My Body is Here, My Mind is There: An Analysis of the Role of the Diasporic Community in Proto-Revolutionary Tunisian Cyberactivism

With this paper, I intend to analyze the role of specific group of political entrepreneurs, namely Tunisians living abroad, in the country's Internet political activist sphere. This study starts from the empirical observation that the collective blog Nawaat, which was managed by members of the diaspora, played a major role in the Tunisian revolution. In line with prior studies on the use of the Internet in transnational social movements, which highlighted its potential to coordinate loosely coupled networks over great distances, it is not surprising that protests against authoritarian regimes, for example in Tunisia, have benefited from support of dissidents living abroad via the Internet. This issue touches the broader question of how the Internet changes political agency, and how it empowers certain actors to the detriment of others. Diasporans feature several unique advantages, enabling them to engage politically, to build coalitions and to lobby in favor of their cause. In the early days of the Internet, they profited from the early availability of new technologies in their host countries, making them likely to be early adopters and thereby to form a digital elite in their respective blogosphere. This is linked to the fact that in most blogospheres, a small number of bloggers attract the majority of the traffic, due to its growth through preferential attachment, meaning that older, established blogs increase their popularity at the expense of the younger. The paper will consist of an exploration of the corpus of Tunisian websites, analyzing the links between political websites and blogs. This analysis will be complemented with interviews of key actors, investigating which actors participated at different Internet-driven campaigns, thereby demonstrating the centrality of the diaspora in the context of the proto-revolutionary Tunisian cyberactivism.