Suchergebnisse

Intro -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of Figures -- Acknowledgements -- Preface -- Introduction: The Gulf's Post-Truth Moment -- PART I Digital Deception and the Pseudo-Reality Industries -- 1 Digital Authoritarianism, Deception and Information Controls -- 2 The Deception Order and Pseudo-Reality Industries -- Part II Controlling Domestic Politics -- 3 Making Arabia Great Again: The Evolution of Digital Media Power and Digital Populism in the Gulf -- 4 Automating Deceit: Authoritarian AI and Journoganda -- Part III Trump and the War on Reality in the Gulf -- 5 The US Right-Wing-Saudi Anti-Iran Nexus -- 6 The Gulf Crisis Never Happened: Pseudo-Events and Pseudo-Publics -- PART IV Projecting Influence Abroad -- 7 Foreign Interference in Elections, Revolutions and Protests: From Iraq to Algeria -- 8 You Are Being Lied to by People that Do Not Even Exist: The Pseudo-Journalist -- 9 Football Crazy: Sportswashing and the Pseudo-Fan -- 10 Covid19's Disinformation Superspreaders -- Part V Attacking Journalists and Silencing Dissent -- 11 Silencing Journalists: The Killing of Khashoggi -- 12 Attacking Women: Malinformation and Digital Misogyny -- 13 Stigmatising Muslims: The Sisterhood of the Muslim Brothers -- Part VI Adventures in Troll-land -- 14 Talking Pro-MBS Zombies -- 15 The Rise and Fall of Magnus Callaghan -- Conclusion: The Future of Deception and Digital Tyranny -- Notes -- Index -- Back cover.

Introduction: Political Repression in Bahrain in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century -- Defining Political Repression -- The Repression Playbook -- Political Statecraft: Between Democratization, Discord and Division -- Torture, Arrests and Other Personal Integrity Violations -- Repressive Law and Legal Repression -- Information Controls: From Surveillance to Social Media and Fake News -- Conclusion: Between Retrograde Repression and Repression.

Revolutions seldom involve more than one percent of the population. However, in Bahrain, a small island nation with a population of around 570,000, twenty percent of the population took to the streets in February 2011 to demand greater democratic reform, making it "proportionally one of the greatest shows of 'people power' in modern history." The regime's response was disproportionally brutal. Saudi-dominated troops from the Gulf Cooperation Council Peninsula Shield Force were "invited to" or "invaded" Bahrain, depending on who is telling the story. Under cover of the Saudi military, Bahrain's security forces killed dozens of civilians, torturing, maiming, and raping many others. The arsenal of repressive techniques was exhaustive. Belonging also was used as a tool of repression, with many being stripped of their Bahraini citizenship on spurious, terror-related charges.

Many of the studies of disinformation tend to reflect transatlantic security concerns, and focus on the activities of Russia and China. There is notably less analysis of disinformation in the Arabic-speaking world and wider MENA region. This article analyses a number of MENA-based COVID-19 disinformation campaigns from 2020, highlighting how COVID-19 disinformation has been instrumentalised by regional actors to attack rivals or bolster the legitimacy of their own regimes. It highlights in particular how certain 'superspreaders' of disinformation tend to promote Saudi, Emirate and right wing US foreign policy in the Middle East.

Social media has permitted activists to subvert censorship and state-controlled media. As a result, it has become a key medium for experimenting with and/or creating genres previously marginalised or discouraged by the Bahraini government. This article explores aspects of revolutionary cultural production and creative resistance in Bahrain since the uprisings in 2011 and examines the role social media has played in shaping and defining it. Focusing on memes, parody accounts and the YouTube serial Baharna Drama, this article looks at the rise of political satire online and the evolution of satirical forms over the progression of the uprising as a dialectic with government policy and propaganda. This article argues that social media has facilitated the emergence of new forms of satire in Bahrain and has allowed activists to assert, to both local and global audiences and in different registers, the integrity of a desired revolutionary aesthetic by confronting state attempts to paint the revolution as schismatic and divisive. As such, 2011 marked a new turn in Bahrain's satirical heritage. It also argues that the subversive nature of satire makes it a favourable genre with regard to revolutionary cultural production and the public sphere, yet acknowledges that satirical forms, as a response to authoritarian policies, are rarely devoid of the tutelage necessary to make them a truly revolutionary form of counter-narrative.

Four years on from the upheavals of 2011, and though it has long since slipped out of the headlines, the struggle for Bahrain continues. Bahrain's Uprising represents one of the first dedicated studies of the uprising, and is the first to move the debate beyond its narrow focus on religious sectarianism

From projecting ideology and influence, to maintaining a notion of 'Gulfness' through the selective exclusion or inclusion of certain beliefs, cultures and people, the notion of Gulfization is increasingly pertinent as Gulf countries occupy a greater political and economic role in wider Middle East politics. This volume discusses the notion of Gulfization, and examines how thoughts, ideologies, way of life and practices are transmitted, changed, and transduced inside and outside the Gulf. From historical perspectives such as the impact of the 1952 Egyptian Revolution in Yemen, to studies on the contemporary projection of Salafism or hyper-nationalism in the Gulf monarchies, this book explores, contends, and critiques the transnational and regional currents that are making, and unmaking, the new Gulf Moment. This is the first volume of the new Exeter Critical Gulf Series and is based on the 28th Gulf Conference held at the University of Exeter in 2016.