Open networks and secret Facebook groups: exploring cycle effects on activists’ social media use in the 2010/11 UK student protests

Abstract

Much has been written in recent years about the growing impact of social media on social movements. While authors have extolled the virtues of Facebook and Twitter as organisational and informational tools for a range of movements from the Arab Spring to Occupy, evidence remains patchy as to under what conditions social media is most effective at engaging and mobilising the wider public. Drawing on the work of Tarrow, this article considers the impact of cycle effects on the effectiveness of social media as a mobilising and organising tool for the 2010/11 U.K. student protests. Although preceding the broader ‘movement of the squares’ contention cycle, the protests made similar use of social media for generating mass participation. Yet, its mobilising power was dependent on a number of temporal factors, including amplification through mainstream media and the urgency of its initial campaign goal. Moreover, towards the end of the cycle, activists were found to be using social media – via ‘secret’ Facebook groups – in ways that reinforced emerging group hierarchies, arguably contradicting their initial commitment to open-access networks and participatory democracy.     

Between organization and spontaneity of protests: the 2010–2011 Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the role of social groups in mobilizing resources for protests in repressive contexts. In particular, it examines the impact of organizations and informal groups on individual engagement in the protests developed in 2010 in Tunisia and in 2011 in Egypt. The empirical analysis draws on the following data sources: the second wave of the Arab Barometer (2010–2011), two focus groups in Egypt conducted between 2011 and 2015 with members of trade unions and of Popular Committees who had participated in the 2011 protests in Egypt, eight semi-structured interviews conducted in 2017 to workers in Tunisia who had engaged in the 2010–2011 protests, and interviews conducted in January and February 2011 to 100 women in Tunisia within a study tackling police violence against women during the Tunisian uprisings.

Findings show that both in Egypt and Tunisia protests were neither spontaneous nor fully organized as formal organizations and informal and spontaneous groups strictly interconnected in sustaining protests. In Egypt, established Islamic charity networks provided the structural basis for Popular Committees to engage in the 2011 protests and the initially spontaneous workers’ groups, institutionalized through the legalization of EFITU, were crucial for national wide protests occurred throughout 2011. In Tunisia, the major trade union UGTT was essential for mobilizing workers in the initial stages of protests but was backed by informal and spontaneous groups of workers during the process of protest diffusion.

Results remark that the 2010–2011 Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings were therefore well-grounded on intermediate mobilizing structures capable to survive in the interstices of an authoritarian context. Findings suggest to consider that, in repressive context, spontaneous groups and more established and formal organizations continuously switch from one form to another, overlap, and transform themselves faster than they would do in democratic contexts.     

The role of emotions during the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt in light of repertoires

ABSTRACT

This article examines the role of emotions during the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt in the context of collective level emotions in mobilizations. Emotions are understood as a catalyst whose mechanism of action is performed through repertories. This article seeks to answer how emotions, having a triggering role, are performed through repertoires while accelerating mobilization against authoritarian orders, creating the intersection of individual and collective level emotions in public spheres of Tunisia and Egypt, and thus affecting the transnational diffusion of emotions. The significant reason to address emotions is to explain what stimulated the Arab Spring and how it spread over the region starting from Tunisia and Egypt. This article synthesizes two literatures: International Relations (IR) and social movements studies in light of emotions and components of repertoires which are as follows: collective action, collective identity, symbolic politics, network society and information politics.     

论当前中东剧变的国内因素及其国际影响

从2010年12月17日突尼斯失业青年布瓦吉吉自焚开始,一场席卷突尼斯全国的政治变革大潮迅速蔓延至中东几乎所有阿拉伯国家。这一突如其来的变化,预示着更为复杂的政治变革进程已经开始。从目前情况来看,各国表面上貌似群龙无首、组织松散的街头抗议,实质都是围绕着"变革"这一主题展开,大量失业青年成为这一"变革"的主要参与力量,而网络新媒体则扮演了推波助澜的角色。变革、青年和网络是中东各国目前政治剧变的三个关键因素,进一步认清三者的互动关系及其作用和影响,不仅可以更好地了解中东当前的政治发展进程,也对维护我国的国家安全和社会稳定,有着十分重要的现实意义。     

The impact of the Arab Spring on democracy and development in the MENA region

In evaluating the consequences of the Arab Spring 8 years later, this paper not only focuses on the short‐term consequences of the uprisings that swept through a number of countries in the Middle East and North African region but also analyzes the long‐term prospects for democratization and development in the MENA region. The impact of the Arab Spring, despite its promises and the expectations of the rest of the world, has been dismal. While only Tunisia made a successful transition to a democratic polity with a constitution guaranteeing the basic rights of the people, the rest of the Arab Spring countries remain in the grip of the authoritarian rule, and countries such as Syria, Libya, and Yemen have been degenerated into bloody civil wars with dwindling hope of peace and freedom. On economic front, the growth has been tardy, showing little difference with countries that were unaffected by the Arab Spring. Yet, the paper concludes, echoing historian Eric Hobsbawm's view, that revolutionary outcomes need not be judged as failure too quickly as they are likely to be partial success in the long term. The impact may be observed in the area of social opening, newer class alliances, and the emergence of a less rapacious, reformed, hybrid authoritarianism.     

