Digital Political Cultures in the Middle East since the Arab Uprisings - by Dounia Mahlouly (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

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
Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the interplay of digital media and Middle Eastern politics. Offering rich, insightful, comparative case studies of recent revolutionary movements in Tunisia, Egypt and, Lebanon, Dounia Mahlouly analyses the discursive cycles of revolution and counter revolution. She examines the dialectic between hegemonic and counter hegemonic forces as revolutions emerge, subside and/or become reappropriated by state and other actors. She presents a powerful defence of human and audience agency confronted as they are with populist politics, alongside a measured sociological account of the tensions between young pro-revolutionary and grassroots groups that provoke fundamental questions about class, representation and legitimacy. An absolutely compelling read
The Open University, UK

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 agency in 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.
Dina Matar, Professor Political Communication and Arab Media, SOAS

About the Author

Dounia Mahlouly is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at SOAS, University of London, where she convenes postgraduate courses on Global Media Theory, Digital Humanities and Political Communication. She has published peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and research reports on media in North Africa with a number of publishers and the academic journal Information, Communication & Society. Dounia Mahlouly is also the founder of the non-profit Middle East Research Hub (MERH)