Introduction 

The Arab Spring produced two different images that the world watched. In Cairo, Tahrir Square became the global symbol of democratic opportunity; in Manama, Bahrain, Pearl Roundabout was demolished by bulldozers within days of its clearance, and has remained largely absent from the dominant narrative of 2011 (Tripp, 2013). Both occupations deployed similar tactics, produced leaderless communitas, and used social media at higher rates in Bahrain than in Egypt (Joseph, 2012). Yet one became a revolution the world witnessed, and one did not. I argue that public spaces and new media were significant in the Arab Spring, but the outcomes depended on the coherence of the narrative that these factors produced. Together, physical occupation and media amplification created a performance-audience complex capable of projecting collective demands globally, but only for protesters whose demands could be packaged into a recognisable democratic narrative, tolerated by Western geopolitical interests, and broadcast by a sympathetic media infrastructure. Tahrir succeeded partly because it was made consumable. Pearl Roundabout was suppressed partly because it was not. This essay draws on Turner’s concept of liminality and Butler’s theory of performative assembly to analyse how occupied squares produced political meaning, before turning to the geopolitics of media attention to examine whose performance was given an audience, and on what terms. 

Theoretical Framework

The public spaces of the Arab Spring can be understood as liminal spaces. The concept originates with Arnold van Gennep, who in The Rites of Passage (1960) used it to describe the middle phase of ritual transitions, the moment when someone has left their old social identity behind but has not yet arrived at the new one. Victor Turner developed this further in The Ritual Process (1995), identifying three defining qualities of the liminal phase. First, it is “betwixt and between,” the normal rules of social structure are suspended, and hierarchies dissolve (1995, p. 85). Second, communitas emerges — an egalitarian solidarity defined by its “spontaneous, immediate, concrete nature […] as opposed to the norm-governed, institutionalized, abstract nature of social structure” (1995, p. 103). Third, liminality is temporary; communitas cannot be sustained indefinitely, and structure must eventually reassert itself (1995). Tahrir Square and Pearl Roundabout embodied all three qualities. 

Dramaturgical scholars have also argued that protest in public spaces can be understood as a form of performance. Levine (2015) argues that cultural performances, in the context of intense struggle, reconfigure dominant structures of power and identity. Schechner (1993) offers the broader concept of “direct theatre,” arguing that protests follow historically established “repertoires” and “scripts” that give collective actions their shared grammar. Butler (2011) makes this most precise: bodies assembled in public space do not merely express a pre-existing political demand; they perform political agency into being. As Butler argues specifically about Tahrir, “the collective actions [of the crowd] collect the space itself, gather the pavement, and animate and organize the architecture.” Both Tahrir Square and Pearl Roundabout were, in this sense, produced by mass protest, transforming sites of state authority into sites of collective political possibility. 

Yet performance requires an audience to carry political weight. Schechner (1993, p. 61) observes that protest theatre is “most theatrical at the cusp when the street show meets the media,” and Auslander (1999) extends this, arguing that live performance is always mediated. Tahrir’s sense of immediacy and historical weight — its liveness —  was partly produced through its mediation: broadcast by Al Jazeera, circulated and commented on across Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to a global audience. The audience became part of the performance’s political power. But the performance had to happen first in physical space, which was not the backdrop but the precondition that created the opportunity for everything that followed. 

Tahrir Square: Liminal Performance Space 

It is worth noting that the Egyptian Revolution was not confined to a single space. Ismail (2022, p. 4) argues that literature neglects the revolutionary mobilisation of Cairo’s informal neighbourhoods, including the alleyways, informal markets, and community institutions she identifies as “counter-spaces” of oppositional action built into the urban everyday. Gunning and Baron (2014, p. 244) also argue that “Tahrir was one location among many, and without these other spaces being occupied and re-inscribed, Mubarak would not have fallen.” Yet, as they also observe, “Tahrir became the symbolic epicentre of the revolution” (2014, p. 244), the theatrical stage onto which spatial politics were projected and made globally legible. In this capacity, as a liminal performance space and theatrical centre, Tahrir demands closer analysis. 

