"We will not be silent": understanding the role of place and locality in online activism against gender-based violence in the MENA region

July 2020 brought a wave of impactful social media activism challenging gender-based violence (GBV) in Egypt, with one of the mobilising hashtags being, #(We will not be silent), giving this thesis its name. The accounts created and activated during this specific Egyptian campaign represent a small, but significant part of the region-wide ecosystem of digital activism against GBV that has been growing in visibility since 2011 and was exacerbated in the COVID-19 context, an ecosystem that this thesis seeks to explore. Within it, we see accounts navigating dynamics of place, with some focusing almost exclusively on local issues, producing content in local colloquial dialects with reference to specific struggles of local women, while others, including the example from Egypt, still centring local change, but simultaneously aiming to participate in broader conversations about womanhood and seeking the creation of cross-border communities. These differences impact not only the content produced, but also the accounts' identities; how they understand and frame the problems they are facing and the solutions they are posing; and the networks that they form and operate within. In doing so, they reproduce and challenge (often simultaneously) existing constructions of place across scales, from the local, to the national, to the regional, to the transnational. This research recognises the ontological agency of (mostly) young, (mostly) female activists who are all too frequently constructed as passive receptors, within these discourses surrounding place and locality. This thesis seeks to use these vibrant and innovative, but as of yet understudied, sites of activism to develop our understanding of how place and locality shape and are shaped by feminist activism in digital spaces. This research offers a timely intervention that challenges discourses of a universal internet with a global public, frequently presented in relation to #MeToo , while also problematising the binary of the Western-dominated transnational vs. the particular situated local that we see across cyberfeminist literature. My research complicates these frameworks, demonstrating the complex and multiplicitous nature through which place and locality operate in digital gender activism. I focus my research on the Middle East & North Africa (MENA) with a particular focus on Morocco, Algeria, Lebanon and Egypt, all of whom saw significant waves of action during the period under study, in order to begin to tackle the Western-centric nature of the current scholarship that exists in tension with the plethora of exciting case studies that are emerging in the Global South. Under the framework of a digital ethnography, I have selected 85 activist social media accounts operating across the MENA, using a multi-modal approach that combines observations with interviews with 20 activists and analysis of social media content to elucidate upon the dynamic processes of localisation, delocalisation and place-making using a Social Movement Theory framework.