Azerbaijani women, online mediatized activism and offline mass mobilization
Mehrabov, Ilkin
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10.3390/socsci5040060
2016
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Mehrabov, I. (2016). Azerbaijani women, online mediatized activism and offline mass mobilization.
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social sciences
Article
Azerbaijani Women, Online Mediatized Activism and
Offline Mass Mobilization
Ilkin Mehrabov
Geography, Media and Communication Studies, Karlstad University, Universitetsgatan 2, Karlstad 65188,
Sweden; ilkin.mehrabov@kau.se
Academic Editor: Martin J. Bull
Received: 25 May 2016; Accepted: 1 October 2016; Published: 12 October 2016
Abstract:
Despite its post-Soviet history, Azerbaijan is an under-investigated country in academic
research—compared with the other former constituencies, such as the Baltic countries or Russia, of
the USSR—and gender questions of the contemporary Azerbaijani society are even less touched on.
Within the current context of the post-“Arab Spring” era of mediatized connectivity and collective
political engagement, this article looks into and analyzes how Azerbaijani women participate in
different online and offline social and political movements, and if (and how) they are impeded by
the increased state authoritarianism in Azerbaijan. Using data, obtained from online information
resources, yearly reports of human rights organizations, focus group discussions, and interviews,
the study detects four major activist constellations within the Azerbaijani field of gendered politics.
Based on the analysis of conditions of detected groups, the article claims that flash mobs, a tactic
employed mainly by liberal activists, emerge as the promising way in overcoming the normative
nature of Azerbaijani patriarchal society, thus providing an opportunity for normalization and
internalization of the feeling of being on the street and acting in concert with others—the practices
which might lead towards an increasing participation of (especially young) women in the political
processes of the country.
Keywords: Azerbaijan; oppressive politics; political opposition; surveillance; women activists
1. Introduction
The turbulent “Arab Spring”—which took place mainly during the years of 2011 and 2012 and has
dramatically changed the political geography of the Middle East—has also inspired other insurgent
oppositional movements around the world. The Azerbaijani online opposition of 2011, enthused by
the seeming success of revolutions in North Africa, and organized mostly on social networking sites,
was not an exception. As the transformation of mostly Muslim geographies was in its heyday, it did
not take long for Azerbaijani activists to become impressed by the possibilities brought with online
organizational capacities of social media and to start organizing their protests on these platforms.
The response of the Azerbaijani government to these developments was very harsh. Police forces
violently dispersed activists at their every attempt, and legislative bans on further dares of conducting
any form of oppositional protest “effectively criminalized the protests
. . .
and led to imprisonment for
many of those who organized and took part in them” ([
1
], p. 70). As the calls to turn Azadlıq Meydanı
(Azadliq Square) into “Baku’s Tahrir”, placed through Facebook posts and Twitter tweets, resulted
in arrests of opposition protesters even before the events took place, it became obvious that the state
surveillance had “significantly increased its monitoring of internet activity and clamped down on
social-media sites, news outlets, and blogs” ([2], p. 68).
We live in an era of mediatization, a meta-process by which everyday communication practices
become increasingly dependent on new media technologies. This process, through which activist
movements rapidly shift towards organizing themselves on social media platforms, also changes the
Soc. Sci. 2016, 5, 60; doi:10.3390/socsci5040060 www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci
Soc. Sci. 2016, 5, 60 2 of 17
shape of surveillance practices. Mediatized surveillance, the conduct of which depends on increase in
the use of contemporary media technologies, enables more scrupulous, more individualized types
of surveillance to be enacted, as surveillance shifts towards a new level of monitoring, identity-based
surveillance. This is a type of tracking which enables focusing, if necessary, on the “elder, children,
women, unhealthy, homosexual, homeless people, racially different and immigrant populations—in
brief, all the ‘others’ of different social, cultural and economic contexts” ([3], p. 120).
However, within the Azerbaijani context, the state does not need to extensively invest in the
surveillance of women. Azerbaijani culture, especially when it comes to women and their everyday life
behavior, is already saturated with surveillance, since in the patriarchal Azerbaijani society all “male
family members are typically charged with monitoring their sisters and female cousins” ([
4
], p. 6).
So, despite the nefarious case of journalist Khadija Ismayilova who was blackmailed with an intimate
video, filmed by a camera secretly planted in her bedroom, it remains to be the case that “surveillative
apparatuses of Azerbaijan, aiming to monitor and keep under control Internet users’ online media
and social networking practices, are currently targeting male activists only, since there are no clear
indicators that the women protesters are kept under the close online surveillance as well” ([5], p. 46).
