Michael is an Emory senior from Bethesda, Maryland who is majoring in Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies (MESAS) and Arabic. He is currently doing a senior thesis project titled “Framing Azawad in the Age of Facebook: The MNLA, Social Media, Narrative, and Identity”. The goal of his project is to explore the ways in which officials and supporters of the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (known as the MNLA, its acronym in French), a secessionist rebel group at the heart of the civil war in the West African country of Mali between 2012 to 2015, used Facebook, and what their Facebook postings tell us about the way the movement framed its own identity and goals. To do this project, Michael identified a number of public Facebook accounts belonging to officials involved with the MNLA’s communications, such as spokesmen, and other accounts belonging to supporters of the MNLA. He quantitatively categorized their Facebook postings between 2012 and 2015, approximately 6500 posts in all, based on content, and he identified and qualitatively analyzed several master narratives present in the posts. Overall, his research draws heavily on the fields of communications theory and discourse analysis. He hopes to contribute to the nascent literature on how non-jihadist insurgent groups use social media. Michael says the understanding of how armed groups see themselves and present themselves to the world is a critical component in conflict resolution.
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