STATE CRIME, CIVIL SOCIETY AND THE USE OF DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY IN COUNTER-HEGEMONIC STRUGGLES: A CASE STUDY OF EGYPT’S MOSIREEN MEDIA COLLECTIVE

Abstract

The thesis traces the rise of Mosireen, a non-profit media collective, within the parameters of revolutionary and post-revolutionary Egypt’s public sphere. It highlights how the Mosireen Collective strategically co-opted the infrastructure of the internet during critical periods of the Egyptian revolution as a tool of resistance to fight injustice, expose human rights violations and restore some semblance of accountability. Moreover, it explores Mosireen’s innovative online / offline digital activism which enabled formerly marginalized publics to access new modes of information and challenge elite-driven discourses, thereby contributing to the ‘democratization’ of the public sphere. The thesis further investigates Mosireen’s emancipatory use of technology where the creation of an oppositional framework not only sustained ‘resistance from below’ movements but also seemed to open up new potentialities for counter-hegemonic spaces and alternative discursive frameworks of society. The thesis provides a rich case study in how ideological struggles and questions of power are interpreted within the broader realm of Egyptian civil society with a particular focus on the power of visual production and its effect on the development of digital counter-publics. Finally, the limitations of the public sphere under neo-liberal capitalism are contextualized and critiqued within the context of the Mosireen Collective and broader digital resistance movements. Through a visual analysis of Mosireen’s online archive, this research makes an original contribution by conducting an in-depth investigation into the efficacy of citizen media in exposing human rights violations and state crime in Egypt.