Big Brother. The Weapons of Mass Influence of Saudi Arabia and the Emirates

 Valery Brozhinsky/Shutterstock Valery Brozhinsky/Shutterstock

Big Brother. The Weapons of Mass Influence of Saudi Arabia and the Emirates

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[In Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East, researcher Marc Owen Jones deciphers the new digital tools that support the Saudi and UAE regimes’ drift from authoritarianism to dictatorship. These textbook cases illustrate formidable strategies for controlling information and monitoring populations. Interview with Claire Beaugrand.]

Claire Beaugrand.: After the publication of your previous book, Political Repression in Bahrain [2020, Cambridge University Press] what made you write this book?

Marc Owen Jones.: In many ways my new book was a natural progression from Political Repression in Bahrain. Political repression is all about how hegemonic forces attempt to weaken or destroy social movements and opposition, and a key aspect of political repression that I defined in my book on Bahrain was information controls. Information controls are the use of media, surveillance, and other means of shaping the information space to weaken resistance to a particular entity. They aim to persuade, convince, or deceive opposition forces, and give the differential power of knowledge to the hegemonic order.

C. B.: How are these two works connected and/or how do they depart from each other?

M. O. J.: Digital Authoritarianism is simply a more specific focus on this aspect of repression. Studying Bahrain at the time of the 2011 uprising revealed the emerging role of social media and digital technology in state control strategies. At a time when people were asking whether the internet and social media would offer a path to democratisation, I was studying how it was being deployed as a tool of control and censorship. My latest book takes this idea further, and while the theoretical framing of information controls is narrower than political repression, the case study is broader, covering numerous countries in the Middle East, and across the globe, instead of just Bahrain. So, it is theoretically more focused, and regionally broader.

C. B.: What topics, issues, and literature does it address? What are your main findings?

M. O. J.: The book is highly empirical, and documents in detail a number of the many investigations I have undertaken into fake news and disinformation campaigns across the Middle East. It draws on literature around disinformation and propaganda, but also authoritarianism and neoliberalism. It makes several arguments but key among them is that the Middle East, while often overlooked in disinformation literature, should be seen as a key exporter of disinformation. The Gulf in particular, I argue, is going through a ‘post-truth’ moment. Trump’s maximum pressure on Iran, the Gulf Crisis, the rise of MBS [Muhammad bin Salman], all prompted social and political changes that necessitated and/or been accompanied by the need for persuasion campaigns. Indeed, such influence campaigns are a key part of big political decisions, such as conflicts or large shifts in foreign or domestic policy – all of which have occurred in the past 10 years.

I also argue that as a result, both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are deception superpowers, i.e., they have the technology and will to launch influence operations on three fronts – domestically, regionally, and internationally – in a sustained and evolving manner. I also suggest the trajectory of digital authoritarianism, coupled with the emerging sultanism of MBZ and MBS, is turning the region away from authoritarianism, and more towards tyranny. Indeed, digital technology can fundamentally shape the nature by which we might define regime type, as it allows hitherto impossible access to people’s private lives. I also argue these regimes, in collaboration with Western PR [Public Relations] and tech companies, are forming disinformation supply chains and authoritarian synergies. Indeed, digital technology helps despatialise authoritarianism, Gulf countries are increasingly deploying these assets beyond the Middle East, to the West, and beyond. ces outils hors du Proche-Orient, vers l’Occident et encore au-delà.

C. B.: Is there a specificity of your chosen case studies or could your conclusions be applied to other GCC states or other states, authoritarian or not, more broadly?

M. O. J.: The basis for selection was really based on inductive analysis of social media, in particular Twitter. The most virulent and voluminous disinformation appeared to come from accounts representing foreign policy interests of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. This was true as far afield as Libya and Somalia, Iraq, and the United States. An aspect of the argument is that these rich Gulf states can mobilise their high technological penetration rates and large populations to try and dominate the Arabic language information space. In many ways, the new digital authoritarianism is an extension of traditional efforts by rich Gulf states to co-opt the Arabic information sphere. While before this was done by paying off journalists and buying up satellites and media companies, the new form it takes is finding ways to dominate social media using fake accounts, surveillance, bots, and corporate espionage.

New political realities also facilitate digital authoritarianism, normalization with Israel is allowing the more permissive transfer of technologies such as Pegasus, which is used by regimes to target their political enemies and securitise all forms of private life. I argue for the creation of digital power. Like conventional warfare, large states with bigger armies are theoretically more powerful. In the case of digital technology, countries like the UAE and Saudi Arabia (in terms of Arab states), are resourcing their digital control infrastructures more so than other GCC states.

C. B.: How do see or evaluate the changes induced by social media in the Gulf?

M. O. J.: This is a large question, but the underlying argument is that social media use very much reflects the confluence of local political factors, along with the idea of ‘neoliberation technology’. Here ‘neoliberation technology’ is my ironic take on ‘liberation technology’, the misguided idea that technology will liberate people from authoritarianism. The discourse of liberation technology is reminiscent of the civilising mission discourse that technology will ‘solve’ problems and bring democracy, and thus its proliferation is a utilitarian force. In fact, these companies, like many other companies, are profit-orientated, and they do not desire barriers to selling their product. Thus, authoritarians and tech companies both share a key thing in common, a desire to know more and more about their populations. For big tech, it must sell this data to advertisers, for authoritarians, it is to better control the populations. This confluence of neoliberalism and ‘liberation’ discourses are the basis of neoliberalism technology, the normalisation of technology into our lives that benefits increase destruction of our private spheres, and thus increasing potential for authoritarianism or exploitation of citizens. This transnational collaboration forms the basis for the despatialisation of digital authoritarianism.

[This article was originally published by Orient XXI on 15 June 2022.]

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412