The role of the Internet in transnational mobilization: a case study of the Zapatista Movement, 1994-2005

In: Civil society: local and regional responses to global challenges, S. 129-156

Abstract

"The Internet has been hailed as a promising tool for fostering transnational interactive communication, the creation of a global civil society, and the empowerment of grassroots actors. This article focuses on the seminal case of the Zapatista movement, in which the Internet is widely seen as having had a crucial role. The activist and scholar Cleaver (1995) spoke of a 'new electronic fabric of struggle'. Other activists, or hacktivists as several called themselves, used the term 'cybemal' to refer to the on-line dimension of the struggle. Ronfeldt and Arquilla (1998), researchers of the Rand Corporation, a Santa Monica-based think-tank serving the Pentagon, saw in the conflict in Chiapas a new type of warfare and called it a 'social netwar'. Because of the Zapatistas' extensive network structure they grouped them in the same category as Al-Quaeda and warned about the emerging threat long before Al-Quaeda's attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Castells (1998) regarded the Zapatista insurgency as the prototypical form of contention in what he described as the emerging network society. Even the Mexican PRI government spoke of an 'Internet war' (e.g., Gurria 1995), and President Fox (2000) later commended the Zapatistas for their pioneering achievements in using the Internet. Yet, these terms tend to exaggerate the Internet's role in the uprising and trivialize the causes of the conflict and of the fact that real arms were used and real people died. When the Mexican government spoke of a 'guerra de Internet' it did so to downplay the offline significance of the conflict, while the computer-skilled Zapatista supporters from post-industrial countries were flattered by such a characterization of their activities. This collusion between foes have led thus to an Inflation of the Internet's role and impact. More systematic empirical scrutiny is warranted in order to assess the Internet's role vis-à-vis other media interfaces, while avoiding the pitfalls of exaggeration and underestimation. This paper builds on the author's previous research on the Zapatista uprising (Schulz 1998, 2001) and extends it through a focus on the media aspects. The data set consists of over 42,000 electronic mails and webpages as well as national and international mass media sources and ethnographic fieldwork in multiple sites in Mexico, the United States, and Europe over the period 1994-2005." (author's abstract)