Alexei Abrahams
Biographic Data
| ID | 4163545 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alexei Abrahams |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alexei |
| FAMILY NAME | Abrahams |
| SIGNATURE | ABRAHAMS A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6547-072X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 8 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 7 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 8 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Moral Shocks and (De)mobilization: The Case of the Palestinian Liberation Movement
What are the organizational consequences of moral shocks? Moral shocks are events or critical junctures that spark “visceral reactions against a reprehensible reality” (Pearlman 2013). They help individuals overcome fear, enabling them to engage in political mobilization despite heightened risks. This phenomenon has often been used to explain how political protests arise, but the mechanisms linking moments of moral shock to their outcomes remain …
Donetsk don’t tell – ‘hybrid war’ in Ukraine and the limits of social media influence operations
Many fear that social media enable more potent influence operations than traditional mass media. This belief is widely shared yet rarely tested. We challenge this emerging wisdom by comparing social media and television as vectors for influence operations targeting Ukraine. This article develops a theoretical framework based on media structure, showing how and why decentralized and centralized media offer distinct opportunities and challenges for…
How civilian attitudes respond to the state’s violence: Lessons from the Israel–Gaza conflict
States, in their conflicts with militant groups embedded in civilian populations, often resort to policies of collective punishment to erode civilian support for the militants. We attempt to evaluate the efficacy of such policies in the context of the Gaza Strip, where Israel's blockade and military interventions, purportedly intended to erode support for Hamas, have inflicted hardship on the civilian population. We combine Palestinian public opi…
Hard traveling: Unemployment and Road Infrastructure in the Shadow of Political Conflict
If political circumstances are an important cause of unemployment in the Middle East, does this tend to attenuate the influence of economic infrastructure? I approach this question by building a geospatial dataset of the West Bank, an area with high unemployment arguably linked to political problems. I find Israeli army road obstacles, deployed during the Second Intifada, obstructed peri-urban Palestinian commuters from accessing commercial cente…
Measuring the (In)security of Palestinian Civil Society Websites
Civil society organizations ( cso s) are reemerging as the central reference of the Palestinian struggle at a time when cyber threats to civil society are on the rise worldwide. We developed a web scanning tool to gather security data on websites and web servers, finding Palestinian cso s neglect even basic precautions like encrypting web traffic or keeping software updated. Why? Evidence suggests this neglect cannot easily be explained by techni…
Framing a murder: Twitter influencers and the Jamal Khashoggi incident
Social media have played a significant role in political discourse across the Mediterranean in recent years. In this research note, we showcase the usefulness of social media data for political analysis by focusing on the main Arabic Twitter hashtag following the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul, October 2018. We collect a sample of almost 2.4 million tweets posted by nearly 370,000 Twitter accounts. We show that just 281 accounts dro…
A Storm of Tweets: Social Media Manipulation During the Gulf Crisis
Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter were heralded circa 2009–2011 as ‘liberation technology’ that would facilitate mass mobilization against Middle Eastern authoritarians. In this article, however, we present evidence from the ongoing Gulf Crisis (2017-present) that regimes can now exploit Twitter as an outlet for political propaganda. Drawing in part on novel data collected by the authors, we present strong evidence of state actors …
Strategy, unity and coercion: Lessons from the Palestinian struggle
Framing a murder: Twitter influencers and the Jamal Khashoggi incident
Social media have played a significant role in political discourse across the Mediterranean in recent years. In this research note, we showcase the usefulness of social media data for political analysis by focusing on the main Arabic Twitter hashtag following the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul, October 2018. We collect a sample of almost 2.4 million tweets posted by nearly 370,000 Twitter accounts. We show that just 281 accounts dro…
Donetsk don’t tell – ‘hybrid war’ in Ukraine and the limits of social media influence operations
Many fear that social media enable more potent influence operations than traditional mass media. This belief is widely shared yet rarely tested. We challenge this emerging wisdom by comparing social media and television as vectors for influence operations targeting Ukraine. This article develops a theoretical framework based on media structure, showing how and why decentralized and centralized media offer distinct opportunities and challenges for…
