The Political Impact of New Media in the Middle East—A Conversation with "Abu Aardvark"

Marc Lynch is associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University. He is cochair of the Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communications, and next year will become director of the Institute for Middle East Studies. 

He publishes frequently on the politics of the Middle East, with a particular focus on the Arab media and information technology, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, and Islamist movements. His most recent book, Voices of the New Arab Public: Al-Jazeera, Iraq, and Middle East Politics Today, was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Book. 

Lynch began writing his influential Middle East politics blog Abu Aardvark under a pseudonym in 2002, and began blogging under his own name in the spring of 2005. Despite (or perhaps because of) the quirky name, Abu Aardvark gained a wide following among Middle East policy professionals, journalists, and academics.

Mohamad Bazzi , who served as Newsday's Middle East Bureau Chief from 2003 until 2007, was the paper's lead writer on the Iraq war and its aftermath, and set up Newsday bureaus in Baghdad and Beirut. He now teaches journalism at New York University and served as the 2007-08 Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

He has written extensively about regional politics, Sunni-Shiite tensions and militant Islam. He also covered the wars in Afghanistan and Lebanon, as well as the Palestinian uprising. Last year, he won the Arthur Ross Award for Distinguished Reporting and Analysis on Foreign Affairs presented by the American Academy of Diplomacy.

Evgeny Morozov is an online media and digital activism expert from Belarus. As an Open Society Fellow, he worked on The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, his critically acclaimed book published in January 2011. In it, Morozov punctures popular myths about the power of the internet to undermine authoritarian regimes. 

Currently a visiting scholar at Stanford University, Morozov was formerly a Yahoo! fellow at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University and has served as director of new media at Transitions Online, a Prague-based media-development organization. His writing has appeared in the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Newsweek, the Washington Post, the International Herald Tribune, Slate, Le Monde, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Review, Foreign Policy, Project Syndicate, Dissent, and many other publications.