• Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.15-39
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• 2014

This research conducted a before/after naturalistic field experiment, with the early Arab Spring as the treatment. Compared to before the early Arab Spring, after the observation period the associations became stronger among the Web terms: 'Jihad, Sharia, innovation, democracy and civil society.' The Western concept of civil society transformed into a central Islamist ideological component. At another level, the inter-nation network based on Jihad-weighted Web hyperlinks between pairs of 46 Muslim Majority (MM) nations found Iran in one of the top two positions of flow betweenness centrality, a measure of network power, both before and after early Arab Spring. In contrast, Somalia, UAE, Egypt, Libya, and Sudan increased most in network flow betweenness centrality. The MM 'Jihad'-centric word co-occurrence network more than tripled in size, and the semantic structure more became entropic. This media "cloud" perhaps billowed as Islamist groups changed their material-level relationships and the corresponding media representations of Jihad among them changed after early Arab Spring. Future research could investigate various rival explanations for this naturalistic field experiment's findings.