Women's Activism and New Media in the Arab World by Ahmed K. Al-Rawi (review)

In the Arab world, a region undergoing distressing setbacks in social movements and the painful defeats that emanate from counterrevolution, the issues of activism and gender are important, not least where these issues intersect with the question of media and mediation. Insights into the material realities, dependencies, and possibilities of the spaces and tools used by women and their organizations and a critique of the persistence of ideological paradigms around gender and democracy through technology in our disciplines require a drastic overhaul. My main aim in this review of Women's Activism and New Media in the Arab World is not to deeply dissect what the book describes. I am more concerned about the larger issues of the publication industry and ethical norms around gender-related knowledge production.

We know that "new media" is engendered by a sector ruled through a profit-based political economy. We also know that encouraging Information and Communications Technologies for Development and accepting economic development (read: free market policies) as solutions are still the guiding principles of a mind-boggling number of World Bank (WB),United Nations (UN), European Union (EU), and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development reports. Part of the hypothesis underwritten in these mega (UN, WB, International Monetary Fund) programs is that a gender gap is reflected by the gap caused by technology inequality known as the "digital divide." In other words, technology and gender are part of the epistemological agenda for global governance. This means research is already a step behind and burdened on both counts. On the one hand, there is no lack of mythology about technology, advancement, and cultural change. On the other hand, the rise of the digital humanities has not only set in motion but solidified a number of assumptions about skills and access to the public sphere. It is these digital tools that help women reach the global stage. These are, of course, also important, but they become mantras once divorced from the material and ideological realms that produce them in the first place. The ideas that technology should improve women's position and that liberal democracy should be developed as a venue for this are also key assumptions in Women's Activism and New Media in the Arab World.

Ahmed K. Al-Rawi provides an introductory account of the social and cultural status of Arab women and relies on resources from UN Women, UNICEF, and the UN Development Programme, as well as statistics about gender inequality in the Middle East and North Africa region. The methodology is heavily invested in quantitative data collected from social media outlets like Twitter (now X), Facebook, and YouTube. According to Al-Rawi, Arab women activists use social media to express their opinions and establish wider networks, influencing cultural change. Each chapter is framed by a particular form of gender politics—religious, political, social, or cultural activism—and for each case, he demonstrates how media technologies enabled positive changes and women's empowerment. The section on how the Arab uprisings empowered women and showed more assertive demands for political equality relies heavily on data gathered from online activist groups.

When we link the issue of technology or digital media (in this book, "new media") to the objectives of helping women bridge the gap between the domestic and the public spheres or allowing activists to anonymously use online platforms safely, we arrive at an interesting intersection of online engagement. The book reminds us that media allow women to mobilize and lead social movements more flexibly than offline activism. In a number of examples, we see that digital spaces also act as platforms for women to find their agency as changemakers and locate peers and role models. Digital media indeed allow for the construction of (distributed) networks of supportive communities and the opportunity to gain confidence or learn from each other. Finally, it is certainly the case that a new area...