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Political Activism on Social Media in Conflict and War
Abstract
In today’s global conflicts, the impact of social media and information and communication technologies (ICT) is undeniable. These platforms have been instrumental in events such as the uprising in Tunisia, the protracted war in Syria, the advocacy of Palestinian activists, the Ukraine-Russia conflict, and the confrontation between Colombian guerrillas (FARC-EP) and the Colombian army. This chapter provides a comprehensive insight into the contemporary use of ICT, especially social media, in these conflicts. We look at the strategies and methods used by different groups, highlighting their adaptation of these digital tools under conditions of the threat of online surveillance, potential legal repercussions and fluctuating levels of connectivity. We emphasise the need for an in-depth perspective on the use of ICTs in conflict in order to truly understand these nuanced appropriation practices.
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Purpose
This study uses TikTok as a novel medium to extend the literature on online activism. It adds to the emergent body of knowledge about playful political participation among youth. It also explores how creative micro-videos can be a force to create momentum and shape opinions around social and political topics.
Design/methodology/approach
A content analysis of 203 TikTok videos reflecting the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict that took place in Sheikh Jarrah in 2021, was used to understand the extent to which TikTok’s platform’s affordances were used and examine the message frames that emerged when online users disseminated messages of affect and solidarity with the Palestinians during the Sheikh Jarrah incident.
Findings
The study showed that TikTok affordances encourage virality and creative crafting of direct and indirect political content, making the platform a space for political expression, mobilization, and online activism. The affordances used during the TikTok Intifada were visibility, editability, association, and persistence. The two most prominent frames were the use of hashtags to promote the cause, followed by direct political content.
Practical implications
Researchers are given guidance on how TikTok design elements are now allowing a very young segment of users to become producers of political content in a way where messages are creatively crafted using the platform’s affordances.
Social implications
This study captured social media activism among a young segment of users on a playful platform. Youth are now able to raise awareness and call to action by capitalizing on platform affordances to create and spread content about a cause.
Originality/value
Using the connective-collective approach, this work adds a unique dimension to the literature on how TikTok is becoming a novel space for the emergence of grassroot movements among a very young segment of users and how hard political content has been adapted to fit the playful nature of this dynamic platform. The work also takes lead into studying the Palestinian Intifada in a virtual context, where an unusual activism frame emerged due to the nature of TikTok as a micro-video and innovative platform.
Social media platforms are widely used to connect people across multiple settings, including country of origin, profession, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, seniority, and training. Groups that have been marginalized or historically excluded from decision-making encounters may lack formal mentors/sponsors because of a lack of representation of women and Black, Indigenous, People Of Color (BIPOC) in senior leadership positions. This can serve as a barrier to professional advancement at all stages of career development. Identifying and connecting with these potential mentors/sponsors outside of one's institutional space can be challenging. For this reason, leveraging social media to develop these professional relationships through flattened hierarchies can allow for professional networking beyond traditional mechanisms. Here we aim to describe how individuals can connect through social media to advance their careers and scientific and clinical expertise, advocate for communities, and provide high-quality communication to the public.
For my International Studies Senior Thesis, I decided to focus on the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, explore the root causes of the conflict, analyze the events and circumstances that led to the Russian occupation of Crimea, and offer possible resolutions to the conflict.
Contemporary commentators describe the current period as "an era of fake news" in which misinformation, generated intentionally or unintentionally, spreads rapidly. Although affecting all areas of life, it poses particular problems in the health arena, where it can delay or prevent effective care, in some cases threatening the lives of individuals. While examples of the rapid spread of misinformation date back to the earliest days of scientific medicine, the internet, by allowing instantaneous communication and powerful amplification has brought about a quantum change. In democracies where ideas compete in the marketplace for attention, accurate scientific information, which may be difficult to comprehend and even dull, is easily crowded out by sensationalized news. In order to uncover the current evidence and better understand the mechanism of misinformation spread, we report a systematic review of the nature and potential drivers of health-related misinformation. We searched PubMed, Cochrane, Web of Science, Scopus and Google databases to identify relevant methodological and empirical articles published between 2012 and 2018. A total of 57 articles were included for full-text analysis. Overall, we observe an increasing trend in published articles on health-related misinformation and the role of social media in its propagation. The most extensively studied topics involving misinformation relate to vaccination, Ebola and Zika Virus, although others, such as nutrition, cancer, fluoridation of water and smoking also featured. Studies adopted theoretical frameworks from psychology and network science, while co-citation analysis revealed potential for greater collaboration across fields. Most studies employed content analysis, social network analysis or experiments, drawing on disparate disciplinary paradigms. Future research should examine susceptibility of different sociodemographic groups to misinformation and understand the role of belief systems on the intention to spread misinformation. Further interdisciplinary research is also warranted to identify effective and tailored interventions to counter the spread of health-related misinformation online.
