Social Media and Its Relation to Social Tensions

When people think about social media, what generally comes to mind are memes, likes, information-sharing, and keeping in touch. However, according to Professor Chris Alden, Course Co-Designer on the Business, International Relations and the Political Economy online certificate course from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), there is a concerning flip side to this, especially when considering the relation of social media to social tensions on a global scale.

Transcript

Globalisation’s dynamism is a powerful force for change and, in some key respects, a disruptive one that can systematically undermine prevailing economic practices and social networks, and in some cases, even threaten the stability of the state itself.

If, as we have seen, populist protest is one reaction to the bewildering impact of globalisation, the challenges posed by globalisation can produce other reactions that potentially result in outbreaks of violence and conflict at the international level. New technologies and platforms, when coupled with novel means of communicating, like social media, can act as instruments for magnifying these problems by reaching out and mobilising new audiences.

Violence and conflict have many sources and expressions. According to Mary Kaldor, a professor of global governance at the LSE, the end of the Cold War may have reduced the prospects for inter-state war, but it created the conditions for the rise of intra-state conflict. Other academics suggest that sustained violence within states is motivated either by greed – the desire for access to resources by one social group – or grievance – sustained discrimination, persecution, or the exclusion of one social group. These motivations trigger violence, and can lead to armed separatist movements, like that of the Kurds in Turkey and its neighbouring states, who challenge state primacy. Another source of conflict that can exacerbate social tensions with dire consequences is rising inequality, a by-product of rapid economic growth experienced by many emerging economies.

Two contemporary examples illustrate how the effects of globalisation can induce conflict or foster cooperation. Firstly, the onset of democratisation movements that swept through North Africa and the Middle East from early 2011, which in some cases lead to the collapse of states and the rise of civil war, provides an example of the way that globalisation can exacerbate instability and conflict. Structural unemployment was especially pronounced amongst the youth in these regions, linked to the short-sighted macro-economic policies pursued by authoritarian governments in the region in what were, for the most part, closed economies.

A series of incidents triggered protests in countries like Tunisia and Egypt, fanned by the use of social media, that ultimately toppled their authoritarian governments. As protests swept Syria, terrorist groups like ISIS moved in to join the armed opposition in fighting the Assad regime, using social media to proclaim a “new caliphate” and recruit fighters from abroad. Turkish and Russian military forces were eventually drawn into what was now a civil war, as were military advisors from Western governments, while nearly 11 million Syrians fled to other countries to seek refuge. Criminal gangs took advantage of their plight, and the EU’s efforts to manage the refugee crisis proved to be controversial domestically, provoking a backlash in some of its member states.

Another example is the outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in West Africa in early 2014, spreading rapidly across the region and through infected air-travel passengers to Britain and the United States. This brought about an unprecedented global response. Poverty in Sierra Leone and other countries in the region contributed to weak public health systems that failed to contain the spread of the disease, and resulted in over 11,000 deaths by 2016. After an initial delay, these systems were bolstered by millions of dollars in financial support. Medical teams were sent in from China, the United States, and Europe, working alongside local health officials and the UN’s World Health Organisation to employ the necessary means to effectively bring the epidemic to a halt by 2017.

Without effective collaboration between these actors, the epidemic might have spread across other parts of the world.