explores how the transformation of the media environment in the Middle East during the last two decades has influenced contentious politics in the region, and in turn how episodes of contentious politics have shaped the media landscape. Using institutional, semiotic, textual and discourse analyses to examine blogs, music videos, social networking sites, political posters and campaign billboards, panelists re-visit the connections between media and politics by paying special attention to the visual, transnational, and networked aspects of the media landscape in the Middle East. Papers focus on (1) how Arab leaders craft political personae using visual media, (2) the ways in which music videos contribute to the transformation of visibility by enabling a variety of social groups to access public discourse, (3) developing a framework for distinguishing causal mechanisms in the ways that Internet-based media influence Middle East politics, and (4) exploring how women's bodies become contested political spaces during elections and periods of political protest. Taken together, the papers present theoretically informed, empirically grounded research and contribute to the ongoing rethinking of mediated politics in the Middle East and elsewhere.
This paper analyzes the way images of leaders in the Arab world are mediated and the response of Arab citizens to this mediation. Focusing on personality politics and performativity, the paper first examines the different ways in which this mediation occurs and the reasons behind the choices of images presented, as well as how the images appropriate space (both electronic and physical): From leader personas that are part and parcel of an ideology, to personas that transcend ideology; from images that serve as a reminder of a legacy to those that hint at a promise of change; from images that self-consciously reference those of other iconic Arab leaders to images that re-brand the Arab leader to appeal to a new generation of citizens; from images that iconize the self after death to those that construct leaders as icons in their lifetime. The paper then moves to examine the place of the image of the Arab leader in political struggles in the region, arguing that politics in the Arab world is increasingly taking a visual form. Within this framework, the presence or absence of the image of the Arab leader at different moments in time sends particular political messages, and the way those images are approached by citizens again communicates messages about political contention. From exaltation to destruction, citizens' consumption of the image of the Arab leader reflects a multitude of issues, from the construction of an imagined nation to the exercise of hegemony to the communication of contention and opposition. The paper is based on a mixture of the following methodologies: historical analysis of mediated leader images (photos, posters, television images from the 1950s onwards); fieldwork conducted by the researcher in the Arab world (mainly focused on posters and televised images); and textual analysis of contemporary electronic and non-electronic images.
Women's bodies have historically been used as political, religious, or cultural symbols. They were often the sites to be studied in order to understand religions, ideologies, and traditions. Arab and Muslim Feminists' work (Ahmed, 1993; Mernissi, 1987) has shed much light on the centrality of the female body in any understanding of Islam as a historical and contemporary socio-political and cultural movement.
This paper traces the path of two women and how their bodies were used by competing groups as conduits of identification. Examined here are the cases of Neda in Iran and the "Sois Belle et Vote" campaign in Lebanon during each country's 2009 elections. What makes the uses and appropriations of these bodies particular to these "Muslim" contexts is the recurrent theme of veiling and unveiling of the "national" female body. These processes of veiling and unveiling served to reassert various group identities and were played out in various media such as billboards, blogs, viral videos and posters within virtual, public and political spaces.
What allowed such discursive contestation, that is, multiple and conflicting uses of these bodies - some of which were formulated by groups outside of the countries' traditional power structures -was their movement from one medium to another. Ultimately, this paper argues that while the movement of these bodies into virtual space ("new" media) enabled non-dominant groups to make their own competing claims, it is namve to posit that the capacities of new media technologies (that of Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube) trigger and fuel revolutions. The regime was not toppled in Iran and Lebanese women did not take the streets of Beirut. Rather, what needs to be considered is the proposition that although media do not produce revolutions, any "revolution" today will not happen without the "new" media.
New Media and Contentious Politics in the Middle East
The role of internet-based new media in sparking contentious politics has received considerable attention in recent years. From Facebook and blogs in Egypt to the Twitter Revolution in Iran, new media technology has been seen as pivotal in creating new forms of contentious politics. But analysis of the role of new media has been plagued by severe data limitations, inattention to basic questions of research methodology, and a failure to precisely specify causal mechanisms. This paper lays out a comprehensive set of plausible causal pathways by which new media might impact contentious politics, and then considers the evidence for such effects across a range of Arab countries and Iran.
