Dina Matar, ed., Reframing Political Communication in the Middle East and North Africa (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you edit this book?
Dina Matar (DM): As a scholar focused on political communication in my teaching and research, I had been concerned by the serious gap in critique of mainstream political communication scholarship in reference to the Middle East and North Africa. Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza that began in October 2023 accentuated this gap, bringing into stark focus the fact that colonial wars and/or conflict as lived realities for populations in the region have been absent from the mainstream literature on political communication, which continues to focus on the functioning or non-functioning of public spheres or the relationship between media and democracy. The edited collection, as I write in the introduction, is an overdue academic/activist intervention amid the persistence of exceptionalist discourses about the region and its peoples that neglect long collective histories of mediated grassroots political cultures that have emerged within colonial and post-colonial structures and outside peripheries of formal power and politics. At another level, I wanted to intervene in the debates about “decolonization” which obscure the complex nature of colonization and prevent us from seeing similarities between countries that were colonized and those that were not.
This collection is not a passive academic endeavor, a theoretical or speculative undertaking, but is intended to reframe the thinking of the dynamics between communication and politics beyond dominant approaches that remain bounded by Eurocentric privileging of the media as an anchor in social practices, emerging within the bounded worlds of media organizations and structures. These structures are more pervasive with the rise of AI-assisted authoritarianism and war, seen in its most vicious forms in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. And yet, as many contributors in this volume show, the relationship between politics and communication is at its most dynamic in the continuous meaning-making productive labor of and by ordinary people within and beyond these structures, offering us openings to consider new terminologies in relation to decolonizing, internationalizing, and de-Westernizing the field.
In my career as a journalist, I wrote about ordinary people and what they do. My first monograph as an academic, “What it Means to be Palestinian” (2010), is a collection of personal stories and lives undergoing rupture and dispossession. In this collection, I reflect on Gaza and Palestinian story-telling and witnessing as acts of political communication intended to dislodge dominant ways of seeing and telling and raising questions about legitimacy, authority, credibility and voice. The margin for me offers a third space through which to contribute to the debates on de-colonization.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
DM: The book addresses political communication as a theory and a practice, offering through its nine chapters a critique of the fit-for-all assumptions of mainstream political communication studies. It also addresses the relationship between politics and communication as one of continuous struggle over the political communication arenas between the state and its citizens, the power elites and the marginal, and post-colonial societies and former colonies—the Western metropoles of power that continue to intervene materially, politically, and discursively in the region.
The chapters are a mixture of theoretical, conceptual chapters and case studies of communicated political practices and, as such, they are not collated under thematic sections. Gholam Khiabany continues the discussion around what is meant by problematizing the field of political communication in the MENA region through a critique of the academic trend to embrace de-colonization without fully addressing global capitalism and war. Khiabany then turns to his native Iran to discuss political communication as a central practice of the Iranian state in its continuous bid to define “national culture,” promoting certain traditions and heritage and discarding/marginalizing/demonizing other histories, traditions, and aspirations.
In my chapter on Palestine, I discuss the war on Gaza and the ubiquitous, precarious, non-organized Palestinian storytelling and witnessing in diverse platforms, which, together with the more organized field of Palestinian oral history, are productive spaces through which a de-colonial politics in the margin is produced and co-produced—not only to subvert the violent epistemic and material erasure of Palestine, but also to destabilize Western-centric political communication approaches.
Writing about Turkey, Taner Dogan offers a historically focused theoretical discussion of the role of ideology and self-Orientalism in political communication practices in the country over a century. Mohamed Ayish offers a critique of Western-centric approaches to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states and discusses how Western academic and policy discourses often depict GCC states as “undemocratic rentier states governed by affluent autocrats.” Dounia Mahlouly examines the challenges to press freedom in Morocco and the use of smear campaigns to target independent journalists as practices of political communication, while also providing a socio-political context that discusses how the Makhzen (the Moroccan state) had promoted a culturally conservative moralism disguised as liberalism to hijack the progressive values of the independent press and create an illusion of political legitimacy. Zahera Harb discusses the discursive war in Lebanon and hate speech disseminated and promoted by politicians as a tool in unethical political communication, a form of negative and retaliatory campaigning that tends to attack one’s opponent with aggressive messages while threatening voters with the dreadful consequences of not supporting the message producer. Aida Kaisy explores bottom-up political communication practices in Iraq by concentrating on the independent media al-Jummar. Sahar Khamis and Amal Bakry use a critical feminist lens to address Egyptian women’s long-standing struggles, beginning with the 2011 revolution as a dual socio-political struggle aimed at resisting multiple layers of marginalization and invisibility on multiple levels. Fatima el-Issawi turns to the post-uprising Tunisian public sphere which she argues is rife with antagonism and forms of othering.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
DM: This book continues my work on non-Western political communication that I began with my research on Hizbullah’s political communication strategies and continued with the edited book Narrating Conflict in the Middle East (2013). In all my research and output, I consider the different marginal spaces of producing politics in the region. I wrote on the Syrian uprising and the use of narratives for mobilization, on Palestinian cultural activism during the 1960s and 1970s, poster art, on Western media bias and silencing of Palestinians, and on memory through oral history.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
DM: Scholars, students, policy makers, and journalists.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
DM: I am currently co-editing a Handbook on War and Media, contracted by Routledge and due to be submitted by April 2026. I am writing a chapter on decolonizing media and war scholarship and am planning to begin research for a new book on Palestinian activism and diaspora. I am also co-editing a book called Archiving Gaza in the Present (Saqi, forthcoming) with Dr Venetia Porter.
