Philip N. Howard’s latest book brings a very timely and much needed scholarly account of the role of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in political transformations of the Muslim world. The book comes as a result of an ambitious, multi-year project undertaken by the author and his team, combing largescale secondary data-analysis with fieldwork conducted in several countries, including Egypt, Tanzania, Turkey and Yemen. There is little doubt that ‘digital Islam’ has been one of the hottest topics for several years. Although news reports have typically focused on the use of the Internet by terrorist leaders and groups, lately the focus has shifted to more upbeat themes of development and democratization. Indeed, recent political upheavals in Iran, Tunisia and Egypt have been frequently portrayed as ‘social media revolutions’ in the Western media, with journalists, pundits, bloggers, diplomats and PR professionals offering views, opinions and analysis around the clock. Largely absent from this lively discussion have been academics, who probably could not keep up with the pace of technophilic media frenzy surrounding these events.
Howard’s work thus comes at the right moment and offers a systematic empirical analysis of the interplay between political Islam and ICTs around the world and its democratic implications. Following in the footsteps of The digital divide (2001) by Pippa Norris and Open networks, closed regimes (2003) by Kalathil and Boas, The digital origins of dictatorship and democracy aims to examine the impact of new information technologies on political democracy around the (Muslim) world. Unlike the aforementioned works, Howard’s book pairs a very comprehensive empirical analysis of the economic, demographic, political and technological conditions in Muslim societies around the world with an innovative and sophisticated comparative approach aimed at uncovering a causal role of ICTs in the process of democratization. A range of theoretically-connected topics is covered, from the state of political democracy (Chapter 1) and national information infrastructure (Chapter 2), to the growth of political parties’ web presence (Chapter 3), changing face of traditional and online journalism (Chapter 4), growth of civic society online (Chapter 5), and issues related to cultural production and censorship in the Muslim world (Chapter 6). In the concluding chapter, Howard aims to unpack the causal conditions behind successful and not-so-successful democratic transitions in Muslim societies and offers a technological theory of democracy, identifying a number of important infrastructural and contextual factors that predict political outcomes and institutional consequences. There is no doubt that many scholars and practitioners will find Asian Journal of Communication Vol. 21, No. 3, June 2011, 318 319