Within such a context, it should not be surprising then that all of Azerbaijani activists—who
were targeted, taken into custody, or imprisoned as a direct result of clampdowns and dispersions
of the recent protests—were males. This situation inevitably evokes a number of questions about
gender dynamics of protests in Azerbaijan: Were (and are) there any women activists, personally
engaging with political processes and oppositional protests? How are they affected by the violent
policies of the state, resolute about keeping the status quo? How are they organized? How do they
recruit new members?
This paper focuses on Azerbaijan, which, despite its post-Soviet history, is an under-researched
country—compared with the other former constituencies, such as the Baltic countries or Russia, of
the USSR. Gender questions in the contemporary Azerbaijani society are even less investigated in
academic research. Considered to be one of the world’s most secular Muslim countries, Azerbaijani
women in general and Azerbaijani activist women in particular, and the possible impacts of their
political engagement on other countries of the Caucasus and of the MENA region, call for scrutiny in
the current context of mediatized connectivity and collective political engagement.
Towards this goal, and following from the above questions, I firstly look into and analyze how
Azerbaijani activist women participate in different political and social movements, both online and
offline; how they are organized; and if (and how) they are impeded by the increased state violence.
Such analysis is required in order to be able to properly look into the conditions of detected activist
constellations, and elaborate on the possible way(s) of increasing involvement of women into the
political processes of the country—thus complementing the main aim of this article.
In my research I am following a network perspective, a tool frequently used in social movement
and collective action studies. It is a powerful approach, which allows certain flexibility to analyze
the “diversity, dynamics, and complexity of collective sociopolitical phenomena”, as well as the
“more intelligible rendering of the coordination dynamics that underlie all sorts of collective action
efforts” ([
6
], pp. 363–64). This perspective is helpful in mapping out the different actors in Azerbaijani
field of gendered politics, and enables one to acquire “an instrument for forecasting the probable
behaviors of agents occupying different positions within that distribution” ([7], p. 58).
Such forecasting allows for speculations on the shortcomings and the promises of the various
hubs, detected in the activist constellations, thus contributing towards the goals of this article.
2. Typology of Women Activists in Azerbaijan
In order to attend to the research scope specified above, the Global Digital Activism Data Set,
developed by the Digital Activism Research Project of the University of Washington, was used here
as a starting point. I then integrated into this set the information obtained from the detailed yearly
reports of Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Freedom House, thus forming a database
Soc. Sci. 2016, 5, 60 3 of 17
detailing all the online and offline protests that took place in Azerbaijan between the years 2003–2015.
This main data source was combined with thorough searches I conducted in the online newspaper
archives of Azadlıq Radiosu, Yeni Müsavat, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Russian, Azerbaijani,
and English languages.
These secondary sources were compared against the information obtained from three accounts of
electronic correspondence and long-distance open-ended interviews [
8
], as well as the two cases of
face-to-face semi-structured interviews I conducted with activists and journalists from Azerbaijan. One
of the interviews was with Khadija Ismayilova herself, who agreed to engage in a session of electronic
correspondence through Facebook Messenger on 30 March 2013.
In addition, on 23 July 2015, a focus group with a number of Azerbaijani activists, mostly from
the left-wing political organizations and parties, was conducted in Baku. Both of the activists, with
whom I initially engaged with, belonged to the leftist side of the political spectrum. They were very
helpful during the process of further recruitment of participants, but this snowballing ended up with
the dominance of Marxist activists among the interviewees and focus group members.
This bias in ideological inclinations has a negligible effect on this study, since both in interviews
and in focus group discussions the main debate revolved around ontological conditions of activist
practices in Azerbaijan. Thus, the ideological standpoint of individual activists was not a focal aspect
of the data-gathering process, as the focus was placed instead on the general problems of Azerbaijani
politics—such as the increased state authoritarianism and the rapid rise of surveillance practices,
together with the more particular difficulties, experienced especially by women protesters.
Although the initial plan was to administer the focus group meeting with six people (four men,
two women), a few other activists (all men) also joined in the discussion, and at some point the group
grew up to ten people. The focus group lasted for (almost) four hours, and a number of additional
issues were covered in the debate. At many instances I chose to remain in a passive observer role,
since the group’s discussions were already revolving around matters which I wished to be open for
debate in the focus group. The discussions would have continued even longer, but as the café where
the focus group was conducted closed at 22:30, the group also had to be dispersed. For reasons of
personal security, names of neither the interviewees nor the focus group members are revealed in this
study, and instead aliases are used when referred to—the only exception is Khadija Ismayilova, who is
well known in Azerbaijan. For the same reasons I was not allowed to record the discussions, but only
to take handwritten notes.
The resulting analysis, conducted using all these information sources, was aimed to generate a
categorical map of protests in Azerbaijan and revolved around the questions of what the protest was
about; what the gender distribution of protesters looks like; how many people (and of what gender)
were taken into the custody or imprisoned; the extent of served jail terms or paid fines, if any; and
so on. Based on the generated map, my analysis further focused on how certain social and political
movements in general, and individual women activists involved in them in particular, are affected by
increasing state authoritarianism in Azerbaijan.
