Social Media and the Arab Spring: How Facebook, Twitter, and Camera Phones Changed the Egyptian Army's Response to Revolution
Abstract
How should militaries think about social media as a factor in military operations? In this thesis, the author examines recent Arab Spring scholarship, with a particular focus on the significant impact of social media on events in Egypt in early 2011. Existing literature in this area centers on the ability of various social media platforms to unite and inspire population masses, yet it does not address the important effect of social media on military forces' response to the revolution. This gap is exemplified by the general reluctance of military practitioners to engage scholars with actual evidence from real-world events during times of conflict. In response to these challenges, the author offers the unique oral history of an Egyptian company commander who led soldiers in Cairo's Tahrir Square throughout several months of intensive security operations during the Arab Spring. Through this descriptive study, the author finds that the prevalence of social media considerably affected the Egyptian Army's response to the massive popular uprising. To evaluate these findings, he proposes a "social media update" to Gene Sharp's mechanisms of nonviolent change, analyzing the Egyptian Army's counterintuitive approach to the events of 2011 in light of an updated Sharp framework. He concludes that the Egyptian Army's experiences provide a tremendously useful example of how militaries may think about social media as a factor in military operations. Finally, he argues that a written account of the Egyptian Army's response to social media is exactly the type of "policy-relevant scholarship" military practitioners must be willing to produce to inform U.S. policy in a truly meaningful way.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jun 08, 2012
- Accession Number
- ADA562880
Entities
People
- Robert E. Barnsby
Organizations
- United States Army Command and General Staff College