ABSTRACT
The so-called ‘Arab Spring’ took many by surprise. With its early shoots first appearing in Tunisia and branching quickly into Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, Syria and elsewhere, unprecedented waves of mass political protest reverberated across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region in 2011. In the wake of this wave of collective protest, authoritarian regimes across the world scrambled to deploy the time-honoured tools of concession and repression in hopes of placating increasingly restive publics with ready access to new communications technologies. For Middle East specialists, the largely unforeseen instability wrought by the Arab Spring provoked a deeper reconsideration of the scholarly consensus of how ‘durable authoritarianism’ (Brownlee, 2007) might coexist with an information environment shaped by Al-Jazeera and Arab satellite television, and internet-based communication tools like Facebook and Twitter.
