Digital Knives are Still Knives: The Affordances of Social Media for a Repressed Opposition against an Entrenched Authoritarian Regime in Azerbaijan.
Article appearing in The Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics
- Author:
- Katy Pearce
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis
- Date: December 22, 2015
Professor Katy Pearce has written a chapter for The Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics. Political protests, campaigns, and communication in developed and developing nations now widely use Social Media, but available research has not yet paid sufficient attention to experiences beyond the US and UK. This collection tackles this imbalance head-on, compiling cutting-edge research across six continents to provide a comprehensive, global, up-to-date review of recent political uses of social media.
Professor Pearce co-authored Chapter 16 – Digital Knives are Still Knives: The Affordances of Social Media for a Repressed Opposition against an Entrenched Authoritarian Regime in Azerbaijan.
Excerpt
Twenty-first century authoritarian regimes manage and deter dissent in less overt force- ful ways than in the past, instead using more creative methods for repression of those that oppose them. Some argue that information and communication technologies can provide new opportunities for oppositionists to overcome barriers. This case study of authoritarian Azerbaijan will look at the challenges that regime critics face and how technology and social media can be leveraged to overcome these challenges, especially due to reduced costs of content creation and distribution as well as organising without co-location.