Studying technology use in unstable and life-threatening conditions can help highlight assumptions of use built into technologies and foreground contradictions in the design of devices and services. This paper provides an account of how soldiers, volunteers, and civilians use mobile technologies in wartime, reporting on fieldwork conducted in Western Russia and Eastern Ukraine with people close to or participating directly in the armed conflict in the Donbas region. We document how private mobile phones and computers became a crucial but ambiguous infrastructure despite their lack of durability in extreme conditions of a military conflict, and their government and military surveillance potential. Our participants rely on a combination of myths and significant technical knowledge to negotiate the possibilities mobile technologies offer and the life-threatening reality of enemy surveillance they engender. We consider the problems of always-on always-connected devices under conditions of war and surveillance and our responsibilities as HCI practitioners in the design of social technologies.
Social media have become increasingly pervasive. However, the literature on social movements and social media has not fully grasped just how much social media have fundamentally changed the landscape of organizational communication, ranging from stakeholders being able to directly mobilize resources to making grassroots transnational social movements more organizationally feasible. A major gap in the literature is this lack of understanding how social media have shaped social movement organizations (SMOs) and the organization of social movements. This Special Issue brings together a unique collection of articles that map and comment on the field of social media and social movements. The volume contributes to literature in this area by exploring how social media are not only shaping social movements, advocacy, and activism from the point of view of organizational communication but also changing the ways in which activists and SMOs interact with each other. The volume leverages a diverse array of interdisciplinary methods and covers a broad terrain ranging from analyses of knowledge transfer between grassroot activists via social media to large SMOs. The Issue is broadly divided into two parts. Part 1 is focused around trends and interventions in social media, activism, and organizations research. Part 2 revolves around a global collection of case studies. The two are hardly mutually exclusive and the boundaries are roughly drawn. This collection provides a critical starting point for better understanding social media and social movements, an area that is fundamentally important to a variety of disciplines but severely underresearched.
Social media has been established in many larger emergencies and crises. This process has not started just a few years ago, but already 15 years ago in 2001 after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. In the following years, especially in the last 10, sometimes summarized under the term crisis informatics, a variety of studies focusing on the use of ICT and social media before, during or after nearly every crisis and emergency has arisen. This article aimed to recapitulate 15 years of social media in emergencies and its research with a special emphasis on use patterns, role patterns and perception patterns that can be found across different cases to point out what has been achieved so far, and what future potentials exist.
The role of the media, and especially the social media, in the Arab Spring has been extensively debated in academia. This study presents a survey of studies published in scholarly journals on the subject since 2011. We find that the bulk of the research contends that social media enabled or facilitated the protests by providing voice to people in societies with mostly government-controlled legacy media; helping people connect, mobilise and organise demonstrations; and broadcasting protests to the world at large and gaining global support. Some scholars, however, argue that social media played only a limited or secondary role, which ought to be viewed alongside other social, political, economic and historical factors. We also identify the spatial and temporal focus of the research and preferred theoretical and methodological approaches and draw attention to several blind spots that require further investigation.
Social media usage during the recent uprisings in Arab countries has gained increasing attention in human–computer interaction research. This study adds to these insights by providing some findings on the use of information and communications technology (ICT), specifically mobile media, by opposition forces and political activists during the Syrian civil war. The presented study is based on 17 interviews with Syrian FSA fighters, activists, and refugees. A first analysis showed evidence for some very specific use patterns during wartime (compared to media usage of political activists under less anomic conditions). The study also describes a fragmented telecom infrastructure in Syria: government-controlled regions offer fairly intact infrastructures while rebel-controlled regions have been cut off from telephone and Internet. Moreover, the central and very critical role of mobile video for documenting, mobilization, and propaganda is discussed.
