The online public sphere matters. Digital communication technologies and platforms increasingly shape the world's politics, society, economics, and culture--and the Middle East is no exception (e.g., Howard and Hussain 2013; Zayani 2015). The Gulf region has some of the highest rates of internet penetration in the Middle East (between 93-100% of the national population) and also some of the highest rates of social media use, including Twitter (Dennis, Martin, and Wood 2016). Nonetheless, the online public sphere remains an understudied aspect of politics in the Gulf.
In this panel, we are interested in exploring how online media has changed the region's politics, economies, and social norms. Building on Marshall McLuhan (1969), who described the Global Village as a place defined by disunity and the inevitable clash of conflicting forces, our panel aims to investigate the Gulf's online public sphere, which, like the Global Village, arose out of instantaneous communication technologies and is defined as much by conflict as it is by cooperation. How has the online public sphere created new opportunities for nationals and expatriates to form new social movements, spark dialogue on key issues, and to bring about tangible change How has it influenced policy making and state-society relations How have national leaders and governments utilized the online public sphere to communicate with their own citizens, neighboring states, and the region's diverse populations How have specific groups used online media to voice their opinions and effect desired change How has the recent diplomatic crisis further politicized the online sphere and impacted social and political attitudes and behaviors in the region And what insights can academic work on the Gulf provide to the region, and the world, about the power of the online public sphere
This panel delves into these questions by drawing insights from different disciplines (political science, history, communication), methodological approaches (both qualitative and quantitative), and case study focus (Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and two Gulf-wide analyses). All papers focus on how and why the online public sphere is used, by social, political, and religious actors, in the modern Gulf. Specific themes include citizen-government interactions, the use of art and religion to influence public opinion, limits of expression in authoritarian regimes, and the discourse of polarization and persuasion. Together with our chair and pair of discussants, the collected papers deepen the academic conversation on the dynamics of the online public sphere in the contemporary Gulf.
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"Social media,” Saudi artist Abdullah al-Shehri (known as Shaweesh) observes, is the “best tool we have available to showcase and express our art,” because it allows millions of Saudis to share and comment on a given work of art simultaneously. Building on this insight, I argue that Saudi artists, who have among the largest followings on Saudi social media, have used the online public sphere to build a new social movement. They have adopted a role akin to Antonio Gramsci’s concept of organic intellectuals—namely, men and women who are not part of the traditional intellectual elite, but who, through the language of culture, articulate feelings and experiences the masses cannot easily express. Indeed, Ahmed Mater, another leading Saudi artist, seeks to live in the “grass roots” of his society’s “ecosystem”—a phrase that brings to mind the term “organic”— and serve as “a networker, sharing ownership of ideas and images with many others.” To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan (1964), the work of Saudi artists is not “mere self-expression” but the “distant early warning system that can always be relied upon to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.”
In this paper, I draw from my extensive research on Saudi art (2012-present). I highlight works such as Haw?jis—a YouTube video in which four Saudi women mock Saudi men and the country’s restrictions on women’s rights. Presciently, Haw?jis, which has 19 million views online, was released on December 23, 2016—almost nine months to the day before King Salman announced that he was lifting the restriction on women driving in Saudi Arabia. Further, I contextualize my argument through the works of Levine (2008, 2016) and Ménoret (2004) on the role of art in Arab politics along with the recent works of Wheeler (2017) and Zayani (2015), especially Zayani’s insights on the importance of online media and other “less formal spaces” of everyday social engagement. Rather than viewing online engagement as political opposition, my work on Saudi artists helps us see that online media can have a very different role—one that is both clear and sophisticated without being confrontational toward the Saudi state and political system. In sum, in a country that lacks a free press or national participatory politics, the online work of artists provides us with a fresh view of how Saudis discuss the key issues impacting their lives.
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Mr. Andrew Leber
Do social media tend to promote citizen freedoms or enhance authoritarian control? Beyond their occasional role as facilitators of mass mobilization, social media platforms such as Twitter offer a daily means of anonymously voicing political opinions. As such, we would expect them to promote freedom of speech and deed through multiple channels: solving coordination problems by helping citizens learn what fellow citizens think, facilitating mass mobilization even in the face of notoriously repressive regimes, and even acting as high-frequency opinion poll data by which activists can gauge (and even shape) public opinion on various topics (Jamal et al. 2015).
Yet in line with the thought that most open platforms tend to fall prey to those most organized to take advantage of them, we present evidence that social media outlets present authoritarian governments with an opportunity to influence citizen perceptions and expectations, not merely as a source of mobilization threats to be managed (King et al. 2013). We focus on major, combative hashtags linked to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates that emerged in the wake of the GCC diplomatic dispute that erupted in June 2017 as well as those stemming from government efforts towards domestic social and economic reform in Saudi Arabia. These regime goals are accomplished through a combination of offline coercion of online "influencers" to repeat key talking points and hashtags (Al-Omran 2017), and wielding armies of online "bots" (Jones 2015) to boost visibility of certain tweets and trends.
