Social Media, Surveillance and Social Control in the Bahrain Uprising

ArticleMarc Owen Jones began his PhD at the University of Durham in 2011 after securing a studentship from the North East Doctoral Training Centre. He worked briefly as a graduate research assistant at Leicester University following the completion of an MSc in Arab World Studies from Durham University in 2010. This two-year MSc was funded by the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World and involved a year of intense Arabic tuition at both the Universities of Edinburgh and Damascus. He received his BA in Journalism, Film and Broadcasting from Cardiff University in 2006 before spending a year in Sudan teaching English. He tweets and blogs regularly on Bahrain and his research interests include critical security surveillance, cultural geography, public space, social justice, systemic control, policing and social media. This is a study of how the Bahraini regime and its supporters utilized Facebook, Twitter and other social media as a tool of surveillance and social control during the Bahrain uprising. Using a virtual ethnography conducted between February 2011 and December 2011, it establishes a typology of methods that describe how hegemonic forces and institutions employed social media to suppress both online and offline dissent. These methods are trolling, naming and shaming, offline factors, intelligence gathering and passive observation. It also discusses how these methods of control limit the ability of activists to use online places as spaces of representation and anti-hegemonic identity formation. While there is considerable research on the positive role social media plays in activism, this article addresses the relative paucity of literature on how hegemonic forces use social media to resist political change

Contesting the Iranian Revolution as a turning-point discourse in Bahraini contentious politics

This is the author accepted manuscript.Exeter Critical Gulf Series 1This chapter contends that there is an overemphasis in the academic literature on the effect the Iranian Revolution had on shifting the dynamics of contentious politics in Bahrain. This has created a discourse in which belligerents are framed according to the contemporary transatlantic antipathy towards Iran, reifying a narrative that can contribute to the perpetuation of anti-Shi‘a and anti-Baḥārna prejudice. Using a closer reading of historical and modern sources, this paper argues that it was not solely the Islamic Revolution, nor the discovery of the Islamic Front for the Liberation of Bahrain, that shifted government policy towards Bahrain’s Shi‘a. Instead, ethno-religious discrimination is rooted in the Al Khalifa legacy of conquest, which was ossified by colonial intervention, but reinvigorated by Bahrain’s Independence, growing Saudi influence, the Iran-Iraq war, and a historically-rooted Al Khalifa antipathy towards the indigenous population. Thus, changes in the modalities of repression are better explained by a multitude of interacting factors, rather than the totalising influence of Iran

Sink particle radiative feedback in smoothed particle hydrodynamics models of star formation

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Oxford University Press via the DOI in this record.We present a new method for including radiative feedback from sink particles in smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations of low-mass star formation, and investigate its effects on the formation of small stellar groups. We find that including radiative feedback from sink particles suppresses fragmentation even further than calculations that only include radiative transfer within the gas. This reduces the star-formation rate following the formation of the initial protostars, leading to fewer objects being produced and a lower total stellar mass. The luminosities of sink particles vary due to changes in the accretion rate driven by the dynamics of the cluster gas, leading to different luminosities for protostars of similar mass. Including feedback from sinks also raises the median stellar mass. The median masses of the groups are higher than typically observed values. This may be due to the lack of dynamical interactions and ejections in small groups of protostars compared to those that occur in richer groups. We also find that the temperature distributions in our calculations are in qualitative agreement with recent observations of protostellar heating in Galactic star-forming regions.This work was supported by the European Research Coun- cil under the European Commission's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013 Grant Agreement No. 339248). The calculations discussed in this paper were performed on the University of Exeter Supercomputer, Isca. The rendered plots shown were produced using SPLASH (Price 2007)

Decomposing energy demand across BRIIC countries

Energy plays an important role within the production technology of fast emerging economies, such that firms' reaction to changes in energy prices provides useful information on factor productivity and factor intensity, as well as the likely outcome of energy policy initiatives, among other things. Drawing on duality theory, this paper decomposes changes in energy demand into substitution and output effects using annual sector-level production data for Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia and China (BRIIC) for the period 1995–2009. Unlike previous studies, this study analyzed the economic properties of the underlying production technology. Results indicate that changes in energy demand are strongly dominated by substitution effects. More importantly, an intriguing finding that emerges from our analysis is the role of economies of scale and factor accumulation, as opposed to technical progress, in giving rise to the growth performance of sampled economies

Nation branding and celebrity diplomacy in Bahrain

ArticleThis is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis (Routledge) via the DOI in this record.n/

Social media, satire and creative resistance in the Bahrain uprising: from utopian fiction to political satire

ArticleThis is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Sage publications via the DOI in this record.Social media has permitted activists to subvert censorship and state-controlled media. As a result, it has become a key medium for experimenting with and/or creating genres previously marginalised or discouraged by the Bahraini government. This article explores aspects of revolutionary cultural production and creative resistance in Bahrain since the uprisings in 2011 and examines the role social media has played in shaping and defining it. Focusing on memes, parody accounts and the YouTube serial Baharna Drama, this article looks at the rise of political satire online and the evolution of satirical forms over the progression of the uprising as a dialectic with government policy and propaganda. This article argues that social media has facilitated the emergence of new forms of satire in Bahrain and has allowed activists to assert, to both local and global audiences and in different registers, the integrity of a desired revolutionary aesthetic by confronting state attempts to paint the revolution as schismatic and divisive. As such, 2011 marked a new turn in Bahrain’s satirical heritage. It also argues that the subversive nature of satire makes it a favourable genre with regard to revolutionary cultural production and the public sphere, yet acknowledges that satirical forms, as a response to authoritarian policies, are rarely devoid of the tutelage necessary to make them a truly revolutionary form of counter-narrative

Saudi intervention, sectarianism, and de-democratization in Bahrain’s uprising

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the publisher via the DOI in this record.Here, we examine the challenges to democratization in Bahrain, with a particular focus on how the recent 2011 Uprising has resulted in a deepening of authoritarianism. It is argued that the recent unrest has brought into sharp relief the absence of “quality” democracy in Bahrain, and that any form of democratic transition is dependent on the will of a conservative Al Khalifa-Saudi nexus. While the pro-democracy movement may have prompted minor concessions on the part of the government, the extent of the popular mobilization triggered the Al Khalifa regime’s authoritarian reflex, and they have reacted to throttle the Uprising by putting in place legislative, ideological, and political barriers to reform, which points not only to a current de-democratization, but also a lack of future democratization. In addition to arguing for the post-2011 undoing of democracy in Bahrain, this paper also points to two major barriers to future democratization; (1) a conservative, post-Independence Al Khalifa-Saudi coalition assisted by large military resources (2) protracted communal tension brought about by the government’s instrumentalization of sectarianism

Model independent properties of two-photon exchange in elastic electron proton scattering

We derive from first principles, as the C-invariance of the electromagnetic interaction and the crossing symmetry, the general properties of two-photon exchange in electron-proton elastic scattering. We show that the presence of this mechanism destroys the linearity of the Rosenbluth separation.Comment: 12 pages, no figures- Corrected misprints, changes in P. 7. No changes in conclusion

Public goods and decay in networks

We propose a simple behavioral model to analyze situations where (1) a group of agents repeatedly plays a public goods game within a network structure and (2) each agent only observes the past behavior of her neighbors, but is affected by the decisions of the whole group. The model assumes that agents are imperfect conditional cooperators, that they infer unobserved contributions assuming imperfect conditional cooperation by others, and that they have some degree of bounded rationality. We show that our model approximates quite accurately regularities derived from public goods game experiments