Non-democratic regimes have increasingly moved beyond merely suppressing online discourse, and are shifting toward proactively subverting and co-opting social media for their own purposes. Namely, social media is increasingly being used to undermine the opposition, to shape the contours of public discussion, and to cheaply gather information about falsified public preferences. Social media is thus becoming not merely an obstacle to autocratic rule but another potential tool of regime durability. I lay out four mechanisms that link social media co-optation to autocratic resilience: 1) counter-mobilization, 2) discourse framing, 3) preference divulgence, and 4) elite coordination. I then detail the recent use of these tactics in mixed and autocratic regimes, with a particular focus on Russia, China, and the Middle East. This rapid evolution of government social media strategies has critical consequences for the future of electoral democracy and state-society relations.
Social media have become crucial tools for political activists and protest movements, providing another channel for promoting messages and garnering support. Twitter, in particular, has been identified as a noteworthy medium for protests in countries including Iran and Egypt to receive global attention. The Occupy movement, originating with protests in, and the physical occupation of, Wall Street, and inspiring similar demonstrations in other U.S. cities and around the world, has been intrinsically linked with social media through location-specific hashtags: #ows for Occupy Wall Street, #occupysf for San Francisco, and so on. While the individual protests have a specific geographical focus-highlighted by the physical occupation of parks, buildings, and other urban areas-Twitter provides a means for these different movements to be linked and promoted through tweets containing multiple hashtags. It also serves as a channel for tactical communications during actions and as a space in which movement debates take place. This paper examines Twitter's use within the Occupy Oakland movement. We use a mixture of ethnographic research through interviews with activists and participant observation of the movements' activities, and a dataset of public tweets containing the #oo hashtag from early 2012. This research methodology allows us to develop a more accurate and nuanced understanding of how movement activists use Twitter by cross-checking trends in the online data with observations and activists' own reported use of Twitter. We also study the connections between a geographically focused movement such as Occupy Oakland and related, but physically distant, protests taking place concurrently in other cities. This study forms part of a wider research project, Mapping Movements, exploring the politics of place, investigating how social movements are composed and sustained, and the uses of online communication within these movements
Political discussions on social network platforms represent an increasingly relevant source of political information, an opportunity for the exchange of opinions and a popular source of quotes for media outlets. We analyzed political communication on Twitter during the run-up to the German general election of 2009 by extracting a directed network of user interactions based on the exchange of political information and opinions. In consonance with expectations from previous research, the resulting network exhibits small-world properties, lending itself to fast and efficient information diffusion. We go on to demonstrate that precisely the highly connected nodes, characteristic for small-world networks, are in a position to exert strong, selective influence on the information passed within the network. We use a metric based on entropy to identify these New Gatekeepers and their impact on the information flow. Finally, we perform an analysis of their input and output of political messages. It is shown that both the New Gatekeepers and ordinary users tend to filter political content on Twitter based on their personal preferences. Thus, we show that political communication on Twitter is at the same time highly dependent on a small number of users, critically positioned in the structure of the network, as well as biased by their own political perspectives.
In this paper we present insights from an empirical analysis
of data from an emergent social movement primarily
located on a Facebook page to contribute understanding of
the conduct of everyday politics in social media and
through this open up research agendas for HCI. The
analysis focuses on how interactions and contributions
facilitated the emergence of a collective with political will.
We lay out an exploration of the intrinsic relationship
between cultural memories, cultural expression and
everyday politics and show how diverging voices coconstructed
dynamic collectives capable of political action.
We look at how interactions through the Facebook page
challenge traditional ways for conceiving politics and the
political. We outline possible research agendas in the field
of everyday politics, which are sensitive to the everyday
acts of resistance enclosed in the ordinary.
To deepen our understanding of the relationship between social media and political change during the Egyptian uprising of early 2011, events in Tahrir Square must be situated in a larger context of media use and recent history of online activism. For several years, the most successful social movements in Egypt, including Kefaya, the April 6th Youth, and We are all Khaled Said, were those using social media to expand networks of disaffected Egyptians, broker relations between activists, and globalize the resources and reach of opposition leaders. Social media afforded these opposition leaders the means to shape repertoires of contention, frame the issues, propagate unifying symbols, and transform online activism into offline protests.
