In spite of a growing body of literature examining how diasporas can impact a conflict’s trajectory, little attention has been paid to the role and influence of diasporas in the wake of the Arab Spring. This is particularly problematic given the fact that a number of diaspora communities around the world view the Middle East as their “ancestral homeland” and can, therefore, be reasonably expected to be concerned with the social and political transformations taking place throughout the region. This paper seeks to fill this gap in the literature by examining the engagement of diaspora communities toward the Middle East following the Arab Uprisings of 2011. I argue that diaspora involvement in the Arab Spring is multifaceted, fluid and, often times, contradictory. Diasporas have, both helped sustain violence—by providing financial and diplomatic support to a variety of opposition movements—and helped promote inter-communal dialogue and post-conflict reconstruction, by providing aid to those impacted by violence as well as engaging in transnational campaigns for peace and reconciliation. I argue that whether specific diasporas become obstacles or assets for peace is influenced by a number of factors including how diasporas were first formed; the degree of internal cohesion among members; diasporas’ socio-economic standing in their host-societies; and how the threat their communities face is perceived and interpreted. This paper, which is part of a larger multi-country study, focuses specifically on diaspora mobilization toward the Syrian civil war. I rely on qualitative methodology, including semi-structured interviews with diaspora leaders in North America and Europe, participant observation, and archival analysis. The specific role diasporas play in the Syrian civil war, a conflict increasingly driven by questions of identity, belonging, and various forms of exclusion, can significantly impact its future trajectory and, consequently, that of the Middle East.

The Egyptian 2011 revolution has usually been depicted as a non-ideological popular revolution against the corruption of state institutions, economic inequality, police brutality, and the subsequent repression of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF). Yet General El-Sisi’s ascendency after the massive popular protests that culminated in the deposition of former President Morsi on June 30th, 2013 and their unprecedentedly violent aftermath gave way to a profoundly different national narrative. The post-July 2013 regime turned the villains of the 2011 revolution into the heroic defenders of another, very different, ‘revolution’ against ‘Islamist terrorists’. The bringing down of two regimes in less than three years has transformed Egypt into a symbolic ‘zone of conflict’ with running battles over the meaning of “Egyptian-ness”. The struggle to redefine the nation particularly in times of crises underscores how revolutionary upheavals cause tremors and social schisms that prompt resonant ‘symbolic resources’ to develop as mobilizers of collective action. In such a charged atmosphere, rival protagonists draw on different ‘usable pasts’ to produce alternative collective representations of the nation. Anomie and alienation experienced by individuals during periods of rapid social change may lead to yearning for more organic, timeless interpretation of a nation’s or religion’s symbolic resources. Hence, when ideological lenses diverge in times of rapid change, social conflict may erupt as sub-groups in society contest different versions of national identity. Often times, class, religious, and other social conflicts entwined with specific cultural idioms may shape the outcome of the post-revolutionary struggle for state power. Against the modernist emphasis on material domains and structural analyses of contention, this study seeks to delineate the main contours of the discursively constructed national narrative of the post-July, 2013 regime in Egypt. In order to analyze this episode of contentious politics and the often under-researched/under-theorized aspects of revolutionary outcomes, this study adopts an ethno-symbolist approach along with insights from social movement/mobilization literature. Central to this study is an analysis of the master frames used by the new military regime in order to mobilize its constituents by reference to popularly resonant claims. Far from fostering a democratic, inclusive polity, this study argues that the official narrative sought to create a multifaceted hegemonic discourse to consolidate a new authoritarian order of an unprecedentedly repressive-exclusionary nature.

The inundation of mobile phone images has dramatically changed how information about current events is disseminated, accessed, and understood. The mobile camera phone was significant to the Egyptian Revolution and the Green Movement in Iran, and scholars who have considered citizen journalist images in these contexts suggest that they have the power to create democratic “deterritorialized” communities and provide objective evidence. This scholarship has assumed a dangerous link between citizen journalist images and democracy, and it has overlooked opportunities for thoughtful comparison of the use of citizen journalist footage in Iran and Egypt. My research examines how films by Iranian and Egyptian filmmakers have interacted with new media technologies in order to challenge the trust we’ve placed in images and to develop a theoretical framework for comparison between Egypt and Iran. Filmmakers from Iran and Egypt have begun to engage questions of citizen journalism and in their narrative and documentary films. Jafar Panahi’s This Is Not a Film (2011) and Ahmad Abdalla’s Rags And Tatters (2013), for example, draw our attention to the limits of the mobile phone image and address concerns of spectatorship in light of the Green Movement and Egyptian Revolution. In this presentation, I examine how This is Not a Film and Rags and Tatters criticize the way in which popular media on the Egyptian Revolution and Green Movement celebrate and exploit the mobile phone image’s “truth” value. Drawing on Bill Nichols and Susan Sontag, whose works remind us to consider what the image enframes and excludes, I argue that Panahi and Abdalla’s films criticize the trust that we have put in citizen journalism, and they show us that despite developments in image-creating technology, all images produce limited perspectives. As such, these two filmmakers interrogate the image’s frame in order to construct a democratic practice of viewing in Iran and Egypt.

On January 25, 2011 Egyptians took to the streets demanding the reform, and finally the toppling, of the government of President Husni Mubarak who had been in power since 1981. Throughout eighteen days of demonstrations, protesters chanted “we want a new government, baqina ‘al hadida” a colloquial expression which denotes extreme poverty and disenfranchisement. This paper constrasts the social democratic demands of the Egyptian revolution with outcomes of the post-revolutionary economic policy debates. I argue that the commercialization of the media achieved during Mubarak’s administration was instrumental to influencing public deliberation on economic policy in Egypt, steering ecnomic policy debates to pro-business and pro-investment consensus rather than highlighting the social democratic demands of the revolution. Using a discourse analysis of forty episodes of the popular talk show Al Qahera Al Youm, the paper identifies the common tropes of Egyptian media in addressing economic policy. The show, on air for 12 years during the Mubarak administration, and hosted by the businessman Amr Adeeb, serves as an case study of the impact of growing cross-ownership, commercialization, and corporate power in the Egyptian media. This paper demonstrates that, despite the social justice demands of the street, the Egyptian commercialized media exhibited a systematic bias towards free market capitalism. Further, I argue that commercial television, as well as the introduction of businessmen into the industry introduced a business-minded language into media discourse, allowing neo-liberal ideology to mediate all aspects of the public sphere. The research provides an excellent prism with which to view existing debates on media demoracy and the role of the media as a deliberative space central to the democratization process.