J: What can Palestine contribute to political communication scholarship?
DM: Palestine has also always been an issue of global concern and an issue of politics and communication. In the contemporary period, and particularly since the beginning of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Palestine’s place in the global political imagination has never been more central or more crucial. As the most pressing case of visible mediated and documented settler-colonial cultures of cruelty and extreme violence, Palestine offers us a new language to address the confluence of politics and communication that is not only revolutionary in terms of its epistemic potential, but also in terms of the possibilities if offers for colonized and marginalized subjects to imagine their futures.
In political communication scholarship, Palestine offers us tools to oppose the persistence of coloniality in the field and to address the relationship between imperialism, communication, and the centrality of war. Palestine can help us insist on talking of the contemporary moment as “an anti-colonial moment” that intervenes in the making of and engagement with global and transnational subversive politics for change and in the emergence of alliances between global anti-colonial struggles that share histories of oppression and resistance alike. Palestine tells us that the field is not disconnected from the violent conditions on the grounds in Gaza, nor is it disconnected from critiques of so-called free media that occlude and obscure mass violence, enabling and reproducing liberal democracies by justifying some lives grievable and others not quite human enough, and therefore dispensable. The long tradition of Palestinian political resistance is deeply intertwined with politically engaged critical theory. Palestinian thinkers have played a crucial role in anti-colonial and feminist critique globally, including our own field’s critical understandings of media, culture, and technology. As such, the history and present of the mediated Palestinian struggle can inform our scholarship and pedagogy.
Excerpt from the book (from the Conclusion, pages 189 to 195)
Problematizing the study of political communication, as theory and practice, in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is an open-ended intellectual and practice-oriented endeavour that involves continuous self-reflexive critique and a conscious disentanglement from dominant paradigms that have defined the field. This volume contributes to this endeavour as part of the broader project of decolonizing the Western-centric field of political communication, a project that has already put some roots in emerging scholarship in relation to Africa and in scattered studies elsewhere.
Bringing together established and emerging authors, the volume with its nine chapters collectively begins the process towards problematizing and reframing the fit-for-all assumptions of mainstream political communication studies while also addressing the relationship between politics and communication as one of continuous struggle over the political communication arenas between the state and its citizens, the power elites and the marginal and post-colonial societies and former colonies – the Western metropoles of power that continue to intervene materially and discursively in the region.
The book is underpinned by two interrelated propositions; the first is the insistence on keeping the continued legacies of colonialism and imperialist intervention at the centre of discussions about the contexts and operations of all modes and genres of communication in the region; and the second is the need to move beyond the rhetorical politics of binaries that have defined the dynamics between the West and the Rest, or the Global North and the Global South. These propositions allow us to look for Khiabany suggests in this volume is a critical “third voice” that goes beyond the binary divides that have defined the relationship between the West and the Rest while keeping in sight the political intentions and aims of those insisting on keeping the divides. Several chapters in this volume show that a critical third voice can be located in the diverse and expanding digital and non-digital spaces for communicating the political, what might be called third spaces of hybridity and in-betweenness that marginalized and underrepresented groups and communities occupy and use to challenge assumptions about them and contest the political.
In her chapter discussing Palestinian quotidian storytelling and witnessing and oral history work, Matar argues for re-centring the margin to locate a third voice that speaks beyond elite narratives of what the political should be and who engages in it. The margin, she argues, is a productive/agentive space in which Palestinians, as historically marginalized and oppressed people, constantly produce an anti-colonial politics that subverts the violent epistemic and material erasure of Palestine by a settler-colonial regime waging a war against them. The margin, in this case, functions as a third space for the everyday production of the political as a necessary means for countering marginalization and confronting Israel’s persistent violence, which since Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza that began in October 2023, had become even more materially tangible and destructive in its ferocity and intent.