Extending the local: activist types and forms of social media use in the case of an anti-mining struggle

As political activists increasingly use social media in local protests, scholars must redirect attention from large-scale campaigns to scrutinize the ways in which geographically confined actors use social media to engage in protests. This paper analyses how a 2013 anti-mining campaign in Kallak, Sweden, combined on-site resistance with social media strategies via Facebook pages. The study examines which activist roles and forms of social media use that emerged and aims to explore what larger practical and theoretical implications one can derive from this specific case of place-based struggles. Results show that three typologically distinct activist roles emerged during the protests: local activists, digital movement intellectuals and digital distributors. These different types of actors were involved in four different forms of social media use: mobilization, construction of the physical space, extension of the local and augmentation of local and translocal bonds. Based on our findings, we argue that the coming together of these different activist roles and the different uses of social media added a translocal dimension to the peripheral and physically remote political conflict in Kallak. Media users were able to extend a locally and physically situated protest by linking it to a global contentious issue such as the mining boom and its consequences for indigenous populations.     

THE POLITICAL ECONOMICS OF THE ARAB SPRING

There were large differences in the responses of Arab dictators to the Arab Spring protests. To understand these differences, I present a stylized model of how a dictator responds to mass protests for democratization in a polarized country with two ethnic or religious groups. In this model, the dictator's response crucially depends on oil revenues and his affiliation to either the majority or the minority group. I document that the model's predictions are consistent with the observed differences in the Arab dictators' responses. Hence, ethnic politics and religious divides may play an important role in political transitions and regime changes. (JEL D72, D74)     

Twitter and video activism as tools for counter-surveillance: the case of social protests in Spain

From a communication perspective, social movements of international significance such as the Arab Spring, Toronto G20, Spanish 15M or Occupy Wall Street have been characterized by the use of mobile communication and social media as tools for video activism and counter-surveillance against the abuse of power committed by the state forces. A representative case of this reality, which reached a high coverage and support in social media environment, can be found in the riots that took place in the Gamonal neighbourhood (Burgos, Spain) in January 2014. In this regard, this article focuses on the denunciation of police violence through video activism by Twitter users during the demonstrations across the country, applying a quantitative–qualitative mixed methodology. First, by means of a content analysis, a sample of 784 tweets linked to videos is analysed in order to identify the main topics and functions of the shared content. Second, a textual analysis of those linked videos of a violent nature recorded by witnesses in order to document police interventions is carried out. The prominent use of Twitter for distributing videos to denounce police violence stands out among the main findings, underlining the audiovisual exposure and ‘secondary visibility’ of the police officers. The results obtained also reinforce the idea of citizen empowerment through the development of an alternative form of journalism, as a practice to criticize the mainstream media coverage of the protests. Additionally, this article sheds light on the open debate about the relevance of social media to encourage citizen involvement in a face-to-face interaction.     

Citizens of the margin: citizenship and youth participation on the Moroccan social web

This paper examines how marginalized youth in Morocco use YouTube to contest hegemonic discourses of state power and institutional practices of social exclusion. The paper analyses a user-generated, YouTube web-series, Tales of Bouzebal, as a performance of marginality and a social critique of state bureaucracies and institutions in the context of post-Arab Spring Morocco. Using a combined method of textual and discourse analyses, the paper argues that the new media practices of producing and consuming user-generated video are best understood as practices of cultural citizenship that contribute to social change through the production of counter-discursive political subjectivities among youth in MENA. The paper posits that the concept of citizenship needs to be expanded to account for citizen participatory media practices that contest the conditions of marginality and inequality sustained by normative definitions of citizenship.     

