Reclaiming Their Historical Agency: A Critical Analysis of International News Discourses on Occupy and Arab Spring

In this study, the authors examine the interrelationship between culture, media, globalization, and social movements through a critical discourse analysis of international news discourses on the Arab Spring and the U.S.-based Occupy movement(s). Following several calls to pay closer attention to democratic discourses and/or practices within globalized social movements, they explore the ways in which news discourses about the Arab Spring and Occupy reinforce dominant ideologies related to global capitalism, cultural imperialism, and Eurocentric democracy. The authors further delineate differences between the ideology of democracy and the practices of democratization. This analysis reveals important implications for conceptions of agency and democracy in a globalized world.