How Information Warfare Shaped The Arab Spring

On January 28 2011 WikiLeaks released documents from a cache of US State Department cables stolen the previous year. The Daily Telegraph in London published one of the memos with an article headlined 'Egypt protests: America's secret backing for rebel leaders behind uprising'. The effect of the revelation was immediate, helping set in motion an aggressive counter-narrative to the nascent story of the Arab Spring. The article featured a cluster of virulent commentators all pushing the same story: the CIA, George Soros and Hillary Clinton were attempting to take over Egypt. Many of these commentators were trolls, some of whom reappeared in 2016 to help elect Donald J. Trump as President of the United States. This book tells the story of how a proxy-communications war ignited and hijacked the Arab uprisings and how individuals on the ground, on air and online worked to shape history.

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.

Responding to urgent calls to de-westernise Media and Journalism Studies and shed light on local agencies, this book examines digital journalistic practices in the Arab region, exploring how Arab journalists understand their roles and how digital technologies in Arab newsrooms are used to influence public opinion. Drawing on dozens of articles penned by Arab media professionals and scholars, supplemented with informal conversations with journalists, this book reviews the historical development of digital journalism in the region and individual journalists’ perceptions of this development. While technology has provided a new platform for citizens and powerful agents to exchange views, this text examines how it has simultaneously allowed Arab states and authorities to conduct surveillance on journalists, curtail the rise of citizen journalism, and maintain offline hierarchal forms of political, economic, and cultural powers. Mellor also explores how digital technology serves to cement Western hegemony of the information world order, with Arab media organisations and audiences judged to be mere recipients, rather than producers, of such information. Arab Digital Journalism offers an important contribution to the emerging field of digital journalism in the Global South and is a valuable resource for students and researchers interested in media, journalism, communication, and development studies.

Did digital media really "cause" the Arab Spring, or is it an important factor of the story behind what might become democracy's fourth wave? An unlikely network of citizens used digital media to start a cascade of social protest that ultimately toppled four of the world's most entrenched dictators. Howard and Hussain find that the complex causal recipe includes several economic, political and cultural factors, but that digital media is consistently one of the most important sufficient and necessary conditions for explaining both the fragility of regimes and the success of social movements. This book looks at not only the unexpected evolution of events during the Arab Spring, but the deeper history of creative digital activism throughout the region.

This book outlines the threats from information warfare faced by the West and analyses the ways it can defend itself. Existing on a spectrum from communication to indoctrination, information can be used to undermine trust, amplify emotional resonance, and reformulate identities. The West is currently experiencing an information war, and major setbacks have included: ‘fake news’; disinformation campaigns; the manipulation of users of social media; the dissonance of hybrid warfare; and even accusations of ‘state capture’. Nevertheless, the West has begun to comprehend the reality of what is happening, and it is now in a position defend itself. In this volume, scholars, information practitioners, and military professionals define this new war and analyse its shape, scope, and direction. Collectively, they indicate how media policies, including social media, represent a form of information strategy, how information has become the ‘centre of gravity’ of operations, and why the further exploitation of data (by scale and content) by adversaries can be anticipated. For the West, being first with the truth, being skilled in cyber defence, and demonstrating virtuosity in information management are central to resilience and success. This book will be of much interest to students of strategic studies, information warfare, propaganda studies, cyber-security, and International Relations.

The catastrophic story of how the Arab world has descended into chaos since the 2003 invasion of Iraq as told by the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and international bestselling author of Lawrence in Arabia, a probing and insightful work of reportage. From world-renowned war correspondent, Scott Anderson, comes this gripping, human account of the unraveling of the Arab world, the rise of ISIS, and the global refugee crisis after the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003. This portrait of the region is framed by the stories of six individuals--the matriarch of a dissident Egyptian family, a Libyan Air Force cadet with divided loyalties, an Iraqi day-laborer turned ISIS fighter, a Kurdish doctor on leave from his practice to fight ISIS, a college student caught in the chaos of Aleppo, and an Iraqi women's rights activist targeted by militias. Through these personal stories, the myriad, complex causes of the widespread war and instability in the region come into focus and the concrete reality of the unspeakable tragedies occurring in the Middle East becomes clear.

This illuminating book examines and refines the commonplace "wisdom" about cyber conflict-its effects, character, and implications for national and individual security in the 21st century. "Cyber warfare" evokes different images to different people. This book deals with the technological aspects denoted by "cyber" and also with the information operations connected to social media's role in digital struggle. The author discusses numerous mythologies about cyber warfare, including its presumptively instantaneous speed, that it makes distance and location irrelevant, and that victims of cyber attacks deserve blame for not defending adequately against attacks. The author outlines why several widespread beliefs about cyber weapons need modification and suggests more nuanced and contextualized conclusions about how cyber domain hostility impacts conflict in the modern world. After distinguishing between the nature of warfare and the character of wars, chapters will probe the widespread assumptions about cyber weapons themselves. The second half of the book explores the role of social media and the consequences of the digital realm being a battlespace in 21st-century conflicts. The book also considers how trends in computing and cyber conflict impact security affairs as well as the practicality of people's relationships with institutions and trends, ranging from democracy to the Internet of Things.

In 2011, the Maghreb occupied a prominent place in world headlines when Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, became the birthplace of the so-called Arab Spring. Events in Tunisia sparked huge and sometimes violent uprisings. Longstanding dictatorships fell in their wake. The ensuing democratic reforms resulted in elections and the victory of several Islamist political parties in the Arab world. This book explores the origins, development and rise of these Islamist parties by focusing on the people behind them. In doing so, it provides readers with a concise history of Sunni Islam in North Africa, the violent struggles against European colonial occupation, and the subsequent quest for an affirmation of Muslim identities in its wake. Exploring Islamism as an identity movement rooted in the colonial experience, this book argues that votes for Islamist parties after the Arab Spring reflected a universal human need for an authentic sense of self. This view contrasts with the popular belief that support for Islamists in North Africa reflects a dangerous "fundamentalist" view of the world that seeks to simply impose archaic religious laws on modern societies. Rather, the electoral success of Islamists in the Maghreb, like Tunisia's Ennahdha party, is rooted in a reaffirmation of the Arab-Islamic identities of the Maghreb states, long delayed by dictatorships that mimicked Western models and ideologies (e.g., Socialism). Ultimately, however, it is argued that this affirmation is a temporary phenomenon that will give way in time to the fundamental need for good governance, accountability, and a stable growing economy in these countries. Written in an accessible format, and providing fresh analytical perspectives on Islamism in the Maghreb, this book will be a valuable tool for students and scholars of Political Islam and North African Politics.