The Arab uprisings of 2011 have generated a significant amount of scholarship, as they represented a seemingly momentous shift in the politics of the Middle East and North Africa. Although the implications and future consequences of these uprisings have yet to be fully teased out, given the relatively short period of time that has since elapsed, the revolts and their immediate aftermath have been dissected and analysed from numerous perspectives and theoretical frameworks. Central to such debates on how to interpret the uprisings has been the theorised struggle between democratisation and authoritarian resilience. Flowing from that macro-debate, there have been numerous studies looking at specific aspects of the uprisings, ranging from the actors driving the protests to the responses of the military and security apparatuses, and from the rise of political parties and elections to the massive violence and instability that characterises the region, including renewed sectarian rivalries. In light of the absence of genuine democratisation across the region – with the exception of Tunisia – more recent studies have examined the ‘desire’ for democracy that Arabs might, or might not, have, and the meaning that they give to the term. These studies are usually based on survey research, which carries with it a number of potential pitfalls. Narratives of the uprisings and their developments usually focus, moreover, on national actors and institutions, marginalising micro-dynamics of struggle and dissent.

Following the uprisings, we have also witnessed diverging institutional trajectories between the different countries involved, and it has therefore become quite difficult to generalise about the region. With an intensive focus on main- stream politics and institutions, and on regional-level analyses, comes the risk of failing to explore what happens ‘below the radar’ of ruling elites and established opposition parties and movements, within countries that have experienced a revolt and those where seemingly no changes took place. In short, there is a danger of making the same mistake as was made in the 2000s, when the focus on authoritarian mechanisms of reproduction of power and elites made it impossible to gauge the level of change occurring in society, and that was to lead to the 2011 revolts. Little has been said thus far about the inner dynamics of protest movements – both peaceful and violent – and the impact that these have on the everyday life on citizens, with significant consequences for the regimes in place. Central to the preoccupations of this book is the notion that the consequences of the 2011 Arab revolts have still to be fully worked out, and that their shockwaves might be felt for much longer than one would have expected, as the anti-regime movements in Algeria and Sudan in 2019 demonstrated. What the 2019 protests in two seemingly stable authoritarian countries suggested is that there are various micro-dynamics operating at the local level that often go undetected, and that there is a need to pay greater attention to these. Among the factors that have permitted local and often marginal movements to impact broader politics has been the ability of non-elite agents to use social media platforms to challenge regime policies: an issue highlighted in this volume. From football fans chanting anti-regime slogans in stadiums to ordinary citizens using YouTube to express frustration at their poor living conditions, a number of previously marginal social and political actors managed to disrupt mainstream media and politics, giving more space and power to subaltern, as against dominant, publics;1 and the same patterns still characterise the politics of the Arab world, demonstrating that the effects of the 2011 revolts have not yet faded. The highlighting or downplaying of specific social and political contentions is connected to the role played by institutional media in shaping the trajectories and sometimes the outcomes of movements’ struggles and priorities, through the important processes of framing and agenda-setting, direct and indirect alliances between media and the institutions of power and the way in which these alliances contribute to the formation of both media narratives and political processes in complex, interdependent dynamics.