A decade after the Arab Spring - Comparing narratives around democracy and freedom in 2011 and 2021 through discourse analysis of English language news media and Twitter.

Abstract

This thesis argues that the English language was a useful tool for some of the participants and many of the observers of the Arab Spring. It demonstrates that while many of the narratives on both traditional and social media used or were shared by the English language, there is no correlation with the intent of the protestors, despite some of them reflecting western liberal democratic values. Furthermore, this research project argues that even those based in the MENA region used the English language to merely amplify their messaging while not necessarily seeking to mirror western liberal democracy in home countries. This thesis is a discourse analysis study of narratives surrounding democracy and freedom in English language coverage of the Arab Spring for the time periods January 1st, 2011, to March 31st, 2011, and January 1st, 2021, to March 31st , 2021. The study compares the mediums of news websites and Twitter to analyse how political language changes in different contexts in relation to three case-study countries- Libya, Egypt, and Lebanon. The newspapers chosen for this study are The Guardian, The New York Times, Al Jazeera English, and Al Arabiya. To conduct its analysis, this thesis has created a unique data corpus from the four news websites and Twitter using corpus linguistics as the methodological approach. It undertakes rigorous quantitative analysis of the data corpus resulting in the selection of materials for its qualitative analysis through political discourse analysis and thematic analysis. Building on existing research of the Arab Spring from both linguistics and political science, this thesis provides original interdisciplinary research, filling gaps in scholarship.