Media, Social Activism and the Women’s Driving Ban in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

This study aims to understand the role of media in activating the social movement against the Saudi women’s driving ban (WDB). Specifically, the current study attempts to explore the role of both print media [newspapers] and social media [Twitter] as platforms to activate and mobilize the social movement for lifting the WDB in Saudi Arabia. The research takes a social constructionist approach to understand the presentation of the WDB social movement through the lens of the local cultural and social norms and values which are embedded within media presentation of the WDB campaign. As a first data collection method from Twitter, this study utilises the hashtag #Women2Drive. The social media crawler and text analysis tool Discover-text are used to gather not only a large number of relevant tweets but also to provide the opportunity to use random sampling to obtain a specific sample for data analysis. The collected data is analysed using discourse analysis, which can be used for written, as well as spoken language in a specific social context. Based on the findings from the discourse analysis, the researcher identified various major themes. One such is Saudi women’s empowerment; and the study discusses in detail how Twitter was used by women activists to gain support so that they could raise awareness, pressurize the government and gain influence to get their driving rights. Discourse analysis was also applied to examine how different news reports published in printed media contributed to the lifting of the WDB in Saudi Arabia. There is a wide range of evidence about how news media and Twitter were used to activate and mobilize the social movement for lifting the WDB. It was also found that women’s rights were granted in order to meet the agenda of the Kingdom, as the government was fully committed to fulfilling their Vision 2030 women’s empowerment goals. Therefore, the government allowed activists to discuss the issue through Twitter as well as other news media such as Arab News. This study has various theoretical and practical contributions which increase its valuein the field. The first theoretical contribution is to consider the activity on Twitter networks in the light of social movement theory to understand how the engagement of international and national influencers played an important role in online activism that increased the success of the WDB social movement in Saudi Arabia. This study provides insights into how Saudi women struggled to get their basic rights such as driving, and how both the traditional media and pressure built on Twitter supported the women’s online activism that helped them to get their driving rights as well as generating opposition to lifting the WDB in a male-dominated culture which is deeply affected by traditional values around honour. The second theoretical contribution is that the use of social movement theory has helped to understand the role of social media in a woman-centric social movement in the KSA. Recommendations for future studies around women’s empowerment in Saudi Arabia are made. For example, there is a need to conduct research on the motivations of Saudi women to empower themselves in areas such as work and to understand the factors that motivate or inhibit Saudi women from diverse income backgrounds to get empowerment. The practical contributions of the study include an insight into the roles of different elite and non-elite participants in social movements and the roles these participants might usefully play in progressing policies on the empowerment of underprivileged groups, such as women in Saudi Arabia. Also, the study provides insights into how social media platforms like Twitter generate spill-over effects and drive a social movement, these insights can help policy makers to capitalise on the positive effects of a movement and minimise its negative effects. Thirdly, the study shed light on how the technological features of social media can be used in social networking to effect social change.