Working on the Revolution in Bahrain: From the Mass Strike to Everyday Forms of Medical Provision

The 2011 Arab Spring uprising with the highest levels of popular support took place in Bahrain. This level of mobilization was due in part to the organizational capacity of trade unions and professional associations, and yet their role in the ‘near-revolution’ has received very little scholarly attention. In contrast to Egypt and Tunisia, where the official trade union federations played an ambiguous or even hostile role as workers began to organize strikes during the protests against Ben Ali and Mubarak, the official General Federation of Bahrain Trade Unions not only supported the protests against the Al Khalifa regime, but called for two general strikes. As significant as the strikes were, the work of unpaid volunteers constituted another less recognized, but equally important form of labor activism. Understanding the mass mobilization in Bahrain, and elsewhere, requires an encompassing approach to labor: one that can conceptualize equally the ability of collectivities to stop working, but also the ability to collectively continue to work, even on an unpaid basis. I will illustrate the contradictory role of the labor movement with examples from the Bahrain Teachers’ Association and the Bahrain Nursing Society. The majority of members of both associations were women. Finally, the Bahraini regime punished both forms of labor activism – both the teachers who went on strike, and the nurses who declared they would not strike but continue to work and care for the injured protesters.     

The willingness to emigrate in six MENA countries: The role of post-revolutionary stress

This paper studies the determinants of emigration from six Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries in light of the Arab Spring of 2011. The aim is to determine if the economically unfortunate events which occurred as a result of the Arab Spring, resulted in a brain drain for many countries. The paper's analysis is conducted using the Arab Transformation Project dataset of the year 2014 by employing an ordered probit model. The paper's main conclusion is that sentiments of unhappiness appear to be the primary determinant of the willingness to emigrate. Other post-revolutionary feelings include lack of trust and political and democratic discontent, which highly encourage the willingness to emigrate. In addition, socio-economic factors, such as being young, male, and highly educated, contribute to the willingness to emigrate. However, married individuals are less likely to consider emigration.     

The Arab Spring for Women? Representations of Women in Middle East Politics in 2011

This article explores the complex, liminal, and difficult space in which stories of women in “the Arab Spring” were wielded as parts of political narratives of gender, race, class, religion, democracy, and Westernization in Western media as the Arab Spring unfolded. It examines those stories by using the tools of postcolonial feminism. After briefly describing what is meant by (gender and) the Arab Spring, the article outlines a method for evaluating the significations of the media narratives surrounding it. We find two dissonant narratives (of gender as emancipatory and of gender as problematic) and ask what assumptions about gender (and sex and race and culture) have to be made to produce these particular representations. We argue that the dissonant narratives have in common using the situation of women as a barometer for the success of Westernization, liberalization, and democratization. The article concludes by exploring the implications of these findings.     

What's Going on? Making Sense of the Role of the Media in the Arab Uprisings

The article reviews recent scholarship on the role of the media in the Arab uprisings. After a summary of events, it sets out the debate between researchers who attribute a central and significant role to social media in the mobilizations that spread from Tunisia to Egypt and beyond in early 2011, and those who are more sceptical of such ‘techno‐enthusiasm’. Different theoretical perspectives on the media and protest are then presented, followed by an overview of empirical approaches to the topic. It is argued that the impact of social media must be viewed in relation to how they fit into wider media ecologies and social and political structures.     

中东局势动荡及其对中阿经贸关系的影响

自2010年年底突尼斯政局发生变化后,一股群众抗议示威浪潮随即席卷阿拉伯世界,东起巴林,西至摩洛哥,鲜有未被波及者,其声势之大,为中东地区历史所罕见。总的来看,中东地区动荡高峰期已过,但政治诉求不断,内部矛盾纷呈,外界干预有增无减。虽然中东剧变对中阿经贸合作造成一定影响,但对于未来应充满信心。中阿双方对于彼此间的经贸交流都有需求,肯定还会持续发展,这对中国企业而言,应是需要牢牢把握的战略良机。     

How Terrorism Affects Attitudes toward Democracy: Tunisia in 2015

Tunisia is the only country that emerged from the Arab Spring as a democracy. However, Tunisian democracy is threatened by political divisions, economic problems, and the threat of terrorist attacks. We shed light on Tunisia's democratic prospects by examining (1) the degree to which major terrorist attacks in 2015 influenced Tunisian public opinion on democracy and (2) the extent to which preference for a democratic system affected opinions on the prospects for democracy in Tunisia. We use data from three waves of a nationwide survey conducted just before and just after Tunisia's first major terrorist attack, and just after the country's second major terrorist attack. We demonstrate that after the attacks the Tunisian public became less favourable toward democracy and less optimistic that Tunisia would soon be ready for it. Such scepticism was widespread, affecting people who preferred democracy as much as those who did not. We conclude that the prospects for Tunisian democracy are more precarious than is sometimes assumed.     