“Indeed, a history of Egypt could be written from the perspective of the square” (Gunning and Baron, 2014, p. 246). Tahrir Square arrived at the 2011 revolution already dense with historical and symbolic meaning. Its very name, Tahrir, is Arabic for ‘Liberation,’ stemming from the mass protests against British rule in 1919 and formally adopted under Nasser when Egypt became a republic (Gregory, 2013). Its location at the intersection of Egypt’s political, civic, and cultural life signifies its importance. Tahrir had already witnessed the Bread Riots of 1977 and the anti-Iraq War protests of 2003 (Gunning and Baron, 2014). In Schechner’s (1993) terms, the square’s scripts were already written. The influence of the Tunisian uprisings combined with Egyptian accumulated local grievances — police brutality symbolised by the death of Khaled Said (AlSayyad, 2015), high unemployment and soaring inequality produced by decades of neoliberal reform (Gunning and Baron, 2014; Bayat, 2013) — had primed the population. What remained was the spark that brought them to demand, in the words chanted across the square, to “bring down the regime” (Levine, 2015). As Said (2014, p. 361) argues, “the power of the square as a historical idea and inspiration played a constitutive role in the revolution itself.” The 2011 uprising did not simply produce a new protest but entered into dialogue with the past, echoing Mitchell’s (2012, p. 2) idea that revolutions can be framed as “return and cycle of seasons.” This resonates with the conception of liminality as simultaneous rupture and return. At Tahrir, one million Egyptians (Said, 2014) invented something new and reclaimed something old. 

The first quality of liminality, suspension of social structure, is strikingly visible. Gunning and Baron (2014, p. 268) observe that “there was neither a centralised authority nor a final authority in Tahrir,” yet this absence of hierarchy did not produce chaos. Instead, communitas emerged, as class, gender, and religious divisions were temporarily suspended, with Christians forming cordons around praying Muslims and Salafis sitting peacefully alongside secular revolutionaries (El-Khatib, 2013). Committees for security, food, and medical care were organised, almost spontaneously, transforming the square into what Soueif (2012, pp. 148-149) called “a bazaar of ideas on the ground.” Protesters had created a non-state space that simultaneously embodied what the state ought to be and hence became “an idealised state space” (Gunning and Baron, 2014, p. 243). Protester Khalil Saeed stated: “This was my Egypt, […] all together, in peace […] We always heard about this kind of Egypt; we saw this in Tahrir” (cited in Gunning and Baron, 2014, p. 243). 

The performative dimension of Tahrir extended beyond the political act of occupation into a cultural theatre. Music, poetry, and graffiti were not incidental but were constitutive of the protest’s liminal character, producing the atmosphere of rupture and possibility in which communitas could take hold. Levine (2015, p. 1283) captures the intensity of this: “There was really no place on earth quite like the Republic of Tahrir […] musicians playing, drummers drumming, poets rhyming, activists chanting.” This was not theatre alongside protest, but protest itself. The necessity of physical presence is central here. Ramy Essam’s ‘Irhal’ became the anthem of the revolution, but as Essam himself acknowledged, it was his bodily presence in the square that gave it power: “If I were just a singer coming to the square and then leaving, it wouldn’t have had the same impact” (cited in Levine, 2015, p. 1288). This speaks directly to Butler’s (2011) argument that the assembled body performs political agency into being. These cultural performances reinforced Tahrir’s liminality. The square became neither the Egypt of the regime nor the Egypt protesters were demanding. It was, in Turner’s (1995, p. 85) terms, “betwixt and between” — a space of possibility sustained by the continuous act of performance. 

Media in Egypt: Narrative Framing 

The Arab Spring was widely labelled the “Twitter Revolution,” though scholars have questioned the extent to which social media functioned as the primary engine of mobilisation (Wolfsfeld et al., 2013; Joseph, 2012). The ‘We Are All Khaled Said’ Facebook page, launched by activist Wael Ghonim following the death of a young Egyptian at the hands of state security, was undoubtedly significant in galvanising initial participation (Gregory, 2013; Amine, 2013). Yet the causation narrative does not hold under scrutiny. Tawil-Souri’s (2012, p. 92) survey found that nearly 50% of people first heard about the Tahrir demonstrations through face-to-face communication, compared to 28% via Facebook. Wolfsfeld et al (2013) Political Contest Model reinforces that politics comes first, both chronologically and analytically, with social media following significant protest rather than preceding it. Gerbaudo (2012) is right that new media performed a choreographic function, but as Norris (2012, p. 5) reminds us, social networking and protest happened long before social media existed. Facilitation, then, is only half the story; the more important question is how the media shaped the meaning of Tahrir once people were there. 

