This book investigates the interplay between media, politics, religion, and culture in shaping Arabs' quest for more stable and democratic governance models in the aftermath of the "Arab Spring" uprisings. It focuses on online mediated public debates, specifically user comments on online Arab news sites, and their potential to re-engage citizens in politics. Contributors systematically explore and critique these online communities and spaces in the context of the Arab uprisings, with case studies, largely centered on Egypt, covering micro-bloggers, Islamic discourse online, Libyan nationalism on Facebook, and a computational assessment of online engagement, among other topics.

While transitioning from autocracy to democracy, media in Africa has always played an important role in democratic and non-democratic states; focusing on politicians, diplomats, activists, and others who work towards political transformations. New Media Influence on Social and Political Change in Africa addresses the development of new mass media and communication tools and its influence on social and political change. While analyzing democratic transitions and cultures with a theoretical perspective, this book also presents case studies and national experiences for media, new media, and democracy scholars and practitioners.

This book looks into the role played by mediated communication, particularly new and social media, in shaping various forms of struggles around power, identity and religion at a time when the Arab world is going through an unprecedented period of turmoil and upheaval. The book provides unique and multifocal perspectives on how new forms of communication remain at the centre of historical transformations in the region. The key focus of this book is not to ascertain the extent to which new communication technologies have generated the Arab spring or led to its aftermaths, but instead question how we can better understand many types of articulations between communication technologies, on the one hand, and forms of resistance, collective action, and modes of expression that have contributed to the recent uprisings and continue to shape the social and political upheavals in the region on the other. The book presents original perspectives and rigorous analysis by specialists and academics from around the world that will certainly enrich the debate around major issues raised by recent historical events.

Terrorism inspires intense emotions of fear, vulnerability, victimization, and helplessness that breed humiliation and shame and demands for redress by the victims-restoring the wounded honor through revenge and military action. The post-9/11 environment of the "global war on terrorism" has exacerbated these vicious cycles of conflict. It also created a media battleground in which conflating Islam with terrorism and deploying a religious lexicon of jihad, martyrdom, and sacrifice have become routine. Yet, scholarship on the relationship between Arab media and terrorism is sparse-despite the salience of terrorism and other forms of politically motivated violence in the greater Middle East and North Africa region. How does Arab news cover "home-grown" or domestic terrorism in comparison to terrorist incidents that might be geographically distant? How does globalization influence the mediation of terrorism in Arab news? This book addresses these lacunae and features a wide range of studies examining coverage of terrorism in Arab media. The case studies investigate technological, political, sociological, and legal infrastructures influencing the ways Arab media make sense of terrorism and international conflict events. The research contributes to the understanding of news frames as central to how terrorism news operates, constructs and thereby explains the social world through familiar master narratives drawn from the region's culture and history.

This book investigates the interplay between media, politics, religion, and culture in shaping Arabs’ quest for more stable and democratic governance models in the aftermath of the “Arab Spring” uprisings. It focuses on online mediated public debates, specifically user comments on online Arab news sites, and their potential to re-engage citizens in politics. Contributors systematically explore and critique these online communities and spaces in the context of the Arab uprisings, with case studies, largely centered on Egypt, covering micro-bloggers, Islamic discourse online, Libyan nationalism on Facebook, and a computational assessment of online engagement, among other topics.