Blogging Bouazizi: The Role of Cyberactivists Before and After Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution (original) (raw)
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Cyberactivists Paving the Way for the Arab Spring: Voices from Egypt, Tunisia and Libya
CyberOrient , 2012
The wave of Arab revolutions and uprisings that has been shaking all corners of the Arab Middle East since 2011 and that has come to be known as the Arab Spring owed a major portion of its success to online activism. The spark that ignited these revolutions in the offline world was ignited by the Arab cyberactivists' well-coordinated campaigns, calling for the toppling of corrupt regimes in their home countries. These campaigns were launched through various forms of social media, such as blogs, Facebook, Twitter and Flicker with the goal of introducing drastic political changes and allowing for a higher margin of freedom in a region that has often been associated with autocracy and dictatorship. Three Arab countries in particular-Egypt, Tunisia and Libya-have witnessed sweeping transformations, leading to the ousting and court trials of members of their old regimes and the holding of democratic presidential and parliamentary elections. This study utilizes qualitative, on-the-field interviews with cyberactivists in these three countries to provide a unique perspective into how they have paved the way for a new era of openness and democratic reform in their respective countries.
The Arab Spring before the Arab Spring: A case study of digital activism in Tunisia
The ongoing Arab Spring Revolutions since 2011 have generated a growing dialogue about the role of social media as a tool for political mobilizations. While there is a large body of literature on the topic, this study takes as its starting point the digital activism in Tunisia during the months that preceded the uprising in Tunisia in order to map the network on social media before the 17 th of December, when the Arab Spring started in Tunisia. Some of the main results of this analysis show that they were structured through dense informal networks on social media and they used this platforms for geared toward developing, sustaining and, sharing collective identities in order to fight against the regime of Ben Ali. According to this, the overall conclusion appears to be that Tunisia's network public sphere was a hybrid model, composed of digital elite, on the one hand, who are predominantly affluent, highly educated urbanities and, on the other, peripheral nodes that are located away from the central nodes of the Net.
Mohamed Zayani’s ‘Networked Publics and Digital Contention: The Politics of Everyday Life in Tunisia’ makes a valuable contribution to the literature on digital media, activism and the 2010/2011 Arab uprisings. Structured almost chronologically, it provides a comprehensive and meticulously researched account of activism in Tunisia and its advances over the past two decades. However, the book is much more than just about Tunisia or the Arab world. It addresses important themes about contention and political activity within authoritarian contexts. The historical perspective offered should be of interest to scholars researching the ebbs and flows of digitally enabled anti-government activity and top-down authoritarian backlash. In the case of Tunisia, dissident activity online and offline eventually led to a popular uprising that resulted in the ousting of then President Zine El Abedine Ben Ali (in power: 1987–2011).
The mass demonstrations that led to the Jasmine Revolution in late 2010 and early 2011 have radically changed the media and communications landscape in Tunisia. All forms of information technology were until recently either heavily regulated by the Tunisian state or were owned by individuals with close links to then-President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. This analysis looks at regulatory regimes across three media and communications technologies during the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia—Internet, television and mobile phones—and shows that the regulatory regimes of media and communications technologies co-evolved with the protests. As expression about public protests became increasingly pervasive within these media, efforts to control them became increasingly restrictive. Thus changes in the media and communications landscape are discussed in the context of the co-evolution of regulatory regimes.
Transforming Tunisia: Transitional Justice and Internet Governance in a Post-Revolutionary Society
International Journal of Transitional Justice, 2016
In this article we argue that examining efforts at Internet reform in Tunisia holds important lessons for transitional justice (TJ) theory and practice, as well as for the way the field defines itself in a space where technology plays an important role in facilitating both repression and transitions. Given the impact of the Tunisian revolution in inspiring the Arab uprisings, as well as those elsewhere, an examination of the Tunisian revolution offers many lessons in understanding the transition away from authoritarian government. We focus specifically on what the Tunisian process of Internet reform can tell us about the increasingly institutionalized implementation of the TJ framework. This process is particularly notable because it has been informed by TJ goals and discourse while remaining outside the formal mechanisms implemented in the wake of the revolution. We examine the more flexible and responsive ways in which local institutions and activists might approach transition, including through attempts to memorialize the impacts of a regime or conflict, build trust, incorporate diverse voices in new partnerships and manage the international dimensions of postconflict reconstruction. Finally, given the Internet's central role as both a tool for repression and a site of resistance and democratic engagement, our findings indicate the importance of future work in considering how TJ can begin