"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 ... s of uprisings and street demonstrations in the region, the text reflects on similarities and differences between the various revolts currently taking place. Digital dissidence is part and parcel of these revolts. Zooming in on the Syrian case, this article assesses how the Syrian revolution and its digital components developed into the humanitarian crisis it has become after nine years of violence. The article then shortly reflects on the Sudanese revolution of 2019, which is seemingly the most successful uprising in the Arab world thanks to a strong digital component, as noted in the words of its own revolutionaries. This text then introduces two contributions to this special issue focused on, respectively, Egypt and the occupied Palestinian territories. The contest between what Layla Shereen Sakr calls “techies on the ground” and repressive regimes is compared to that of a race between a hare and a turtle, in which the techies continuously circumvent the attempts by the repressive regimes to curtail their means of digital communication and capacity for organizing collective action." (Abstract) more

"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