Digital Political Cultures in the Middle East Since the Arab Uprisings: Online Activism in Egypt, Tunisia and Lebanon

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.

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).