Of Note: Bloggers as Actors in International Affairs?

In contrast to Washington, D.C., which serves as a nexus of international political and economic influence on the American policymaking process, the capitals of many Arab states are the sites of secretive policymaking with processes that are opaque even to most experts. The kind of information control exercised by the governments of most Middle Eastern states is at odds with the diffusion of power and avenues of influence that are emerging in the capitals of powerful nations and regional blocks. In countries like Syria, decisions about the state’s most important policies are made by a small elite consisting largely of blood relatives. News of these decisions filters down to the populace and to international actors primarily through the mechanism of state-controlled newspapers, which present and omit issues exactly as their governments see fit. Phone calls are monitored, many foreign newspapers are banned, and access to many websites is blocked.

Such policies are aimed preserving the primacy and security of the state by limiting the ability of individuals to organize against it. This task is often accomplished in broad strokes; Facebook, YouTube, Google Maps, and Wikipedia are among a long list of websites that the government in Damascus has banned. But state control in Syria is often accomplished through decidedly low-tech methods. In Damascus, internet café owners receive photocopied instructions that describe a host of activities deemed illicit by the state; it is not uncommon for security service officers to stop by and enquire about any ‘suspicious activity’ on the part of café patrons. But any serious Syrian internet user can rattle off a long list of proxy server sites that allow him or her to circumvent government controls. While much of Syrian internet users’ maneuvering is aimed at writing on friends’ Facebook walls or downloading old episodes of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” these methods are also used to access and distribute oppositional political information more quickly and safely than was possible in an earlier age.

Some degree of information control is a necessary condition for the maintenance of autocratic power, especially for a state like Syria that has an ethnically distinct ruling group that is disliked by much of the population under its control. Yet while the internet and the patterns of communication that it has spawned continue to pose particular challenges for autocratic states, the internet has also limited the effectiveness of all states—autocratic or not—to control or shape the information disseminated about them. During its recent incursion into the Gaza Strip, for example, Israel hoped to minimize international fallout from the invasion by limiting the access of Western reporters to the territory. The Israeli government took a page from the media control tactics of its Arab neighbors, barring Western journalists from entering Gaza. This policy stood until an Israeli Supreme Court decision asserted the right of foreign journalists to access Gaza—over a week after the official end of hostilities. But the result of this infringement of access to information only mirrored the failures of Israel’s neighbors to contain inconvenient information. Bloggers in Gaza gained a new level of prominence during the invasion, becoming a source of detailed information that formal medial institutions were blocked from gathering themselves. The BBC, for example, turned to informal media (or “citizen journalism”) for its news on Gaza, distributing the footage of its former cameramen to millions of viewers throughout the world.

Given the rising importance that public and international opinion have on a state’s ability to effectively wage wars, new media pose a challenge to the state’s pursuit of its interests by giving dissident voices new and effective tools with which to poke holes in official narratives. Paradoxically, perhaps, new media also pose problems for the creation of democratic institutions in those same societies—at least insofar as blogging and other forms of new media contain their own problems with transparency and fact-checking. Nevertheless, while the proliferation of internet technology looks unlikely to occasion a wholesale rearrangement of the state system, it is creating new opportunities for opposition in states whose leaders take great pains to suppress...