We analyze practices of political activists in a Palestinian village located in the West Bank. Activists organize weekly demonstrations against Israel’s settlement policy and the separation wall. Over a period of 28 months, we conducted a field study consisting of eight days ‘on the ground’ observation and interviewing, and extensive monitoring of Internet communication. We describe the activists’ background and their efforts to organize these demonstrations under conditions of military occupation. Over time, we observe the role both digital and material factors play in the organization of protest. Specifically, we analyze how Email and Facebook were appropriated to facilitate interaction ‘on the ground’.
.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.
People everywhere are generating ever-increasing amounts of data, often without being fully aware of who is recording what about them. For example, initiatives such as mandated smart metering, expected to be widely deployed in the UK in the next few years and already attempted in countries such as the Netherlands, will generate vast quantities of detailed, personal data about huge segments of the population. Neither the impact nor the potential of this society-wide data gathering are well understood. Once data is gathered, it will be processed -- and society is only now beginning to grapple with the consequences for privacy, both legal and ethical, of these actions, e.g., Brown et al. There is the potential for great harm through, e.g., invasion of privacy; but also the potential for great benefits by using this data to make more efficient use of resources, as well as releasing its vast economic potential. In this editorial we briefly discuss work in this area, the challenges still faced, and some potential avenues for addressing them.
We present a study conducted in Sidi Bouzid, the Tunisian town where the Arab Revolution, also known as 'Arab Spring', started, and where the role of Web 2.0 and social media applications in the people's uprising have been much discussed. We identify four relevant phenomena: (1) the publication of classified materials via WikiLeaks challenged the regime's legitimacy, (2) Web 2.0 connected local activists with Arab satellite TV, (3) social media linked the young activists with actors in other cities in Tunisia, (4) social media allowed organizing resistance inside Sidi Bouzid. Methodologically, we question a too deterministic view of the role of the new media and the representativeness of investigative techniques that uniquely use the new media in order to assess their impact. At the same time, rigorous investigations 'on the ground' are extremely difficult. We present a modest and initial attempt to provide such an 'on the ground' approach, cognizant of necessary limitations. We compare our findings with studies which analyze data downloaded out of social media applications and suggest that studies of the kind we describe offer additional insight and play an essential role in better understanding political uses of social media.
This article details the networked production and dissemination of news on Twitter during snapshots of the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions as seen through information flows—sets of near-duplicate tweets—across activists, bloggers, journalists, mainstream media outlets, and other engaged participants. We differentiate between these user types and analyze patterns of sourcing and routing information among them. We describe the symbiotic relationship between media outlets and individuals and the distinct roles particular user types appear to play. Using this analysis, we discuss how Twitter plays a key role in amplifying and spreading timely information across the globe.
This paper reports on an ethnographic study of the technology-enabled behavior that took place amongst a citizen population living in a conflict zone. We interviewed 65 Iraqi citizens who experienced the current Gulf War beginning in March 2003. In the context of a disrupted environment, trust in people and institutions can erode. We find that trust is contextual-as aspects of the physical world change, conceptions of trust can also change. We show how people were able to create a context of trust in the environment by using ICTs to manage their public identity, to conduct background checks, and to develop collaborative practices that relied on those with whom interpersonal trust previously existed. These new practices, in turn, enabled people to maintain work collaborations, to determine whether or not to continue interacting with others in public, to be able to travel safely, and to find trustworthy jobs. In developing these new practices we argue that technology enabled people to restore a sense of normalcy in an environment that had radically changed.
In this paper we investigate the role blogs played within the context of the Egyptian revolution of early 2011 using blog data authored between 2004-2011. We conducted topic modeling analysis to gain a longitudinal view of the interaction of societal, personal and revolutionary blog topics over this period. Furthermore, a qualitative analysis of blog posts during the period that bracketed the political uprising revealed Egyptian bloggers' concerns. Reporting events and supplying commentary provided bloggers with a means to voice dissent against institutionalized power represented by the government-controlled media. In short, blogs reveal a counter-narrative to the government-supplied version of events in Egypt during the 18-day uprising. These narratives offer rich documentation of how blogs, and perhaps social media more generally, can be utilized by individuals operating under repressive conditions.