Media use predictors of online political efficacy among Internet users in five Arab countries

Informed by research on the uses and gratifications of the Internet for political activity, this study examines predictors of online political efficacy among Internet users in five Arab countries (N?=?4029): Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Lebanon, Qatar, and the U.A.E. As predicted, variables presumed to be associated with political dissidence in Arab countries – unemployment, distrust of mainstream media, young age, and feeling country is on the wrong track – were not positively associated with online political efficacy. Counter to what was hypothesized, however, Internet reliance and social media use were not strongly or consistently associated with online political efficacy in the five countries. Rather, the strongest predictors of efficacy were a belief in news media credibility, print media use (newspapers, magazines, and books), belief in the reliability of online information, and tolerance of free speech online. Findings align with some prior research on predictors of online political efficacy, but not with common presumptions of the role the Internet plays among Arab publics.     

Local press meets transnational activism: news dynamics in an anti‐WTO protest

Transnational protests often involve a cross‐cultural encounter between “foreign” protesters and the local media and public, whose repertoires of contentious practices and discourses may differ. Examining how transnational and local actors interact in these events is one way to understand the significance and impact of transnational activism. At the same time, local media coverage of transnational protests can also be analyzed as such a cross‐cultural encounter. Following these premises, this article examines Hong Kong media coverage of the transnational protests during the World Trade Organization's 6th Ministerial Conference, which was held in the city in December 2005. The analysis focuses particularly on how this non‐routine news event provided the conditions for a more reflective interactive dynamics between the protesters and journalists, which contributed to emergence of media discourses negotiating and redefining the existing cultural understanding of protest actions. However, the case study also shows the limits regarding how far the redefinition and negotiation can go. Theoretical implications of the analysis are discussed.     

The contextual effect of trust on perceived support: Evidence from Roma and non-Roma in East-Central Europe

In recent years, trust has been conceptualized as an important source of social capital, setting off cross-disciplinary research on both the benefits and predictors of trust at the individual and contextual level. In this paper, we turn to the individual outcomes of living in a trustful context, and explore the relationship between trust, itself one of the main components of social capital, and social support, seen as one of the most important effects of social capital. In particular, we ask how social capital—and the relationship between trust and social support—functions in the context of unequal societies. We model perceived support as an outcome across three levels, from no support to proximate to distal support, and using a cross-national study of Roma and non-Roma across 12 European countries, we track the relationship between trust and support across both mainstream and marginalized populations. Our findings suggest that living in contexts with more trust has protective effects particularly for members of marginalized groups: the Roma are more likely to have distal support in contexts with higher trust. We conclude that contextual trust helps to broaden the circle of support beyond family and friends; thus, trust can indeed be a synthetic force that binds individuals together in broadened structures of support.     

Government websites and social media's influence on government-public relationships

Recent years have witnessed the increasing use of online media, such as websites, blogs, and social networking sites, by the government for various public relations purposes. These government communication channels are often regarded to promote democratic values and public trust in government by helping the government provide the public with information and respond to citizen inquires. Further, such channels help the public provide the government with feedback. This study questions whether individuals’ experience with government websites and social media do, in fact, influence their perception of the government-public relationship (represented by public trust in government). The results, which are based on a nationwide survey of more than 2000 American citizens, showed support for a positive relationship between this online experience and public trust in government. In particular, experiences with informational online services and social media were associated with greater trust in government at the local and state levels, while those with transactional online services conveyed greater trust in the federal government. However, successful experience with the channels was more important than the experience itself, and an unsuccessful experience could even backfire in terms of trust in government.     

The frustrated generation youth exclusion in Arab Mediterranean societies

In Arab Mediterranean countries (AMCs), insecurities and a lack of opportunities have continuously kept young people from becoming independent and being full, active, and integrated members of society; a process commonly referred to as social exclusion. This paper explores the driving factors of youth exclusion in Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, and Tunisia. It is argued that not only the extent but also the structure of social exclusion varies across countries. Based on the social exclusion framework developed by the UNDP [2011. Beyond Transition – Towards Inclusive Societies. Bratislava: United Nations Development Programme], we construct a social exclusion index that takes economic, social, and political factors into account. The results obtained indicate that the share of young people suffering from social exclusion is highest in Tunisia (46.7%), followed by Algeria (43.4%), Egypt (42.1%), and Lebanon (33.2%). In contrast to the prevailing assumptions on social exclusion, we find that economic exclusion does in fact play a minor role. The strongest driver of youth exclusion in all Arab Mediterranean countries is the exclusion from social and political life.