Social media,civil unrest and government responses: the Zimbabwean experience

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the discontent that increased against the Robert Mugabe led government as a result of grave socio-economic and political grievances, and in the context of accessible social media platforms which mobilised and empowered disenfranchised Zimbabweans to challenge the regime after the 2013 elections. Among other factors, the mounting discontent was caused by the belated payment of civil servants’ salaries, inability to create employment opportunities, refusal to enact electoral reforms, rampant corruption and the introduction of import ban restrictions. This led to the formation of civic organisations which demanded the resignation of Mugabe and these included, but were not limited to, #Tajamuka and #ThisFlag. In response, the Mugabe led government used rigid and repressive measures targeting the protesters, as well as traditional and social media platforms to safeguard itself.     

B: Reviews: review articles

THE OTTOMAN GULF: THE CREATION OF KUWAIT, SAUDI ARABIA AND QATAR. By Frederick F. Anscombe. New York, Columbia University Press, 1997. 270 pp., maps, $21.00/£14.00 (pb), $55.00/£38.00 (hb).

THE BLOOD‐RED ARAB FLAG: AN INVESTIGATION INTO QASIMI PIRACY, 1797–1820. By Charles E. Davies. Exeter, University of Exeter Press, 1997. 453 pp., illustrations, maps, £40.00.

THE POLITICS OF REGIONAL TRADE IN IRAQ, ARABIA AND THE GULF, 1745–1900. By Hala Fattah. SUNY Series in the Social and Economic History of the Middle East (11). Albany, NY, State University of New York Press, 1997. 254 pp., maps.

AN OTTOMAN CENTURY: THE DISTRICT OF JERUSALEM IN THE 1600s. By Dror Ze'evi, edited by Jere Bacharach. SUNY Series in Medieval History. Albany, NY, State University of New York Press, 1996. xii + 258 pp.

FABRICATING ISRAELI HISTORY: THE ‘NEW HISTORIANS’. By Efraim Karsh. London and Portland, Frank Cass, 1997. 210 pp., £25.00 (hb).

ISLAM AND MODERNITY: MUSLIM INTELLECTUALS RESPOND. Edited by John Cooper, Ronald Nettler and Mohammed Mahmoud. London and New York, I. B. Tauris, 1998. xii + 228 pp., £39.50.

DEFINING ISLAM FOR THE EGYPTIAN STATE: MUFTIS AND FATWAS OF THE DAR AL‐IFTA. By Jakob Skovgaard‐Petersen. Leiden, New York and Koln, Brill, 1997. vii + 420 pp.

CIVIL SOCIETY, DEMOCRACY AND THE MUSLIM WORLD. Edited by Elisabeth Özdalga and Sune Persson. (Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul Transactions Vol. 7.) Richmond, Curzon Press, 1997. 143 pp., £15.00.

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An Inquiry Concerning Liberty and Equality in the American Constitutional System

This essay is an examination of the theory of constitutionalchoice that was used to conceptualize and design the Americansystem of governance as grounded in liberty and justice. Theinquiry is pressed to deeper foundations concerning the methodof normative inquiry and presuppositions about how conflictcan be used to drive a due process of law and a due processof inquiry to achieve conflict resolution in a pluralistic systemof order.     

Déjà vu all over again?

He has recently conducted research for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment’s project, Communication Systems for an Information Age, and for the Canadian Ministry of Communication. His latest books are The Pay-Per Societyand, with Janet Wasko, The Political Economy of Information.     

State aid programs for equalizing spending across local school districts: does the structure of the program matter, or only it’s size?

This paper provides interesting insights into an important causal mechanism underlying Murray, Evans and Schwab’s (Am. Econ. Rev. 88(4):789–812, 1998) finding that court mandated reforms result in less inequality in spending per pupil levels across rich and poor school districts within a state. Treating the choice of an education program’s structure as endogenous, following the analysis of Leyden (Public Finance/Finances Publiques 47:229–247, 1992; Public Choice 115(1–2):83–107, 2003), yields empirical results suggesting that court mandated reforms increase the likelihood that a program’s structure will include a price effect and that the inclusion of a price effect in turn results in a decrease in spending inequality.     

Deadly foreign terrorism and the rank-ordered tournament for foreign press attention: implications for counterterrorism

Limiting the attention countries receive from the foreign press is thought to reduce the incidence of deadly foreign attacks, but by how much? We show that the incidence of deadly foreign terrorism increases as a nonlinear function of the level of foreign press attention states receive. As a result, the benefits of reducing foreign press attention to prevent deadly foreign terrorist attacks are uneven: some states stand to benefit more than others. Nevertheless, we also show that reducing press attention produces, at best, only minor reductions in the number of deadly foreign terrorist attacks states experience. These results suggest that reducing foreign press attention may not provide as much security as governments expect.