Increasingly, large organizations are experimenting with internal social media (e.g., blogs, forums) as a platform for widespread dis- tributed collaboration. Contributions to their counterpa rts outside the organization's firewall are driven by attention from str angers, in addition to sharing among friends. However, employees in a work- place under time pressures may be reluctant to participate-and the audience for their contributions is comparatively smaller. Participa- tion rates also vary widely from group to group. So what influe nces people to contribute in this environment? In this paper, we present the results of a year-long empirical study of internal social media participation at a large tech nology company, and analyze the impact attention, feedback, and man- agers' and coworkers' participation have on employees' beh avior. We find feedback in the form of posted comments is highly corre - lated with a user's subsequent participation. Recent manag er and coworker activity relate to users initiating or resuming pa rticipation in social media. These findings extend, to an aggregate level , the results from prior interviews about blogging at the company and offer design and policy implications for organizations seeking to encourage social media adoption.
Social media technologies have been empowering to some human rights activists, providing a platform for exercising free speech and mobilization. However, many activists have voiced concerns and shared experiences they understand as considerable censorship on these platforms, under the guise of content governance. In an effort to increase the understanding and transparency of content moderation practices during conflicts, this study investigates the perceived reasons for censorship as understood by activists and the explanations made visible to activists by social media platforms, if any were given. Our case study to examine these platforms-activists relations is the events which occurred in May 2021 in East Jerusalem's Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, which was a significant moment in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and garnered international attention. The over enforcement of content moderation faced by Palestinians and their allies during these events on social media raised concerns about freedom of speech and the role of technology in activism. Our study deepens understanding through findings from a survey of 201 social media users who reported potentially unfair moderation decisions, and from 12 interviews with political influencers to grasp the broader implications of content moderation on activism. The findings of this study indicate a substantial disparity between the official explanations made visible to the activists by the social media platforms, and the reasons as perceived by users. This has significant implications, both socially and for social media platforms -- as CSCW and Group work environments --- on activist groups and the potentialities of democratic discourse. This study serves as an important contribution to the debate on the role of social media content moderation in human rights activism, particularly in conflict zones.
Following the 2016 US presidential election, many have expressed concern about the effects of false stories ("fake news"), circulated largely through social media. We discuss the economics of fake news and present new data on its consumption prior to the election. Drawing on web browsing data, archives of fact-checking websites, and results from a new online survey, we find: 1) social media was an important but not dominant source of election news, with 14 percent of Americans calling social media their "most important" source; 2) of the known false news stories that appeared in the three months before the election, those favoring Trump were shared a total of 30 million times on Facebook, while those favoring Clinton were shared 8 million times; 3) the average American adult saw on the order of one or perhaps several fake news stories in the months around the election, with just over half of those who recalled seeing them believing them; and 4) people are much more likely to believe stories that favor their preferred candidate, especially if they have ideologically segregated social media networks.
The ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine can be analyzed as an instance where the Internet has strengthened the power of political actors to create disinformation. But it is no longer only the state-supported media monopoly that produces and disseminates propaganda. Citizens themselves actively participate in their own disenfranchisement by using social media to generate, consume or distribute false information, contributing to a new order where disinformation acquires increasing authority. This essay follows disinformation practices through the transition from broadcast to social media in post-Soviet times and theorizes how the coexistence of old and new media in the production of propaganda might inform our understanding of future scenarios, including in Western democracies.
Paramilitary violence is not complementary to military strategy. In fact, the paramilitaries have come to replace the armed forces, which are mired in crisis as a result of their failure to defeat the guerrilla insurgency.
Bosnia-Herzegovina and its administrative unit or "entity", Republika Srpska are divided, transitional post-war societies. The aim of this paper is to present a preliminary analysis of regional activists' use of information and communication technology (ICT) and to identify improvement potential. Empirical investigations of social media use and qualitative interviews with the country's activists indicate strong interest in ICT. Benefits for the use of ICT by activists include more efficient access to their target group, easier information sharing with the general population, and quicker reaction to spontaneous "offline" activities. Simultaneously, data points to problems such as limited budgets and know-how, intensive outsourcing practices, and a significant lack of awareness regarding data security. Activists see improvement potential in areas of training on content optimization, campaign management, ICT use and maintenance, security, and privacy. Additionally, there is potential to improve upon the sustainability of activist's work and patterns related to their ICT outsourcing.