How civilian attitudes respond to the state’s violence: Lessons from the Israel–Gaza conflict
States, in their conflicts with militant groups embedded in civilian populations, often resort to policies of collective punishment to erode civilian support for the militants. We attempt to evaluate the efficacy of such policies in the context of the Gaza Strip, where Israel's blockade and military interventions, purportedly intended to erode support for Hamas, have inflicted hardship on the civilian population. We combine Palestinian public opi…
Hard traveling: Unemployment and Road Infrastructure in the Shadow of Political Conflict
If political circumstances are an important cause of unemployment in the Middle East, does this tend to attenuate the influence of economic infrastructure? I approach this question by building a geospatial dataset of the West Bank, an area with high unemployment arguably linked to political problems. I find Israeli army road obstacles, deployed during the Second Intifada, obstructed peri-urban Palestinian commuters from accessing commercial cente…
Strategy, unity and coercion: Lessons from the Palestinian struggle
A Storm of Tweets: Social Media Manipulation During the Gulf Crisis
Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter were heralded circa 2009–2011 as ‘liberation technology’ that would facilitate mass mobilization against Middle Eastern authoritarians. In this article, however, we present evidence from the ongoing Gulf Crisis (2017-present) that regimes can now exploit Twitter as an outlet for political propaganda. Drawing in part on novel data collected by the authors, we present strong evidence of state actors …
Framing a murder: Twitter influencers and the Jamal Khashoggi incident
Social media have played a significant role in political discourse across the Mediterranean in recent years. In this research note, we showcase the usefulness of social media data for political analysis by focusing on the main Arabic Twitter hashtag following the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul, October 2018. We collect a sample of almost 2.4 million tweets posted by nearly 370,000 Twitter accounts. We show that just 281 accounts dro…
How civilian attitudes respond to the state’s violence: Lessons from the Israel–Gaza conflict
States, in their conflicts with militant groups embedded in civilian populations, often resort to policies of collective punishment to erode civilian support for the militants. We attempt to evaluate the efficacy of such policies in the context of the Gaza Strip, where Israel's blockade and military interventions, purportedly intended to erode support for Hamas, have inflicted hardship on the civilian population. We combine Palestinian public opi…
Hard traveling: Unemployment and Road Infrastructure in the Shadow of Political Conflict
If political circumstances are an important cause of unemployment in the Middle East, does this tend to attenuate the influence of economic infrastructure? I approach this question by building a geospatial dataset of the West Bank, an area with high unemployment arguably linked to political problems. I find Israeli army road obstacles, deployed during the Second Intifada, obstructed peri-urban Palestinian commuters from accessing commercial cente…
Measuring the (In)security of Palestinian Civil Society Websites
Civil society organizations ( cso s) are reemerging as the central reference of the Palestinian struggle at a time when cyber threats to civil society are on the rise worldwide. We developed a web scanning tool to gather security data on websites and web servers, finding Palestinian cso s neglect even basic precautions like encrypting web traffic or keeping software updated. Why? Evidence suggests this neglect cannot easily be explained by techni…
Donetsk don’t tell – ‘hybrid war’ in Ukraine and the limits of social media influence operations
Many fear that social media enable more potent influence operations than traditional mass media. This belief is widely shared yet rarely tested. We challenge this emerging wisdom by comparing social media and television as vectors for influence operations targeting Ukraine. This article develops a theoretical framework based on media structure, showing how and why decentralized and centralized media offer distinct opportunities and challenges for…
Moral Shocks and (De)mobilization: The Case of the Palestinian Liberation Movement
What are the organizational consequences of moral shocks? Moral shocks are events or critical junctures that spark “visceral reactions against a reprehensible reality” (Pearlman 2013). They help individuals overcome fear, enabling them to engage in political mobilization despite heightened risks. This phenomenon has often been used to explain how political protests arise, but the mechanisms linking moments of moral shock to their outcomes remain …
Political science (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Law (5 works) · Politics (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Media studies (3 works) · Misinformation and Its Impacts (3 works) · Political economy (3 works) · Social media (3 works) · Social Media and Politics (3 works)