Kings College London Conference

Kings College event 25/9/2019

The media, politics and dissent in North Africa since the Arab Spring

In partnership with the Institute of Middle Eastern Studies at King’s College London, the project organised its first major public. The one day conference examined the role of media in political uprisings and social movements in North Africa including a wide range of topics such as the media and political hybridity, activism challenging authoritarian resilience and the power of new online media. 

After an introduction by Pr. Jonathan Hill, Director of the Institute of Middle Eastern Studies and Dr Fatima el Issawi, Reader in Journalism at the University of Essex and the project’s PI, the first panel titled “The media and authoritarian resilience” tackled the complex relationships between media and politics in uncertain times of change with contributions from Francesco Cavatorta, Professor of Political Science at Laval University (Canada), Dr Kjetil Selvik, Senior Research Fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and the Peace Research Institute (Oslo) and Hendrick Kraetzschmar, Associate Professor in the Comparative Politics of the MENA at the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of Leeds. 

The second panel titled “The media and political accountability since the Arab Spring” explored the role of media in political accountability and democratization with contributions from Dr el Issawi, Aboubakr Jamai, leading Moroccan journalist and Dean of The School of Business and International Relations at the Institute for American Universities in France and Dr Roxane Farmanfarmaian, Academic Director for  International Relations and Global Studies, Institute of Continuing Education (ICE), University of Cambridge.

The third panel, “New medias, new dissent?” looked at the new media role in shaping new forms of social and political dissent with contributions from Dr Cristina Moreno-Almeida, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London, Omar Radi, Moroccan journalist and activist and Chaima Bouhlel, Tunisian journalist and civil society activist. 

An address by leading Algerian journalist Omar Belhouchet from El Watan newspaper on the repressive policies of independent media drawing on the Algerian case as well as media’s contribution to the current ‘Hirak’ movement, brought the day to a close.