Social media and political change: The case of the 2011 revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt

Throughout the past decade, social media have come on the scene of various popular revolts. Their role as tools of information and coordination of social movements, from the Iranian Green Movement in 2009 to the Arab uprisings in 2011, has been widely debated. In most cases, online activism through blogs, Facebook, Twitter or other forms of social media has allowed citizens to be part of a social networking exercise and to engage in a public sphere that would have otherwise been unreachable to them due to severe repression. In Tunisia and Egypt, social media helped protests start and expand thanks to their ability to coordinate and disseminate information quickly. The new information and communication tools were an influential factor in accelerating the revolutionary processes across the Arab world, albeit they cannot be seen as neither the spur nor the drivers of any revolution.

Adapting established instruments to build useful food sovereignty indicators

The recent context of global food emergency and ecological crisis has increased the relevance of people’s struggle for food sovereignty (FSv), which promotes the transformation of the dominant food system and claims ‘the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems’. Revisiting two Spanish and Catalan articles developing FSv indicators, this article aims at discussing the need and utility of developing FSv indicators at different territorial levels. Confronting these two territorial scales, the paper also identifies common steps that can facilitate other future processes of building FSv indicators. As a conclusion, the paper suggests that these processes of building indicators can contribute to providing political direction at different geographical scales for the implementation of the FSv proposal. At the same time, they favor the movement’s self-reflexivity in its practices while supporting the collective shaping of future actions