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Authoritarianism in the information age: state branding, depoliticizing and ‘de-civilizing’ of online civil society in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates

ABSTRACT Much academic and media attention has been focussed on states’ development of powerful surveillance capabilities to police the online space in recent years. In authoritarian contexts, these technologies serve to identify political dissidents and remove them from the sphere of public discourse for the sake of regime survival. However, this paper argues that direct repression is but one application of coercive technologies; authoritarian states are simultaneously pursuing longer-term strategies in the online space aimed at influencing citizens’ conduct and generating discourse that aligns with regime priorities. Drawing on a theoretical framework conceptualizing the civil society-politics nexus in the specific context of emerging communications technologies, the paper comparatively evaluates the attempts of two Arab Gulf monarchies, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, to depoliticize and de-civilize online debate through promoting regime-friendly narratives that expose, criticize, crowd-out, delegitimize and ultimately deter political dissidents. Evidence is collected from a broad range of literature on digital authoritarianism, as well as original open-source research analysing relevant social media content in the Gulf states.