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Strategic Communication Management for Development and Social Change: Perspectives from the African Region

Tsietsi Mmutle, Tshepang Bright Molale, Olanrewaju Olugbenga Akinola, Olebogeng Selebi (eds.)

Cham: Palgrave Macmillan (2024), xix, 287 pp.

"This book is the first of its kind within the African region to combine scholarly perspectives from the fields of Strategic Communication Management and Communication for Development and Social Change. It draws insights from scholars across the African continent by unravelling the complementary nat ... more

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Documenting Syria: Film-Making, Video Activism and Revolution

Josepha Ivanka Wessels

London et al.: Tauris (2019), xiv, 321 pp.

"Since the 1970s, Syrian cinema masters played a defining role in avant-garde filmmaking and political dissent against authoritarianism. After the outbreak of violence in 2011, an estimated 500,000 video clips were uploaded making it one of the first YouTubed revolutions in history. This book is the ... more

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Authoritarianism, Digital Dissidence and Grassroots Media in the Middle East and North Africa Region

Josepha Wessels

CyberOrient, volume 13, issue 1 (2019), pp. 4-27

"As an introduction to this special issue of CyberOrient, this text provides an insight into ongoing research in studies of digital layers of revolutions, digital communication, and dissidence in the Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) region. Providing a short overview of the latest development ... more

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YouTube and Evidencing Warcrimes: The Role of Digital Video for Transitional Justice in Syria

Josepha Wessels

Tidskriftet POLITIK, volume 19, issue 4 (2016), pp. 30-52

"The enormous collection of user-generated content (UGC) in the form of YouTube videos from the Syrian war provides an unprecedented and diverse collection of shared digital memories of conflict and violence. The central question of this article asks what the value is of UGC on YouTube for legal evi ... dence of war crimes and future Transitional Justice. It is beyond doubt that the surge of uploaded videos from the Syrian uprisings revolutionized the way in which contemporary wars are observed and documented. The sheer amount of user-generated content online has given rise to manifold ways of interpreting what is happening on the ground, inspired creative resistance, led to a surge of professional and independent Syrian documentary films and increased the connectivity between those who undergo the war inside the conflict zone and those who are observing the situation from a safe distance. Many YouTube clips from Syria are likely to be rejected as stand-alone legal evidence though, as it often lacks sourced information about meta-data, date, time, geographical coordinates, identity of the participants, the identity of the perpetrator, and other contextual information crucial to establishing judicial facts for war crimes prosecution. The everexpanding body of videos from Syria will give rise to a wide and varied landscape of interactive media that has surpassed the old approach of political mainstream media to inform and possibly manipulate their audiences for their own agendas, whatever those may be. As a platform of digital memory and space to express moral outrage, YouTube served a crucial and important role in the Syrian crisis and the UGC is of immense value for digital memorialisation and historicization of the Syrian crisis. The vast amount of UGC on YouTube was categorized in 8 different types of footage and we can conclude that only small number of videoclips on YouTube can in fact function as crime-based evidence for war crimes. This does not mean that the UGC on YouTube has no value, however as a legal evidence it can be problematic to use YouTube videos if not corroborated and verified properly. The main issue is the lack of meta-data in many of the UGC on YouTube. The YouTube video revolution in Syria did bring to the surface many brave video activists who are now professionally involved in producing high quality footage for international news broadcasters, the most recent example of that is the important work of Waad al Kataeb inside eastern Aleppo with the British Broadcaster Channel Four News (Channel 4 2016). Through a series of edited 5-6 minute mini stories from the ground, Al Kataeb’s work provides a credible and important source of evidence." (Conclusion, page 22-23) more