Through a qualitative study of the historical patterns of retweeting and favouriting of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's messages, followbacks to other Twitter accounts, and evolving themes of messages pre- and post-election, this essay examines trends in his political discourse that have corresponded to four distinct periods. Thoughtful construction of messages on Twitter has helped Modi build a powerful online brand, allowing him to transcend a problematic past and emerge as a techno-savvy global leader who speaks directly to his electorate.
Digital politics is shorthand for how internet technologies have fueled the complex interactions between political actors and their constituents. Cristian Vaccari analyzes the presentation and consumption of online politics in seven advanced Western democracies-Australia, France, German, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States-from 2006 to 2010. His study not only refutes claims that the web creates homogenized American-style politics and political interaction but also empirically reveals how a nation’s unique constraints and opportunities create digital responses. Digital Politics in Western Democracies is the first large-scale comparative treatment of both the supply and demand sides of digital politics among different countries and national political actors. It is divided into four parts: theoretical challenges and research methodology, how parties and candidates structure their websites (supply); how citizens use the websites to access campaign information (demand); and how the research results tie back to inequalities, engagement, and competition in digital politics. Because a key aspect of any political system is how its actors and citizens communicate, this book will be invaluable for scholars, students, and practitioners interested in political communication, party competition, party organization, and the study of the contemporary media landscape writ large.
This essay explores the role of textiles, particularly Dutch wax prints, in the lives of women in Ghana, West Africa. Wax prints are colorful message-bearing printed cloths produced in Holland, based on Indonesian batik designs that express meaningful messages. Central to this discussion is the practice of counter-appropriation, that is, how women as individuals are in dialogue with culture by transferring the foreign, in this case Dutch wax prints, into the local in a culturally appropriate way. It positions women not only as cloth distributors and consumers, but also as producers of knowledge through the phenomenon of naming.
This paper builds on the work of Professor George Clement Bond who, over a 20-year period, explored the impact of the movement of rural Yombe men of northern Zambia in search of wage employment and how this migration challenged their kin-based cults. Instead of rejecting capitalism, Yombe society members adjusted it to coexist with the ancestor cult. However, Yombe laborers did not merely appropriate money; by imbibing it with the spirits of the ancestors, they made it a new and meaningful form. In a similar vein, Ghanaian women culturally redefine factory printed textiles from a Dutch import by assigning them local meaning and value through the phenomenon of naming, resulting in an object accepted as foreign that is synthesized and indigenized into something that is meaningful and useful to them, becoming a “visual voice” for creative expression. This essay will show Dutch wax prints as a realm in which women play a key role not only as distributors and consumers, but also as producers of knowledge and of a new cultural form. It positions women as active participants in the global markets who have taken advantage of the economic opportunities offered by technological changes and the subsequent reordering of class relations of production.
Social media practices and technologies are often part of how ethnographic research participants navigate their wider social, material and technological worlds, and are equally part of ethnographic practice. This creates the need to consider how emergent forms of social media-driven ethnographic practice might be understood theoretically and methodologically. In this article, we respond critically to existing literatures concerning the nature of the internet as an ethnographic site by suggesting how concepts of routine, movement and sociality enable us to understand the making of social media ethnography knowledge and places.
Social media played a central role in shaping political debates in the Arab Spring. A spike in online revolutionary conversations often preceded major events on the ground. Social media helped spread democratic ideas across international borders.No one could have predicted that Mohammed Bouazizi would play a role in unleashing a wave of protest for democracy in the Arab world. Yet, after the young vegetable merchant stepped in front of a municipal building in Tunisia and set himself on fire in protest of the government on December 17, 2010, democratic fervor spread across North Africa and the Middle East.Governments in Tunisia and Egypt soon fell, civil war broke out in Libya, and protestors took to the streets in Algeria, Morocco, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere. The Arab Spring had many causes. One of these sources was social media and its power to put a human face on political oppression. Bouazizi’s self-immolation was one of several stories told and retold on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube in ways that inspired dissidents to organize protests, criticize their governments, and spread ideas about democracy. Until now, most of what we have known about the role of social media in the Arab Spring has been anecdotal.Focused mainly on Tunisia and Egypt, this research included creating a unique database of information collected from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. The research also included creating maps of important Egyptian political websites, examining political conversations in the Tunisian blogosphere, analyzing more than 3 million Tweets based on keywords used, and tracking which countries thousands of individuals tweeted from during the revolutions. The result is that for the first time we have evidence confirming social media’s critical role in the Arab Spring.
