Commentary: How spontaneous are the revolutions currently sweeping the Middle East & North Africa?
The article "Revolution U" by Tina Rosenberg published in Foreign Policy Magazine last month, goes on to describe how the nonviolent protests currently sweeping the Middle East, particularly Egypt, though as spontaneous as they may have seemed, were actually a result of years of planning and organizing with military-like discipline and precision.
Although the Egyptian youth organizers of these protests may have initially used Facebook and Twitter to galvanise online sympathy and support, they soon realized the limits of social networking as a tool of democratic revolution: Facebook/Twitter could "bring together" thousands of people online under the cause, but it could not organize them once they logged off their computers.
Back in January, Mathew Ingram of GigaOM also argued that it was not Twitter or Facebook that seemingly caused the revolutions but the power of the network itself. Ingram cited perspectives from a wide number of observers, from Evgeny Morozov who argued that Facebook/Twitter should not be credited with playing any kind of critical role in the uprisings, to open-network advocate Dave Winer who makes the case that it is the Internet that is really the powerful tool here, not any of the specific services (such as Twitter and Facebook) that run on top of it.
Going back to Egypt, learning how to organize people on the streets in the country to overthrow the government of Hosni Mubarak, also came out of the playbook of an organization based in Belgrade, Serbia, called the Center for Applied NonViolent Action and Strategies, or CANVAS. This organization is run by a group of young Serbs who had cut their teeth in the late 1990s student uprising against Slobodan Milosevic, and now have a hand in supporting people-led movements to throw autocratic regimes around the world, from Harare to Rangoon to Minsk to Tehran.
The Foreign Policy article can be found here.
