This chapter provides comparative case-study evidence of the core argument of this book: that ordinary people can create change in small ways by leveraging new media tools to network around the state, and other structures of power at work in their lives. In the service of this argument, three types of digital resistance in authoritarian political contexts in the Middle East are examined: digital disclosure to confront bad governance; peopleto- people diplomacy; and social media for social change. These examples of digital resistance are based upon new media campaigns against the Egyptian, Turkish, Kuwaiti, Israeli, Iranian and Saudi states. In each of these cases, citizens use new communication devices to resist bad governance, and to enhance agency and autonomy in their everyday lives.

The story of enhanced state power in the digital age, so-called ‘repression 2.0’ (Seib 2012: 97), is a common one, and yet not surprising (Kalathil and Boas 2003, Calingaert 2010, MacKinnon 2011, Morozov 2011b). Especially in authoritarian contexts, the Internet has been used by the state for ‘propaganda purposes’ and ‘surveillance’, by ‘paying bloggers to spread propaganda and troll social networking sites looking for new information on those in the opposition’ (Morozov 2011b: xiv, xv). What is surprising, however, is that citizens in authoritarian contexts have effectively used the Internet to enhance their political and social agency in spite of the risks. Why, when the chances of success are so limited, and the costs for taking on the authoritarian state are so potentially life threatening, do Middle Eastern citizens resist? As demonstrated vividly by the Arab Spring revolutions, and the case studies examined in this book, the Middle East is an increasingly oppositional space. Collectively examples of digital resistance present ‘new avenues of political change, through autonomous capacity to communicate and organize’ which take place ‘beyond the usual methods of … political control’ (Castells 2012: 21).

In other words, as argued in this chapter, people in the Middle East use social media to resist because they can, and because they have a great degree of dissatisfaction to express. Digital media multiply the forms in which resistance can occur, replicate the avenues through which resistance can be expressed, and pool and intensify the results of small acts of defiance into big, potentially transformative waves.