Suchergebnisse

This study examines online news delivery and how Arab newspaper journalism has harnessed the Internet's potential to deliver news in novel ways, reach new readers and audiences, and the implications for the way these users consume and interact with online news. Existing research
on online journalism has documented the web's effects on journalism practice and online news at several levels, including the reorganization of newsrooms and the incorporation of technical features such as interactivity and media convergence. Based on those research findings, we conduct
a comparative analysis of 54 websites of online and print newspapers in the Arab world. The comparative analysis focuses on six main variables: (1) revenue resources, (2) editorial organization, (3) hyperlinks, (4) interactivity, (5) media convergence issues, and (6) updating/immediacy. While
the Internet has opened new and immense opportunities for journalism in the region, the study finds little evidence to suggest that it is substantially contributing to transforming communication dynamics and journalistic practices that can foster dialogical discourse and participatory communication,
both of which are central to the development of civic culture and liberal democracy.

The blood of Egyptian Copts on the streets of central Cairo on 9 October 2011 could be accurately described as the first major set-back for the Arab Spring. Preserving the rights of minorities as full citizens in the face of long-standing persecution and neglect is a pressing challenge for the Arab revolutions. However, the dilemma of the rights of Christian minorities within the Arab world is a historical one, deeply rooted in a complex interplay of social, economic and political factors predating the Arab Spring and its unpredicted implications. The growing signs of a radical Islam empowered by the loosening grip of Arab dictatorships raise concerns that go beyond the question of security and political representation for minorities. There is a bitter race between, on the one hand, secular forces weakened both by the absence of any previous organisational cadres and by the misuse of secularism by nationalist Arab regimes and, on the other, religious forces that are pushing forcefully for further overlap between religion and the state. As the results of the first free elections in Tunisia demonstrate the popularity of Islamism in the midst of entrenched secular countries, it is clear that the battle between the two trends is an unequal one.

Purpose: This paper aims to address the reasons behind the varying levels of volatile conflict and peace as seen during the Arab Spring of 2011 to 2015. During this time, higher rates of conflict transition occurred than normally observed in previous studies for certain Middle Eastern and North African countries. Design/Methodology/Approach: Previous prediction models decrease in accuracy during times of volatile conflict transition. Also, proper strategies for handling the Arab Spring have been highly debated. This paper identifies which countries were affected by the Arab Spring and then applies data analysis techniques to predict a country's tendency to suffer from high-intensity, violent conflict. A large number of open-source variables are incorporated by implementing an imputation methodology useful to conflict prediction studies in the future. The imputed variables are implemented in four model building techniques: purposeful selection of covariates, logical selection of covariates, principal component regression and representative principal component regression resulting in modeling accuracies exceeding 90 per cent. Findings: Analysis of the models produced by the four techniques supports hypotheses which propose political opportunity and quality of life factors as causations for increased instability following the Arab Spring.

Ribas-Mateos, N. 2016: Migration, Mobilities and the Arab Spring. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing. xvi + 196 pp. £63.00 (Cloth). ISBN: 978 1 78536 194 4.