New Media and Democratisation

Abstract

This issue of Irish Studies in International Affairs opens with a collection of articles on the question of 'New Media and Democratisation', drawing on a series of papers presented at the annual conference of the Royal Irish Academy's Committee for International Affairs, held in Dublin in November 2011. The 'traditional' media coverage of the Arab Spring emerging across North Africa and the Middle East during 2011 started a high-level debate on the actual and potential impact of social media in facilitating communication and mobilisation internally in authoritarian states, and also in allowing activists to communicate internationally. The international communication might ultimately have been the more significant (due to limited access to means of communication internally), as it gave media organisations and international activists direct access to information and, crucially for the media, powerful images that commanded widespread attention. Combined with the broad support for internal protests in some countries in the region, this made it very difficult for those states who traditionally lent support to the authoritarian leaders, who they perceived to be better allies than popularly elected Islamist parties, to continue such support. Using the changes in the Arab world as a starting point, Professor Philip Seib (from the University of Southern California), one of the leading international figures on public diplomacy, explores the pressures for diplomacy from, first of all, the vast range of information sources now available to policy-makers and their advisors, and also from the expectations of speed from a public used to getting 'instant' news updates. His analysis of the tensions created by the competing pressures of instant response and the need for careful analysis is an extremely valuable contribution to this debate. Of course, the debate on new media and democratisation goes far beyond the Arab spring. I§il Turkan (Science Po Aix-en-Provence and Bah?e§ehir University, Istanbul), using Turkey as a case study, highlights the tensions caused by a relatively accessible 'new' media in situations where the work of journalists is constrained, not only by controls in advance of publication but also by threats afterwards. Christian Christensen (Uppsala University) provides a very interesting discussion on the ways in which the Swedish government has rationalised offering not only diplomatic but also material support to 'net activists' working on the Arab Spring, and he seeks to analyse the extent to which the Swedish government utilised what is called a 'liberation technology'