Worldmaking

Shortly after Egyptian security forces detained well-known Egyptian-American blogger and columnist Mona Eltahawy last Wednesday night in the Egyptian Interior Ministry in Cairo, she managed to tweet five chilling words to her more than 60,000 followers: “beaten arrested in Interior Ministry.” Her tweet went out at 8:44 pm Eastern Standard Time (3:44 am in Cairo). At 9:05 pm, I got a direct message on Twitter from the NPR strategist Andy Carvin, who covers English-language social media from Arab protests, telling me of Mona’s tweet. After responding to him, I immediately sent an email to my former colleagues at the State Department. Within another hour, I’d heard back and was able to tweet that the U.S. Embassy in Cairo was on the case. Nick Kristof, citing his own contacts at the State Department„ sent out a similar message to his million-plus followers. By then, #FreeMona, a hashtag Carvin had started to help track the disparate efforts to help Mona, was already trending worldwide on Twitter. A few hours later, Mona was free, although with two broken bones and a traumatic story of sexual assault. Maged Butter, an Egyptian blogger who had been arrested with Eltahawy, was also released. A debate about the role of Twitter and whether or not it helped win Mona’s release has already been joined by Andrew Rasiej and Evgeny Morozov. The ever-perceptive and thoughtful Zeynep Tufekci wrote a long post reflecting on the nature of this intervention. Adrija Bose also wrote on the episode at FirstPost, as did Alix Dunn at the Engine Room. I will not join that debate directly here, but the incident provides the perfect hook for a piece that I have been wanting to write for a while about the nature of power on the foreign policy frontier. (via A New Theory for the Foreign Policy Frontier: Collaborative Power - Anne-Marie Slaughter - International - The Atlantic)