The Tahrir Data Project gathers empirical data on media use during the Egyptian revolution of January and February 2011. The Project consists of three data sets documenting media use by protesters, by coordinators, and by transnational audiences. Preliminary descriptive analysis of the data suggests that social media use was not dominant in demonstrations, but may have played an important role in connecting and motivating protesters. Metrics for media use by protesters indicate a strong presence of activities and characteristics commonly associated with communication in protests to social media and social media users. These metrics, along with preliminary data on coordinator strategies and preliminary analysis of the #jan25 tweet set, suggest an important but complex role played by social media in the Egyptian revolution of 2011. The data and preliminary analysis are presented here, together with a number of research questions for further study.
Different historical experiences in various regions of Ukraine have produced very different political cultures and identities. Each region of Ukraine has a unique history: Transcarpathia was the only part of Ukraine to experience protracted Hungarian rule—nearly 1,000 years of it; Bukovina was the only part to experience both Moldavian and later modern Romanian rule; Bukovina and Galicia were the only regions to have experienced Austrian rule; large parts of the southern territories were carved out of the Crimean Khanate; significant portions of central Ukraine were once part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania; and much of Ukraine’s formative historical experiences unfolded within Poland and Russia/USSR. The border between the latter states has shifted over time, and some parts of Ukraine have lived much longer under Poland (Galicia: 1386–1772, 1918–39) and others much longer under Russia and its Soviet successor (the Hetmanate and Sloboda Ukraine: since the mid-17th century until independence in 1991, interrupted by the German occupation of 1941–43). Of course, Crimea was not included in the Ukrainian SSR until 1954 and had previously been in the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR).
All former regimes have left their traces in the regions, and not just in the spheres of art and architecture: Polish and Magyar are still widely understood and spoken in Galicia and Transcarpathia, respectively, while Russophones predominate over Ukrainophones in the eastern and southern regions; labor migration from Ukraine to Hungary, Poland, and Russia originates from regions with historical associations with those countries; the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church is strongest where Catholic powers once held sway (in formerly Polish and Austrian Galicia and in formerly Hungarian Transcarpathia), while Orthodoxy reigns where once there was Russia and Moldavia (central, eastern, and southern Ukraine, as well as Bukovina). A variegated past has produced a variegated Ukraine.
In the present crisis, the most salient regional division is between Galicia, on the one hand, and eastern and southern Ukraine, on the other. Galicia, as used here, comprises three western oblasts of Ukraine: Ivano-Frankivs´k, L´viv, and Ternopil´. (The Austrian crownland of Galicia was larger; its western territories were incorporated into Poland after World War II.) Often commentators and scholars operate with the term “western Ukraine,” but as far as politics are concerned, the three Galician oblasts are quite different from the other western Ukrainian oblasts of Chernivtsi (comprising mainly the former Bukovina) and Transcarpathia. Galicians were overrepresented in the antigovernment demonstrations both in the Orange Revolution and what is often called the Euromaidan Revolution (the terminology for what happened in the winter of 2014 remains contested). In both cases, the Galicians were protesting against governments headed by presidents and their networks based in the East (Leonid Kuchma in Dnipropetrovs´k and Viktor Yanukovych in Donetsk). Even though persons from all around Ukraine have adopted their viewpoint, it was the Galicians who articulated the vision of Ukrainian identity that informed the Euromaidan Revolution and inflamed heated resentment in the East and South. For example, the greeting popularized by the Euromaidan Revolution—”Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the heroes!”—originated in Galicia in the 1930s as the slogan of the radical right Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). The other relevant political culture is that of eastern and southern Ukraine. These were the areas most resistant to the political changes introduced by the Euromaidan. In eastern and southern regions where the population was over 90 percent Russophone, the dissatisfaction contributed to the emergence of powerful secessionist movements (Crimea, eastern Donbas).
