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Systematic investigation of attitudes expressed in Arabic on Twitter towards the United States and Iran during 2012–13 shows how the analysis of social media can illuminate the politics of contemporary political discourse and generates an informative analysis of anti-Americanism in the Middle East. We not only analyze overall attitudes, but using a novel events-based analytical strategy, we examine reactions to specific events, including the removal of Morsi in Egypt, the “Innocence of Muslims” video, and reactions to possible US intervention in Syria. We also examine the Boston Marathon bombings of April 2013 and Hurricane Sandy, in which the United States suffered damage from human beings or from nature. Our findings reinforce evidence from polling that anti-Americanism is pervasive and intense, but they also suggest that this animus is directed less toward American society than toward the impingement of the United States on other countries. The Arabic Twitter discourse toward Iran is at least as negative as the discourse toward the United States, and less ambivalent. Anti-Americanism may be a specific manifestation of a more general phenomenon: resentment toward powerful countries perceived as interfering in national and regional affairs.

Bios:

Robert O. Keohane is a Professor of Public and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. He has served as President of the International Studies Association and the American Political Science Association, and he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. He is author of After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (1984), and co-author of Power and Interdependence (with Joseph S. Nye, Jr., 1977), and Designing Social Inquiry (with Gary King and Sidney Verba, 1994). He has received the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order; the Johan Skytte Prize; a Centennial Medal from the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences; and the James Madison Award from the American Political Science Association.

Amaney A. Jamal is the Edward S. Sanford Professor of Politics at Princeton University and director of the Mamdouha S. Bobst Center for Peace and Justice. Jamal also directs the Workshop on Arab Political Development. She currently is President of the Association of Middle East Women’s Studies (AMEWS). The focus of her current research is democratization and the politics of civic engagement in the Arab world. Her interests also include the study of Muslim and Arab Americans and the pathways that structure their patterns of civic engagement in the U.S. Jamal’s books include Barriers to Democracy, which explores the role of civic associations in promoting democratic effects in the Arab world (winner 2008 APSA Best Book Award in comparative democratization); and, as coauthor, Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11: From Invisible Citizens to Visible Subjects (2007) and Citizenship and Crisis: Arab Detroit after 9/11 (2009). Her most recent book Of Empires and Citizens was published by Princeton University Press, Fall 2012. In addition to her role as director of Princeton’s Workshop on Arab Political Development, Jamal is a co-director of Princeton’s Luce Project on Migration, Participation, and Democratic Governance in the U.S., Europe, and the Muslim World; principal investigator of the Arab Barometer Project, winner of the Best Dataset in the Field of Comparative Politics( Lijphart/Przeworski/Verba Dataset Award 2010); co-PI of the Detroit Arab American Study, a sister survey to the Detroit Area Study; and senior advisor on the Pew Research Center projects focusing on Islam in America (2006) and Global Islam (2010). Ph.D. University of Michigan. In 2005, Jamal was named a Carnegie Scholar.