The Fourth Wave: Digital Media and the Arab Spring by Philip Howard and Muzammil Hussain (review)

Philip Howard and Muzammil Hussain’s The Fourth Wave is an important new contribution to the study of digital media and politics in the Middle East. While the subject of digital media in the Arab Spring has not wanted for scholarly attention, Howard and Hussain are the first to contribute a booklength, region-wide analysis focusing on the causal importance of this much-studied variable. Utilizing the “set theoretic” approach familiar from Howard’s earlier Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, the authors find that the importance of digital media varies from state to state in conjunction with a smaller set of variables including youth unemployment, regime censorship practices, and mobile phone penetration. Howard and Hussain argue that “our goal is not one explanation but a few parsimonious explanations that cover the most cases in the most sensible way” (p. 13). Each chapter of the book proceeds from this premise; rather than taking the familiar country-by-country approach, the authors move from country-to-country in the same chapter, providing important comparative context for the reader.

Howard and Hussain proceed by providing in-depth historical context on the use of social media, particularly in Egypt and Tunisia over the 15-year period preceding the Arab Spring, concluding that “Digital media became a proximate cause of political revolution precisely because a significant community of users was already comfortable using digital media before the crisis began” (p. 27). Particularly important was the fact that the Internet and social media opened up space for political dissent even where regime authorities cracked down on such activity. They also take note that the countries with the lowest levels of technology infrastructure and the weakest online civil societies — Libya, Syria, and Yemen — were precisely those whose Arab Spring protests devolved into protracted conflict. In telling this story, the authors also tackle the issue of causality, and using big data streams, conclude that “a spike in online revolutionary conversations often preceded major events on the ground” (p. 65), challenging the notion that social media conversations are merely reflections of what is happening on the ground. The authors also spend considerable time outlining different state responses to digital mobilization, as well as addressing the role of traditional media — primarily Al Jazeera — in providing an important outlet for disseminating the work of citizen journalists and gaining international buy-in. That is, social media were effective during the Arab Spring in large part because “pan-Arab satellite networks such as AJE rebroadcast them with amplifying effects that mobilized and enraged regional and international publics” (p. 102).

In the book’s final chapter, the authors offer two causal pathways toward collective mobilizations. The first path is for states with “high levels of income but poor internet diffusion and low Gini scores,” and includes Libya, Algeria and Saudi Arabia. The second path is for regimes with “high levels of unemployment, significant mobile phone use, and low levels of internet censorship,” and includes Libya and Oman (p. 113). Overall, the authors insist that “in every single case, the inciting incidents of the Arab Spring were digitally mediated.” Unlike many studies, Howard and Hussain include both qualitative comparative analysis as well as diverse data sources to bear on this claim, thus strengthening their analysis against digital skeptics. The strength of this analysis is that it avoids single-cause theorizing about the role of social media in any particular uprising, and provides a plausible set of causal combinations that might account for different trajectories across the region. Their conclusions, though, might also be usefully juxtaposed with explanations of different uprising trajectories that take into account authoritarian regime structures that have been excluded from their parsimonious model. For instance, while Libya and Syria featured weak online civil societies as the authors argue, they also featured regime structures that were based around ethnoreligious or tribal distinctions. Still, the authors capably pull off the task of both...