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Explores how internet use empowers Arab citizensThis book argues that Internet diffusion and use in the Middle East enables meaningful micro-changes in citizens' lives, even in states where no Arab Spring revolution occurred. Using ethnographic evidence and taking a comparative perspective, it presents a grass roots look at how new media use fits into the practice of everyday life. It explores why citizens use social media to digitally route around state and other forms of power at work in their lives. This increase in citizen civic engagement, supported by new media use, offers the possibility of a new order of things, from redefining patriarchal power relations at home, to reconfigurations of citizens' relationships with the state, broadly defined. The author argues that new media channels offer pathways to empowerment widely and cheaply in the Middle East.Key FeaturesBased upon ethnographic research of Internet diffusion and impact in several Middle Eastern countries (primarily Kuwait, Jordan and Egypt, but also Tunisia, Morocco, UAE, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia)Collects evidence of new media-enabled change between 1996 and 2014, giving an evolutionary perspective on small acts of norm violation and change in everyday lifeShows how even micro-political and social uses of the internet can disrupt power relationsEncourages a renewed focus on citizen agency, voice and interests in the Middle East despite the persistence of regional authoritarianism

This study uses "quick immersions" in Middle East politics to investigate the role that a short, yet immersive fieldwork stay can play in generating social scientific and pedagogic insights. Using three "quick immersions" in Middle East politics, this article argues that although having an extended amount of time in the field is ideal, especially when committed to obtaining "an ethnographic sensibility," a quick immersion is better than no immersion. A quick immersion is not a substitute for an extended field stay. Its primary advantage is making fieldwork possible when time, finances, logistics, and other contextual, professional, or personal constraints prohibit a longer stay. A quick immersion is an adaptation to the constraints that might lead scholars to forego fieldwork otherwise. This study aims to dispel disparaging notions that short fieldwork trips equate with mere academic tourism, by considering the outcomes of three short immersive fieldwork trips to the Middle East: six months in UAE (2013), two months in Qatar (2013), and one month in Lebanon (2017). Although the immersion in UAE was three times longer than the immersion in Qatar, and six times longer than the immersion in Lebanon, the insights yielded from all three case studies were equally meaningful for understanding Middle East politics in ways not possible without fieldwork.

This study considers Kuwait's food security strategies in light of the country's environmental challenges. It examines the case of a country that relies on food imports, which are increasingly subject to supply and price shocks, and has one of the world's highest obesity rates, highest water use rates per capita, and one of the largest per capita waste footprints globally. The explanations for this curious situation include cultural, political, economic, and environmental variables supported by data collected between 2009 and 2014 using ethnographic research methods and participant observation in Kuwait. This article contributes to an emerging body of scholarship on new security challenges in the Arabian Gulf, and is one of the first to consider the national security implications of public health and resource strain in Kuwait, using ethnographic research methods.

This article examines Egypt's attempt to build an information society for international development as defined by four key variables: an IT infrastructure, a knowledge economy, a public culture of discursive openness, and formal legal institutions which support the digital age. The main finding is that given serious infrastructural challenges, as well as a tendency towards political and economic centralisation, the efforts of a series of government-led projects are unlikely to affect all but the top of the Egyptian social pyramid for the immediate future.

In her pivotal work on Kuwaiti politics, Mary Ann Tétreault provides an
"insider's guide" to the private and public spaces in which struggles over
communal power are pursued by the government, the Parliament, and the people of Kuwait.
Tétreault is careful to call her text "Stories of Democracy," as she realizes
the reflexive nature of what democracy means at different periods in history (before oil, after oil,
under Iraqi occupation, in post-Liberation Kuwait); for different people in Kuwait (women, the
merchants, government officials, tribal leaders, service politicians, opposition leaders); and in
different contexts (the mosque, the diwaniyya or men's social club, the civic
association, Parliament, the government). With this in mind, she argues that
"democracy" is a "concept that 'moves' depending on
one's assumptions" (p. 3). Her basic message is that Kuwaiti politics resembles the
politics of the Greek city-state, and she relies on various forms of Aristotelian comparison to
explore this concept. Moreover, Tétreault illustrates that much of Kuwaiti politics
resembles a high-stakes soap opera. For example, she calls the bad debt crisis "one of the
longest running soap operas in Kuwaiti politics" (p. 164). In Chapter 4, she labels Kuwaiti
politics "a family romance, whose grip on political actors constrains their choices"
(p. 67). Toward the end of her text in chapter 8, Tétreault combines these metaphors
when she observes that in the city-state that is Kuwait, politics are "the product of a
domestic public life that seems all too often like life in a large and contentious family" (p.
206).

For the Past Five Decades, media texts, broadcast over television air waves, have created a shared identity among viewing audiences. John B. Thompson notes that if culture is understood as "the ways in which meaningful expressions of various kinds are produced, constructed and received by individuals", then mass media can be understood as central to the creation and maintenance of culture (pp. 122-23). The words and images that construct a media culture are the very building blocks of collective identity. As Michael Schudson observes, "news is part of the background through which and with which people think" (p. 16).