Global Civil Society in Wartime: Text Analyses of Syrian Facebook Pages

• In Event: Media, Contention, and Conflict in the Middle East and North Africa

Abstract

The Syrian War has been described as “the most socially mediated in history” (Lynch et al. 2014). Beginning with the 2011 uprising, Syrians turned to social media platforms to express grievances, coordinate resistance, document events, and connect with Syrian and foreign audiences—creating a rich temporally granular record of the dynamics of social movements, conflict, and civic engagement. Drawing on an original dataset of over 5 million posts from 1300 public Facebook pages associated with formal organizations and informal groups of Syrians, we leverage supervised and unsupervised machine learning approaches and qualitative content analysis to explore questions related to the transnational character of wartime civil society. Who drives the discourse around the uprising—diaspora, refugee, or local groups? Do diaspora networks encourage militarization and radicalization, as existing scholarship suggests? Which cleavages, if any, distinguish groups, and why? Through these descriptive analyses, we contribute to literatures on transnational activism, wartime processes, and refugee studies. We elevate the voices and production of Syrians themselves to provide new insight into the largest forced displacement, and one of the most brutal conflicts, in recent history.

Authors

• Rana B. Khoury, Princeton University

• Alexandra Arons Siegel, University of Coloardo Boulder