Not only have Arab authoritarians largely survived the threats that social media initially mobilized against their rule; we argue that some – particularly Saudi Arabia and the UAE – have now turned the new tool to their favor, using it as a day-to-day means of building ideological consensus to ensure regime stability. In tracking “waves” of Twitter activity centered around particular hashtags, we find that a small minority of Twitter accounts drive a disproportionate amount of traffic in conversations criticizing Qatar’s foreign policy and questioning its domestic stability (relative to conversations reacting to widely experienced natural disasters or domestic demands in Saudi Arabia). Case studies of particular campaigns suggest a concerted effort by state security institutions, at least in Saudi Arabia, to stifle dissent on contentious issues by drowning out public evidence of shared dissent.
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Mr. Geoff Martin
Research on the Gulf States focuses almost exclusively on two facts: oil money and its reciprocal impact on state power. Approaches to rentierism, both old and new, generally agree that oil rents foster socio-political stagnation by buying off citizens, making them rent dependent and weakening mobilization efforts by civil society groups (Luciani 1987, Moore and Peters 2009, Gray 2011, Gause and Yom 2012). Since the beginning of the Arab Spring, the thoroughness of this narrative has been called into question. In Kuwait, activists united many different tribes, urban-rural groups, and ideological factions under a—short-lived but inclusive—banner calling for structural reforms to the political system. In a series of events that rocked the country to its core, protesters stormed the Kuwait parliament in November 2011 and organized some of the largest demonstrations in the country’s history. Since the protests, the Kuwaiti government has made many steps to increase citizen representation in the public sphere. One of these steps has been to expand the government’s presence on social media, specifically Twitter, in order to respond to a rising crescendo of criticism and facilitate engagement with citizens’ concerns. How have Kuwaiti citizens voiced their opinions to government officials? What are government responses to online criticism?
In the literature on rentier states lower class societal forces are considered politically acquiescent or at best, only concerned with access to patronage sources (Crystal 1989, Yom 2016). If this thesis is correct, then the Kuwaiti states’ intervention in the public domain should lead to a collapse in societal pressures or signs that criticisms or commentary are reduced.
This paper investigates this puzzle by looking at the pattern of interactions between elites—government ministries and organizations, members of parliament, and other important political figures—with ordinary citizens on Twitter. I conduct a content analysis of individual tweets and comment sections of 50 government Twitter accounts from February 2018 to June 2018. If we are to take theory seriously - and to digest the ramifications of events in Kuwait - some combination of factors must have changed the relationship between the state and civil society. Ultimately, the clashes between the government and the people online are a very public and a legitimate form of dialogue that moves beyond the rigid structure of state and society by which we understand Gulf rentier societies.
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Dr. Jocelyn Sage Mitchell
How do political, social, and religious figures employ social media to affect online public discourse? Using the June 2017 Gulf diplomatic crisis as a case study, this paper examines the use of social media as a tool of diplomacy and disruption in contemporary international affairs, presenting research results of an interdisciplinary, multimethod grant project.
Political scientists are increasingly recognizing the relevance of the online public sphere as a venue for communication and manipulation of information and preferences (Chadwick 2017; Karpf 2016). In regimes where physical public space is tightly controlled and/or inaccessible, the internet can serve as an alternative public square for societal engagement, discourse, and networking (Abdul Ghaffar 2014; Zayani 2015). But trolls and bots, often encouraged or hired by political authorities, can hijack the online public sphere and drown out alternative and anti-establishment voices through targeted and purposeful campaigns of disinformation (Forestal 2017; Gunitsky 2015; King, Pan, and Roberts 2017). Further, social media influencers have begun to use political, cultural, and especially religious “cues” to engage and coopt the general public sentiment around important issues and thereby influence conversation and attitudes, a crucial area of research that is understudied in the non-Western world (Penney 2017).
How is the digital landscape of the Gulf changing in response to the Gulf diplomatic crisis? This research project looks both top-down and bottom-up to answer this question, investigating how Gulf government entities are using digital tools for image-building, reputation, and crisis management, and how society—both influential Twitter users and ordinary people exert implicit or explicit pressure on each other to think and act in a certain way. We explore Twitter discourse in the Gulf through network, content, and discourse analysis, in order to analyze the origin, spread, and response of tweets, code the content and discover patterns, and analyze the discursive and rhetorical strategies of particular key words related to religious authority. The findings are useful and timely, bringing insights from the fields of political science, communication, and digital media studies to understand and analyze the increased politicization of the online public sphere in the region.
