Strategic maneuvering for political change

What is it about?

Most research on the Arab Spring in Egypt has concentrated on the speech events that accompanied the revolutionary actions taking place from January 25th to February 11th 2011, which resulted in bringing Mubarak and his regime down. Less attention was paid to the texts and discourses that paved the way for a radical political change. Of the latter category of texts, posts on Facebook, blogs, and other types of texts circulated through the internet were considered the most effective speech events in causing the minds of the masses to change and contribute to radical political change. Other texts and discourses paving the way for political change received less attention might be a consequence of the common belief that the revolutionary uprising of January 25th was fortuitous and not an outcome of a cumulative process of engaging in the public debate. This book sheds light on some anti-regime political columns that argued in favor of democratization making use of narrative and fictional forms.

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Why is it important?

It is a contribution to developing pragma-dialectics by applying the notion of strategic maneuvering to political columns that intensively use fictional and narrative techniques and forms. This monograph is an attempt to help argumentation theorists, linguists, analysts of narratives, and political scientists better understand and evaluate how fiction and narration can be effective means of persuasion in the domain of political communication. It therefore reconsiders the non-straightforward and artistic variants of the language of politics.

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