a shared belief in the value of “Rejecting Serzh” (i.e., opposing then President Serzh Sargsyan). Results also illustrated a recursive process of collective action supporting the development of a new theoretical CARE (collective action recursive empowerment) model. The model understands successful social change as a function of both individual and group identity informing collective‐action processes: Smaller acts of protest increase individual feelings of shared group identity and empowerment/efficacy beliefs, thus strengthening motivations for continued protest and making large‐scale collective action achievable. By linking together multiple time points of a collective‐action process in one recursive model, the current work maps out one specific case of successful collective action in recent history, which serves as a basis for broader theoretical generalization and future empirical research.
.The goal of this article is to place the role of the social media in collective action within a more general theoretical structure using the events of the Arab Spring as a case study. Three theoretical principles are put forth all of which center around the idea that one cannot understand the role of any media in a political conflict without first considering the political context in which they are operating. The first principle states that: “Political variables are likely to be more important in explaining the extensiveness of a popular uprising than the overall penetration of the social media in a particular country”. The second principle is referred to as the “principle of cumulative inequality”. It states that: “Citizens who most need the media are the ones who find it the most difficult to exploit them.” The third and final theoretical principle states that: “A significant increase in the use of the new media is much more likely to follow a significant amount of protest activity than to precede it.” The three principles are examined using political, media, and protest data from 22 Arab Countries. The findings provide strong support for the validity of the claims.
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