Dissertation

The Role of New Media and Technology in Popular Resistance Against Repressive Rule

Dissertation Research started: May 2008

Dissertation Committee: Professors D. Drezner, C. Gideon, P. Walker

Informal Committee Readers: Evgeny Morozov, E. Zuckerman, H. Rheingold

Media Version: Does access to new media and technology change the balance of power between  repressive regimes and civil resistance movements? We all saw what happened in Iran (one of my case studies, in addition to Burma, Zimbabwe and Tunisia). New technologies played a major role in the events leading up to and following the elections and are likely to continue having a tremendous impact in Iran and beyond. Social networking tools such as Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and blogging have clearly changed the way individuals in non-permissive environments communicate with each other and the outside world. From SMS and cell phone cameras to Flip cams and flash drives, new media and digital technology is also changing the nature of popular resistance throughout the world.  At the same time, repressive regimes are increasingly censoring and monitoring information flows and shutting down popular communication tools in times of threat, thus imposing information blockades.

The question I ask is simple: who is winning this cyber-game of cat-and-mouse? Why? And is this likely to change in the near future?

For media inquiries, please email me at Patrick@DigiActive.org

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Academic Version: Does the information revolution empower the coercive control of repressive regimes at the expense of civil resistance movements, or vice versa? Does the change in the means of, and access to, information significantly threaten authoritarian control? The normative motivation behind this research agenda is based on the recognition by “many scholars and practitioners […] that the techniques associated with strategic nonviolent social movements are greatly enhanced by access to modern information communication technologies, such as mobile telephony, short message service (SMS), email and the World Wide Web, among others” (Walker 2007).

The political science literature provides two competing arguments on how the information revolution affects the relationship between governments and social resistance movements. One school of thought maintains that the costs of networked communication are dramatically reduced as result of the information revolution, which implies that social movements may be more easily mobilized to response against government repression. The second school of thought counters with the claim that more repressive states are becoming increasingly effective in regulating the information revolution. To be sure, authoritarian regimes also benefit from the information revolution since they gain access to increasingly sophisticated tools with which to censor and control digital information (Diebert et al. 2008). As Drezner (2006) rightly notes, these two contradictory trends raise a fascinating question—does the information revolution empower the coercive control of repressive regimes at the expense of citizen activists? Are state imposed “information blockades” effective? Or does the information revolution lead to an associated increase in more frequent decentralized, distributed and mobile forms of social resistance?

The literature on this research question is sparse and faces seven important limitations:

• First, the terms information revolution and Internet are used interchangeably, when the latter is in fact only a subset of the former. The majority of the literature and research is therefore restricted to the Internet’s impact exclusively.
• Second, the terms are not differentiated on the basis that the predominant feature of the information society is the spread of the Internet. While this is true of the most industrialized democratic societies, it is not the case for the majority of developing countries with repressive regimes, where mobile phones are the most widely spread communication technology.
• Third, the political science literature duly argues that coercive governments have recourse to non-technical means of information control such as intimidation and imprisonment. However, there is a very rich literature on nonviolent action that suggests social resistance movements also have recourse to non-technical means, or tactics, to effectively counter government crackdowns. At the same time, a notable gap exists in the nonviolence literature vis-à-vis the recent and current use of ICTs in nonviolent movements. The only systematic study carried out on the role of technology in nonviolent action is by Martin (2001), in which the majority of references date from the early 1990s, i.e., before the information revolution.
• Fourth, the social movement literature tends to treat technology as a black box. The impact of the information revolution on social resistance needs to be disaggregated to generate more fine-grained analysis.
• Fifth, the sociology, political science and communication literatures have to some extent each addressed the impact of ICTs on authoritarian rule and/or social resistance. While the diversity of perspectives enriches the debate, there is little evidence of any serious cross-disciplinary research that seeks to connect the findings from these various disciplines.
• Sixth, the literature is overwhelmingly qualitative. There don’t appear to be any current large-N quantitative studies on the impact of information communication technology (beyond the Internet) on protests.
• Seventh, the literature does not emphasize the use of network theory as a theoretical framework.

This dissertation will draw on nested analysis as the principal methodology to answer the question formulated above, i.e., does the information revolution empower the coercive control of repressive regimes at the expense of social resistance movements, or vice versa? Nested analysis consists of a large-N quantitative study followed by qualitative comparative case studies.

As a first step towards addressing the dissertation question, the large-N analysis will test whether the diffusion of ICTs is a statistically significant predictor of protest incidents. The assumption here is that communication facilitates organization, coordination and mobilization of protest events. The analysis will draw on a novel large dataset of protest events from 1990-2007. The ICT data will be constructed using multiple different data sources including the International Telecoms Union (ITU), World Bank and United Nations (UN).

The results of the analysis will inform the case study selection process which will compare and contrast four countries (Iran, Burma, Zimbabwe and Tunisia) using the qualitative methods of congruence and process tracing. These will draw on the available secondary literature and (when possible) structured interviews with: (1) government officials, (2) members of resistance movements, and (3) individuals engaged in transnational civil society networks.