Insurgency Onlineis critical media theory for the twenty-first century.

Refusing a passive approach to understanding media,Insurgency Onlinedoes something more challenging and, in the end, far more rewarding. Intently studying genuinely revolutionary changes in the nature of mass media initiated by the massive, still-accelerating growth of electronic culture and the Internet,Insurgency Onlineexplores the impact of the Internet upon political resistance. Notice here that we are not in the old world of politics existing somehow outside the daily life of the media nor in the now-superseded world of mass media with its implicit assumption that politics is...

As the second Gulf War raged in March and April 2003, a struggle over perceptions of the conflict erupted in newspapers, cable television networks, and on the World Wide Web. Television viewers in the West repeatedly saw images of murals of Saddam Hussein being bulldozed, shot at, or otherwise obliterated. Photographs of Saddam were shown being smashed, shot at, and removed from prominent positions in public places in Iraq. A particularly hot spot in the battle of images was the Qatar-based Arabic-language television news network Al Jazeera, whose broadcast of U.S. prisoners captured by Saddam’s forces outraged the Pentagon and...

As the theories of Benedict Anderson, David Miller, and Tom Nairn illustrate, nationalism has spawned a wide-ranging literature. Nationalism does not resemble liberalism, conservatism, fascism, communism, socialism, or the other major political ideologies of the post-1789 political world. Nor does it fit the materialist assessments of both left and right. For much of the twentieth century, nationalism was seen as redundant, a sign of political and cultural underdevelopment that had been relegated to the sidelines of political history by a global capitalist-communist struggle. Both the United States and the USSR were multiethnic, multiracial, and multicultural entities in whichdifferenceand...

The marginalization of the concept of gender in discussions of politics and power is surprisingly persistent. Introductory politics textbooks often either ignore feminism or relegate it to a ‘special issues’ section. Schools of political science that range from libertarians to Straussians (followers of the philosopher, not the composer) explicitly dismiss gender issues as pandering to ‘political correctness’ or special interest groups. Imagine the surprise and consternation of savvy undergrads who come across Aristotle’s assertion that ‘it is a mistake to believe that the “statesman” is the same as the monarch of a kingdom, or the manager of a household, or...

As the RAWA and IRSM websites illustrate, Web activism is carried out to many ends by a range of non-state actors in both democratic and non-democratic societies. A common characteristic of the three online insurgent organizations discussed here is their call for far-reaching change in their host society and radical opposition to the existing political regime. They carry out politics in a transnational manner that highlights the relevance and reach of non-state actors in a post-realist global mediascape. In democratic societies, non-state actors as diverse as white supremacists, animal rights activists, or ethnic nationalists also use Web activist techniques to...

Bertolt Brecht once stated that ‘the radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life ... if it knew how to receive as well as transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him.’¹ Brecht recognized that two-way and multiple-user communication devices could transform society. Today, such devices are present in the form of desktop, laptop, and hand-held devices in many settings: integrating preexisting technologies such as computers and photography on a single platform; introducing new values, ideas, and interests in many contexts; privatizing information...