In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, diverse political actors across the MENA region — from armed groups and clerics to activists and politicians — flocked to social media to organize, reach their constituencies, and amplify their causes. As these actors create content and interact with others, they leave behind digital traces of their strategic communication and the networks through which it spreads. Taking advantage of this rich record of online behavior, we plan to develop an infrastructure for tracking shifts in political alliances, including extremism, sectarianization, and polarization, in countries across the Middle East.
This will allow us to monitor emerging threats to regional stability both in the immediate aftermath of events on the ground and over long-range time horizons. To reach this goal, we plan to carry out the following three research objectives: 1) creating a database of tens of thousands of political, economic, religious, and cultural elites’ online communication, eventually across 28 countries of the Middle East, with this first phase of the project focusing on four countries as a proof-of-concept; 2) developing scalable approaches to mapping and measuring shifting polarization, sectarianism, and extremism among these actors and their followers over time; and 3) training the next generation of analysts of Arab social media data to improve and continue scaling our approach to real-time threat monitoring in the MENA region.