Digital technologies have become increasingly important for solidarity politics across the world. The internet has been a counter-hegemonic space and tactical tool for marginalised groups from its inception. What role does it play for liberation politics?

 In the case of Palestine/Israel, Israel’s supporters worldwide are harnessing the same technologies and platforms to mobilize technology primarily to increase pro-Israel sentiments. To understand this paradox, Professor Aouragh problematizes ‘digital activism’ through the case of Palestine in this presentation and analyses the relationship of digital infrastructures and decolonisation through the prism of on-the-ground experience and power-relations. 

Social media has affected the basic algorithms of propaganda in unprecedented ways. It increasingly seems that digital suppression of solidarity for Palestine has underlined the image of Israel as a colonial power engaged in violent occupation. Drawing on ethnographic research over two decades in Palestinian and the Palestinian diaspora, Aouragh describes the empowering and alienating impact of digital technology. Digital infrastructures must be placed within the context of Israel’s colonialism. But as Palestinian internet is grounded in offline physicality and neoliberal economy, its political landscape requires a dialectical treatment: namely both the relationship between online and offline politics and between cyber colonialism and settler-colonialism. 

About the Speaker

Miriyam Aouragh (Professor of Digital Anthropology, University of Westminster, London) is an antiracism and trade union organiser. She studies how digital infrastructures shape the modes and meanings of resistance in the era of counter revolution and transformations. Grounded in complex dynamics in the WANA, she studies activist movements as conditioned by techno-social politics. Her ethnographic research in Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan and Morocco are part of publications include Palestine Online (IB Tauris 2011); with Hamza Hamouchene The Arab Spring a decade on: Revolution, Counter-Revolution and the transformation of a region (TNI 2022), Mediating the Makhzan : (r)evolutionary dynamics in Morocco (CUP 2025) ; with Paula Chakravartty Infrastructures of Empire (Sage 2024).