Online Activism in Contexts of War: Is There a #MeToo Echo in Libya, Syria, and Yemen?

The chapter examines legacy media and social media reporting of violence against women in Libya, Syria, and Yemen, which are located in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and part of the Global South. The time frame in this study focused on the aftermath of the Arab Spring of 2011 and the rise of the #MeToo movement in 2017. Though women played a large role in the Arab Spring of 2011 and pressed for equal rights, the shift in power in gender relations never arrived because conflicts and civil wars remained a part of daily life in these three countries. Using a framework of transnational and domestic feminism to research networks of collective action for institutional and social change (Relly & González de Bustamante, Global and domestic networks advancing prospects for institutional and social change: The collective action response to violence against journalists. Journalism & Communication Monographs, 19(2), 84–152. https://doi.org/10.1177/1522637917702618 , 2017), this chapter performed a qualitative data analysis of the content of #MeToo posts (N = 226) in Arabic (n = 174) and English (n = 52) on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. The analysis also extended to Google News content related to #MeToo and Libya, Syria, or Yemen from mid-October 2017 to the end of August 2021. The analysis explored key resistance search terms with hashtags in Arabic and English, which included #MeToo #أناكمان (Ena Kamen) and #YouAreNotAlone #لست_وحدك (Lassta Wahdek), #MeTooLibya, #MeTooSyria, and #MeTooYemen, which are offshoots of the #MeToo global hashtag movement. This chapter found that likely because of low rates of internet penetration, ongoing political conflict, and limited publicly facing resistance activities among women, there was minimal outward-facing collective resistance and social media activity in Libya, Syria, and Yemen for addressing violence against women in the #MeToo era.