News

April 16, 2013

A recent TASCHA project, in the research area of Social Movements, explored how Facebook and social media was used in Egypt before and during the Arab Spring. The Youth, ICTs, and Democracy in Egypt project drew on social movement theory and emphasizes various lines of analysis, asking the main research question, how did the use of ICTs impact the evolution of the youth movement and the trajectory of the Egyptian revolution? Findings from this research have recently been presented at multiple venues by members of the project team.

July 23, 2012

The diffusion and exchange of knowledge between the dissent movements of the non-democratic countries is very important for the success of their struggle. Indeed, learning from both the best practices and mistakes of others who are in the similar situations helps you both to use the most effective tools, strategies and tactics in the similar situations of your own political endeavors, and to avoid errors which you could commit without such a knowledge transfer. During the Arab Spring such transfers occurred between many oppositional movements of the region, particularly – between the Tunisian and Egyptian ones.

July 12, 2012

Mid-December 2010 witnessed the largely unnoticed beginning of the sequence of highly contentious events which eventually changed the geopolitics of the whole Middle East. On December 17th, the individual protest action in the provincial Tunisian city of Sidi Bouzid sparked a surge of protest activities which, within four weeks, ousted the long-ingrained regime of President Ben Ali and started a wave of revolutions across the whole Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, known as the “Arab Spring.” All these revolutions, despite their appearing differences, share a number of important features which allow researchers to classify them similarly. Particularly, in all these attempted revolutions, modern Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) played important roles.

July 10, 2012

Over the past few months, the research team behind the Youth, ICTs, and Democracy in Egypt project has collected and coded a series of Facebook posts, blogs, newspapers, and interviews with key actors to tease out the different roles social media played in the trajectory of the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt (A6YM). This is the first of a series of blog posts which will share the emerging findings as the analysis of the data collected through this diversity of sources progresses. The multiplicity of narratives in the sources represented in the data will help us portray a more nuanced landscape not only on the varieties and variability of uses and roles of social media, but also on the complexity of the socio-technological interactions/assemblages among different institutions, organizations, and individuals that are part of the contemporary political processes of social change.

July 3, 2012

To understand the role of social networking sites in social activism, this paper examines the April 6th youth movement’s Facebook presence and its evolution from a “Facebook group,” co-founded by two young Egyptians Ahmed Maher and Esraa Abdel Fattah, to a social movement mobilizing and coordinating protests on the street via skillful utilization of a “Facebook page” with technical features to gain the followers who would eventually take to the streets on January 25, 2011. To this end, we coded an archive of posts from the movement’s Facebook page and group in Arabic and the Facebook group in English from March 2008 through April 2011. This data set captures the movement’s Facebook activity from its inception to the consolidation of it as a mobilizing and organizing force garnering a broad level of support that crystalized in the first months of 2011.