In times of increasing mediatization and digitalization media play an important role in political and societal transformation processes. The authors of this volume take an actor-centered perspective to shed light on current cases in Arab and Asian countries. They inquire into the ways processes of networking and mobilization evolve in the context of restricted media systems and state-dominated public spheres. It features original research about various social and political actors such as women's rights activists, public intellectuals, anarchists and Islamists.

Anna Antonakis' analysis of the Tunisian transformation process (2011-2014) displays how negotiations of gender initiating new political orders do not only happen in legal and political institutions but also in media representations and on a daily basis in the family and public space. While conventionalized as a "model for the region", this book outlines how the Tunisian transformation missed to address social inequalities and local marginalization as much as substantial challenges of a secular but conservative gender order inscribed in a Western hegemonic concept of modernity. She introduces the concept of "dissembled secularism" to explain major conflict lines in the public sphere and the exploitation of gender politics in a context of post-colonial dependencies.