Reframing Political Communication and Media Practices in the Middle East and North Africa [Hardcover]

A decade on from the Arab uprisings, debates continue to reiterate exceptionalist discourses about the region and its peoples which tend to deny individual agency. They also neglect long collective histories of mediated political cultures that have emerged within colonial and post-colonial structures and outside peripheries of formal power and politics. This book problematizes the relationship between politics and communication in the Middle East and North Africa region, paying attention to the diversity of communicative forms and political practices outside formal institutions and structures while remaining conscious of the power dynamics within institutional practices. Examining political communication in Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt, Morocco, Iraq, Syria, Turkey,Tunisa and Iran, the book's chapters challenge Western-centric theories and methodologies that dominate the broad field of political communication by reframing the discussions to include the politics of the marginal or the peripheral, the informal, and the grassroots.Dina Mataris a Professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, UK. She is the Chair of the SOAS Centre of Palestine Studies and the Centre for Global Media and Communication. She is Series Editor of the series Political Communication and Media Practices in the Middle East and North Africa, and SOAS Palestine Studies.

Dina Matar has assembled an outstanding array of scholars whose chapters in this volume reflect and respect the diversity of political communication in the greater MENA region. The authors thoughtfully examine the region's distinctively non-Western media environments, making the book a valuable addition to the literature of evolving media practices. Philip Seib, Professor Emeritus of Journalism and Public Diplomacy, University of Southern California, author of The Al Jazeera Effect.

There could hardly be a more important time for this collection to be pulC"