The results are indicative of a situation where women activists, active both in the oppositional
scene and Azerbaijani cyberspace, share some similar traits when it comes to online organization of
protests or placing calls for collective action. Yet, they also show some structural differentiations which
led me to discern four distinctive categories, based on their ties with the offline political structures and
institutions; organizational support systems; and ideological inclinations. These four categories can
broadly be named as traditional oppositional political activists; religious Islamic activists; feminist
activists; and liberal activists. These categories are constructed and constituted in a general sense,
and there exist a number of overlaps between them; for example, it is quite possible that many liberal
women activists might be holding feminist ideas and values as well.
Soc. Sci. 2016, 5, 60 4 of 17
2.1. Traditional Oppositional Political Activists
Except for the short-lived statehood period of Azerbaijan Democratic Republic (1918–1920), an
independent, democratically-oriented, parliamentarian state, for the last two centuries Azerbaijan
has been part of firstly Tsarist Russia, and later the Soviet Union. Tsarist Russia had no intention of
intervening into the inner dynamics of Azerbaijani society, and the traditional Azerbaijani culture
continued to thrive during the Russian rule, with women “tending to the needs of family members
and to traditional household tasks, with virtually no access to formal education and with relatively
little participation in public life” ([9], p. 33).
Towards the end of the 19th century, with the formation of the local, ethnically Azerbaijani,
bourgeois business class influenced by the ideas of Russian and European secularism, Azerbaijani
women started to enter the country’s “public sphere through wage labor in the oil industry, garment
workshops, charity activities, women’s publications, women’s clubs, and broad political groups
that promoted women’s literacy, vocational training, legal rights, and improvement in their overall
status” ([10], p. 140).
The period of the Soviet Union’s rule further improved the conditions of Azerbaijani women, as
through the egalitarian measures introduced by the socialist state, women were able to take broader
work roles in the paid labor force and to gain “greater access to formal education and to political
participation”—and the USSR “played a much more pronounced role in providing social services and
in providing a social safety net for family and community maintenance” ([9], p. 39).
After proclaiming its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Azerbaijan entered a period
of the economic, social, and political hardships due to the shattered economy and the skyrocketing
inflation in prices of the consumer goods; occupation of the country’s Nagorno-Karabakh region by
Armenian armed forces; the mass influx of Azerbaijani internally displaced persons fleeing the war,
as well as the bulk emigration of Azerbaijan’s historical ethnic minorities; and occasional military
insurrections. This turbulent era came to an abrupt halt when Heydar Aliyev, the leader of the Soviet
Azerbaijan between 1969 and 1982, returned to power in October 1993. He immediately sued for
ceasefire with Armenia and moved “aggressively to take advantage of Azerbaijan’s oil resources”,
while launching a “successful campaign to elevate the country’s place in the world” ([11], p. 81).
After a decade of Heydar Aliyev’s presidency, his son Ilham Aliyev was appointed as the sole
candidate of the ruling party for 15 October 2003 presidential elections. Ilham Aliyev’s landslide victory
was met with skepticism and raised concerns over the gradual transition of Azerbaijan towards a
“sultanistic semiauthoritarianism” [
12
]. The recent dynamics of contemporary Azerbaijan are marked
with the cases of widespread corruption (well-documented, especially in the public service); the
growing nepotism and authoritarianism; the suspicions of the vote fraud; and frequent violations of
human rights of activists and journalists [1,2].
Although there are few active oppositional left parties such as Az
@
rbaycan Kommunist Partiyası
(Azerbaijan Communist Party) or Azerbaycan Sosial-Demokrat Partiyası (Azerbaijan Social Democratic
Party), their impact within political processes is very limited with very low voter turnover. During
the past few years, a revival of leftist ideas among young people has become visible and new
organizations such as Az
@
rbaycan Ekososialistl
@
ri (Eco-socialists of Azerbaijan) and Sol Front (Left
Front) have emerged, yet their members are still counted only in thousands, if not in hundreds. The
category of traditional political activists mainly employs women who are active within traditional
oppositional political parties of Azerbaijan, mainly nationalistic and conservative parties such as
Müsavat Partiyası (Equality Party), Az
@
rbaycan Xalq C
@
bh
@
si Partiyası (Azerbaijani Popular Front Party)
or Az@rbaycan Demokrat Partiyası (Azerbaijan Democratic Party).
Azerbaijani women have always been active in political processes, and the historiography of
prominent roles undertaken by them within politics goes a long way back. Within this scope, Azerbaijan
has always had a vibrant scene when it came to women, their role within politics and their political
influences. It would be interesting to note, for example, that the first known woman diplomat of the
“East” is considered to be Sara Khatun of the 15th century, who was the mother of Uzun Hassan, the