If Tahrir was the stage, media — and Al Jazeera in particular — was the audience that also played a role in crafting the narrative of the performance, both to the world and to Egyptians whose domestic news sources had been shut down by Mubarak’s regime (Joseph, 2012). Though Al Jazeera predates social media, it operated as part of the same networked media ecology — circulating YouTube footage shot on protesters’ phones, accessed via streaming, and in a continuous dialogue with Twitter and Facebook — and is treated as such here. Rinnawi’s (2012) analysis reveals that Al Jazeera’s coverage was far from neutral reporting. Visually, protesters were glorified as peaceful and heroic while security forces were demonised; Mubarak was personalised as the singular face of the regime; his supporters were vulgarised, and his officials were sidelined. Rinnawi (2012) notes that these images galvanised further demonstrators, creating a feedback loop in which the performance and its mediation became mutually reinforcing (Auslander, 2011). The audience was not separate from the theatre, but part of what kept it alive.

Narratively, coverage constructed a stark ‘people vs. regime’ binary, gave Egypt disproportionate airtime relative to other uprisings — such as Bahrain and Syria — and maintained a constant atmosphere of urgency and drama (Rinnawi, 2012). Auslander’s (1999) argument that live performance is always mediated helps explain the mechanism. Tahrir’s liveness was partly constituted by being watched, with the square and satellite channels co-producing the event in real time. The protesters were performing, and the audience was actively narrating what the performance meant. Al Jazeera’s framing empowered the Tahrir narrative globally, but it did so by flattening it, presenting all Egyptians as united against Mubarak in a way that, as Rinnawi (2012) observes, erased political complexity and dissenting voices. The revolution was made legible to the world, but legibility required simplification. 

As Ismail (2022) argues, the revolution was not confined to the square but extended into “counter spaces.” These spaces did not resonate as powerfully in the media. Tahrir, already historically freighted as Liberation Square and resonant with Habermas’s (1989) ideal of a democratic public sphere, offered audiences a narrative they knew how to read — a heroic crowd in an iconic space, demanding the freedoms they recognised. Ismail’s counter-spaces represented the messier, more distributed, less photogenic revolution that the framing could not accommodate. The performance audience complex did not empower the revolution but rather a version of the revolution. And as Bahrain shows, the same filter that selected Tahrir would actively silence Pearl Roundabout. 

Bahrain: Violent Suppression of Liminal Space 

Bahrain represents a revealing counterpoint to Egypt, as the uprising deployed similar tactics and also occupied a liminal space, yet the outcome was violently different. That it remains far less documented than other uprisings is itself analytically significant (Rinnawi, 2012; Byun and Hollander, 2015). On February 14, the ‘Day of Rage,’ protesters spread from a Shia village to Manama after a demonstrator was killed by state forces, and another at his funeral (Brown, 2023). Rather than dispersing the movement, this state violence catalysed it, mobilising an “enormous percentage of the country” toward Pearl Roundabout, which protesters renamed Tahrir Square, a deliberate reference to their predecessor’s symbolic power (Brown, 2023). The movement drew on deep structural grievances: youth unemployment, income inequality, and what Brown (2023, p. 233) identifies as “state repression and economic discrimination” against the Shia majority, whose economic precarity had intensified against a backdrop of rising Sunni elite privilege. Yet Brown (2023, p. 239) is careful to note that the uprising was “to a degree, non-ideological,” driven by material deprivation rather than sectarian identity, as there were even Sunni protesters. It was the regime, not the movement, that imposed the sectarian framing, successfully rebranding a broad-based socioeconomic revolt as an Iranian-backed Shia threat (Qadir and Rehamn, 2015), and in doing so, denying it the universal democratic narrative that had given Tahrir its global resonance. 

What followed reproduced the strikingly similar liminality of Tahrir Square. Demonstrators occupied Pearl Roundabout “in a conscious imitation of the encampment in Cairo’s Tahrir Square” (Tripp, 2012, p. 111). Communitas emerged once again: committees formed for communal cooking, medical provision, and childcare; a central stage provided a platform for speeches and debate; and the occupation was characterised by the same leaderless self-organisation visible in Egypt, with citizens demonstrating that they could “maintain an orderly and peaceful presence that was nevertheless a direct challenge to the authorities” (Tripp 2012, p. 112).  The private boundary dissolved as it had in Tahrir, and the space between the old Bahrain and a new one opened up. Most strikingly, the Pearl Monument, originally erected as a symbol of Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) unity, was resignified by protesters as a stage of resistance against those very Gulf monarchies (Brown, 2023). In Butler’s (2011) terms, the assembled bodies performed a new meaning, animating the monument with a different political charge of resistance. 

