Campaign Processes During the Arab Spring

Essay: Campaign Processes During the Arab Spring and their Effectiveness Student’s Name Instructor Course Title Date Essay: Campaign Processes During the Arab Spring and their Effectiveness The Arab Spring is one of the latest political and social movements that started in the spring of 2011 in the Arab world, including North Africa and the Middle East. The event manage to capture international attention, but also exposed several regions to a wave of popular uprisings and civil rights movements that managed to a bid to remove dictatorships in the region (Batstone, 2014, p.28). In a matter of a few months, regimes that existed for numerous years had been brought down, either through violence or non-violence strategies. During the Arab Spring, various campaign processes were used to enhance the success of the movement. For instance, the social networking sites and the internet in general were used as the major platform of mobilizing people and encouraged active engagement. This paper critically analyses the campaign used in during the Arab Spring and how they influenced and encouraged active engagement in the political processes. Campaign Processes Use of the Social media The social media played an important role in coordinating the political campaigns that took place in the Arab world, thus enhancing the success of the Arab Spring movement. Although the Arab Spring would not solely made popular by the social media, evidence indicates that social networking sites were important tools of popularizing the movement (Badoura, n.d, p.1). As a tool, social media has both a positive and negative consequences in terms of the way the sites shape the outcomes of different regions. For instance, social media would become effective in Tunisia and Egypt since the regions experienced impacts which are more positive than negative. On the contrary, other regions such as Libya, Syria, Algeria, Yemen, and Bahrain received little benefits as a result of social media campaigns as a result of intensive government interventions that made most social media functions to backfire. When the fruit vendor in Tunisia set himself on fire, the incident was popularized quickly in the social media, resulting to the Arab Spring to be branded as “Facebook revolution” (Andersson, J. n.d, p.1). Despite the fact that numerous cases of violence were recorded during the Arab Spring, it can be argued that the movement was mainly spread on the basis of nonviolent methods. Some scholars have analysed the Arab Spring on the basis of the defections that occurred among the security officials. Other researchers have offered a structural explanation that led to the Arab Spring, with WikiLeaks being spread as a result of the popularity of the Arab Spring. Political organizations, social movement institutions, and other interest groups led to a direct impact on policy formulation that would enhance the spread of the movement (Burstein & Linton, 2004, p.381). Although this Facebook revolution was mainly considered as nonviolent, there is evidence indicating that countries such as Tunisia had various levels of civil resistance that differed from other violent episodes that were prevalent in the other parts of the Arab world. Networked Social Movements Before the Arab Sp...