Central Ukraine has been less a creator than a reflector of political cultures. Kyiv, a prosperous capital city, has drawn migrants from all over Ukraine. The top administration, as embodied by the successive presidents, has either striven to balance between West and South/East (Leonid Kravchuk, Kuchma) or has leaned to the West (Viktor Yushchenko) or to the South and East (Yanukovych). Some of the antigovernment activism in Kyiv has been generated by Kyivan rivalries with powerful political and economic “clans” based outside the capital, in Dnipropetrovs´k and Donetsk.
Galicia’s political culture was formed in Central Europe. Since the mid-19th century it had shared the Central European obsession with nationality politics...
Based on a survey of participants in Egypt's Tahrir Square protests, we demonstrate that social media in general, and Facebook in particular, provided new sources of information the regime could not easily control and were crucial in shaping how citizens made individual decisions about participating in protests, the logistics of protest, and the likelihood of success. We demonstrate that people learned about the protests primarily through interpersonal communication using Facebook, phone contact, or face-to-face conversation. Controlling for other factors, social media use greatly increased the odds that a respondent attended protests on the first day. Half of those surveyed produced and disseminated visuals from the demonstrations, mainly through Facebook.
The information technology revolution and the introduction of the Internet in the last decade have transformed the life of individuals and groups across the globe. One unique example of the remarkable impact of this new medium on the life of a marginalised society is the impact of the Internet on the life of Palestinians. The author demonstrates that, since the outbreak of the second Palestinian Intifada on 28 September 2000, and the drop of the average income of Palestinian households living in the 1967 Palestinian territories, a sharp increase in the number of Palestinian Internet users, especially youths, has been reported through connectivity in schools, universities and cafes. In universities, a method of instruction has been developed to maintain higher education, since students frequently cannot reach the campus due to conditions of siege. The author also argues that, due to the pertinent socio-political conditions of Palestinian youths and students under occupation, the Internet now acts as a medium between teachers and students, as well as a tool for intense politicisation and cyber-resistance. With constant Internet access possible for over 25% of the Palestinian population, a new youth culture has emerged amongst Palestinians, in particular at schools and universities. By organising relations between teachers, students and the youth in general, as well as with various sectors of the Palestinian population, the Internet now acts as a broad and collective front for national peaceful political resistance, and is one of the most central elements of everyday life. It is to be noted that this phenomenon should be seen in the specific socio-political, economic and cultural context of the Palestinians, unconnected to the introduction of the Internet in the broader Arab world. It should also be noted that, as a result, Palestinians are now the largest group of users of the Internet in the Arab world.
Security fence or security wall-the Beit Sourik decision and proportionality test-International Court of Justice's Advisory Opinion-the Maràabe decision-differences between the ICJ and Israeli Supreme Court-fate of the settlements-foundational constitutional issues
Millions of Javanese peasants live alongside state-controlled forest lands in one of the world's most densely populated agricultural regions. Because their legal access and customary rights to the forest have been severely limited, these peasants have been pushed toward illegal use of forest resources. This book untangles the complex of peasant and state politics that has developed in Java over three centuries. Drawing on historical materials and intensive field research, including two contemporary case studies, the text presents the story of the forest and its people. Without major changes in forest policy, the book contends, the situation is portentous. Economic, social, and political costs to the government will increase. Development efforts will by stymied and forest destruction will continue. Mindful that a dramatic shift is unlikely, the book suggests how tension between foresters and villagers can be alleviated while giving peasants a greater stake in local forest management.
This paper examines microblogging information diffusion activity during the 2011 Egyptian political uprisings. Specifically, we examine the use of the retweet mechanism on Twitter, using empirical evidence of information propagation to reveal aspects of work that the crowd conducts. Analysis of the widespread contagion of a popular meme reveals interaction between those who were "on the ground" in Cairo and those who were not. However, differences between information that appeals to the larger crowd and those who were doing on-the-ground work reveal important interplay between the two realms. Through both qualitative and statistical description, we show how the crowd expresses solidarity and does the work of information processing through recommendation and filtering. We discuss how these aspects of work mutually sustain crowd interaction in a politically sensitive context. In addition, we show how features of this retweet-recommendation behavior could be used in combination with other indicators to identify information that is new and likely coming from the ground.