A third voice also comes across in the discursive and material struggle surrounding the mediated political weaponization of sexual charges in Morocco where, as Mahlouly writes in her chapter, the ideology of state feminism adopted by the Makhzen (the state) has consistently exploited divergent ideologies to portray public authorities as simultaneously liberal and steadfastly committed to the notion of national sovereignty. By positioning themselves in opposition to the international human rights framework, the rhetoric of state feminism ostensibly addresses criticisms previously articulated by Islamist female activists. However, as she writes, these assertions align more closely with a populist manifestation of patriarchal nationalism, which depicts the state as persistently engaged in a struggle for autonomy, thus seemingly resonating with the audience's postcolonial identity struggles while obscuring the state's complicity in the realities of neocolonialism.
In their discussion of feminism and activism in Egypt post-2011, Khamis and Bakri address the emerging hybrid and eclectic realities they suggest represent a third symbolic space between established binaries - repression and liberation, tradition and modernity, the old and the new, the top-down and the bottom-up, the political and the social, mainstream media and citizen journalism, and the online and the offline - in a rapidly evolving and transformative political communication landscape. In Iraq, Kaisy discusses the alternative news media organization Jummar launched in post-war context which provides a third space for producing a third voice - that of an emerging professional journalism field that problematizes in practice dominant international norms of journalistic practice in contexts of politicized media ownership. In Tunisia, suffering from serious political setbacks to the 2011 revolutionary promise, Issawi suggests that the choice of a consensus model for the Tunisian transition has led to emptying politics from its meaning and the emergence of a weak political opposition and a dysfunctional state system in which policies became mere power tactics. In the communication realm, this model led to chaotic attempts to embed impartiality in news coverage; the resulting media bias was driven by severe media instrumentalization, on the one hand, and by the eagerness of most journalists to claim their subjectivity, as being a main definer of their identities, on the other hand. Harb and Kaisy, in their chapters on Lebanon and Iraq, two Arab countries suffering from persistent sectarianism and post-war traumas, use what might be called a methodological third voice in their respective case studies - Harb through her practice-based workshops she organized and convened to help journalists in Lebanon deal with hateful political communication, an emerging phenomenon in the country and elsewhere, while Kaisy uses the case of Jummar, which she founded, to discuss the potential for journalism in the country.
No single volume can do justice to political communication as praxis in the region and its diasporas nor comprehensively attend to what the struggle over the political communication arena is about in different conjunctures and histories, whether this is a struggle over identities, power, structures, lives and imaginations, which transcend borders and territories. Indeed, as discussed in some chapters in this volume (Khiabany, Matar) the political mobilization of the MENA’s divergent and expanding diasporas cannot be excluded from any discussion of political communication particularly because diasporic populations are increasingly engaged in mediated political mobilizations against oppression and subjugation, as we see in the contemporary mobilizations by Iranian digital activists responding to the continued encroachment of the Iranian state in people’s lives and imaginations; the growing global pro-Palestinian solidarity movements that have expanded in reach and size since Israel’s war against Gaza and that have intervened in the politics of the Western metropoles of power; and the digital mobilization by Sudanese and Syrian diasporas, particularly political exiles, against continuous regime oppression against ordinary people.
Likewise, no single volume can provide definitive answers to how a de-colonial political communication field in the MENA region could look like as this field, by its nature, is an evolving field that responds to and emerges within temporalities and conjunctures that remind us of the necessity and the urgency to counter the colonial project. This volume hopes to have begun a process of problematizing and reframing the language and terms of political communication, taking inspiration from the region’s peoples and their capacity to inform our thinking about the possibilities of new politics through disruption and change. As Gopal reminds us, “the terrain of decolonization was a constitutively contested, even fractious one in which competing visions of post-colonial entities jostled for a hearing and for primacy”. As such, the terrain “was not reducible to one set of elites handing the levers of state to another. The targets of critique were also varied and included both native tyrannies and nationalist elites as they were colonial rulers, just as much indigenous capitalism as foreign firms”. Whether the project of de-colonization can be “a program of complete disorder” (Fanon) is unclear not definitive, but what is clear is that problematizing dominant theories and practices is a process that unsettles structures.
Writing more than 10 years ago about the necessity of an Arab Cultural Studies, Tarik Sabry suggested that de-colonial perspectives must be able to shift the terms and language as a kind of ‘epistemic dislocation’ that is conscious of its own histories and that is cognizant of the structures and processes of communication deeply embedded within wider structures and processes of persistent colonialism and imperialism. Indeed, as a starting point, such an epistemic dislocation must contend with the colonial legacy of labelling the region as the MENA region and with the stuckness of this label – this is a label that portrays the region as a coherent, self-sealed, and self-explanatory space that has too often been perceived as being in the grip of an authoritarian spell that had slowed down the flow of time. Indeed, the myth of authoritarian regeneration and survival is so deep that the Arab uprisings of 2011 came as a shock. What is forgotten is that the peoples of the region have always been engaged in upending power and fighting injustices.