ABSTRACT
Since the 1990s, there has been a constant flurry of interest in investigating what Arabs think about, and how, and what their likely collective actions are going to be. This trend of pulsing “Arab public opinion,” if it can be empirically measured, was strongly embedded in Western constructs of polling, understandings of publics, impacts of media on audiences, and some assumed shared principles of human behavior. Such trends have accelerated as an immediate policy response to the events of 9/11, and as a way of predicting Arab popular reactions about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and about the US case for the “war on terror” and “democratization” (Zogby 2010). Similarly, a second major wave of interest in “Arab public opinion” emerged with a particular focus on discovering how and why young people or Islamists were mobilized in popular uprisings during the so-called “Arab Spring,” a series of popular uprisings in a number of Arab countries (Telhami 2012).
