The revolutions sweeping the Middle East
provide dramatic evidence of the role that technology
plays in mobilizing citizen protest and upending
seemingly invulnerable authoritarian regimes. A grainy
cell phone video of a Tunisian street vendor’s
self-immolation helped spark the massive protests that
toppled longtime ruler Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and
Egypt’s "Facebook revolution" forced the ruling regime
out of power and into exile.
While
such "liberation technology" has been instrumental in
freeing Egypt and Tunisia, other cases—such as China and
Iran—demonstrate that it can be deployed just as
effectively by authoritarian regimes seeking to control
the Internet, stifle protest, and target dissenters.
This two-sided dynamic has set off an intense
technological race between "netizens" demanding freedom
and authoritarians determined to retain their grip on
power.
Liberation
Technology brings together cutting-edge
scholarship from scholars and practitioners at the
forefront of this burgeoning field of study. An
introductory section defines the debate with a
foundational piece on liberation technology and is then
followed by essays discussing the popular dichotomy of
"liberation" versus "control" with regard to the
Internet and the sociopolitical dimensions of such
controls. Additional chapters delve into the cases of
individual countries: China, Egypt, Iran, and
Tunisia.
This book also includes
in-depth analysis of specific technologies such as
Ushahidi—a platform developed to document human-rights
abuses in the wake of Kenya’s 2007 elections—and
alkasir—a tool that has been used widely throughout the
Middle East to circumvent
cyber-censorship.
Liberation
Technology will prove an essential resource
for all students seeking to understand the intersection
of information and communications technology and the
global struggle for
democracy.
Contributors: Walid
Al-Saqaf, Daniel Calingaert, Ronald Deibert, Larry
Diamond, Elham Gheytanchi, Philip N. Howard, Muzammil M.
Hussain, Rebecca MacKinnon, Patrick Meier, Evgeny
Morozov, Xiao Qiang, Rafal Rohozinski, Mehdi
Yahyanejad