Understanding the symbolic power of this, the regime responded quickly and forcefully. On March 14, a thousand Saudi troops and five hundred UAE police crossed the causeway into Bahrain, and security forces violently cleared Pearl Roundabout, where twenty were killed, hundreds wounded, with systematic arrests, torture, and disappearances following (Brown, 2023).  The most telling act was not just the violence against bodies, but also the space. Bulldozers demolished the Pearl Monument within days. As Bayat (2013, p. 204) observes, the rulers did this “to erase the value that protesters had attached to it.” This was not only pragmatic crowd control but a counter-performance. If Butler (2011) is right that assembled bodies produce meaning by animating architecture, then the demolition was the regime’s answer in the same language, by destroying the architecture to unmake the meaning, ending the liminal phase of this space. Turner (1995) argues that structure must eventually reassert itself after liminality. In Bahrain, it did so with bulldozers. 

Bahrain: No One Is Watching

Despite Bahrain having the highest Facebook penetration of any Arab Spring Country — 36.83% compared to Egypt’s 7.66% (Joseph, 2012, P. 157) — the uprising was suppressed and remains far less documented than Tahrir (Rinnawi, 2012). This statistical paradox directly exposes the limits of social media determinism: if platforms were the cause of revolutionary momentum, Bahrain should have been its epicentre. Instead, it reveals that social media’s power was never intrinsic, but relational and therefore dependent on a receptive geopolitical and media audience that Bahrain fatally lacked. Rinnawi’s (2012) analysis confirms that Bahrain received significantly less Al Jazeera coverage than Egypt — a disparity that becomes clearer when one considers that Al Jazeera is state-funded by Qatar, a neighbouring Gulf monarchy with direct geopolitical interests in Bahrain’s stability and ruling order, unlike Mubarak’s regime, whose regional influence it could undermine. The channel that had constructed Tahrir’s global legitimacy, that held the spotlight over Cairo and narrated a people’s revolution, turned that spotlight off over Manama. Tahrir’s global resonance was never simply a product of what happened in the square but a product of who was watching. Unlike Egypt’s broad coalition, which Al Jazeera could frame as “the Egyptian people” rising against a tyrant (Rinawwi, 2012), Bahrain’s uprising, led predominantly by the Shia majority, was successfully reframed by the regime as a sectarian, Iranian-backed threat (Qadir and Rehamn, 2015). The binary was different, but the flattening of the narrative was the same — where Cairo was simplified into liberation, Manama was simplified into danger.

Bahrain also hosts the US Fifth Fleet and was regarded by Washington as an “important security partner,” and therefore the suppression of protesters was met with international silence rather than scrutiny (Moritz, 2021). Qatar’s media interests and Washington’s strategic interests thus converged to produce the same result — a performance deliberately kept from a global audience. Bahrain does not undermine the significance of public space or new media, but exposes the limits of both: neither can sustain a performance when geopolitical interests withdraw the audience and state forces demolish the stage.

Conclusion 

The Arab Spring’s public spaces and new media were significant, but the limitations became clear in the audience’s receptiveness, which shaped the mythic narrative of the revolutions. Tahrir Square produced Turner’s communitas, Butler’s performing bodies animating architecture, and Levine’s theatre of immediacy. But liminality is temporary — the structure that asserted itself in Egypt was military rule, and the communitas of the square did not survive contact with the institutions it had briefly suspended. 

Pearl Roundabout makes this sharply visible. The uprising there followed the same script — the same self-organisation, the same dissolution of hierarchy, the same resignification of monumental space. What it lacked was not social media penetration, which was higher in Bahrain than in Egypt, but a receptive audience. Geopolitical interests silenced the witness, and the Shia-led movement was reframed as a sectarian threat rather than legitimate economic and political grievances being protested (Brown, 2023), denying the universal narrative that had given Tahrir its global resonance. Audiences, it turns out, are shaped by the same structures of power that protest seeks to challenge. 

The Arab Spring created genuine moments of possibility, where ordinary people performed new political identities into being. But possibility is not transformation. Those moments of communitas, performance, and global witness were contingent because the political effects depended entirely on a set of conditions — geopolitical, narrative, media — that were never in the protesters’ control. The question that the Arab Spring leaves open is not whether public spaces and new media were significant, but whether the kind of significance they produce can ever outlast the moment of performance itself. 

Bibliography 

AlSayyad, N., & Guvenc, M. (2015). Virtual Uprisings: On the Interaction of New Social Media, Traditional Media Coverage and Urban Space during the “Arab Spring.” Urban Studies, 52(11), 2018–2034. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26146115 

Amine, K. (2013). Re-enacting Revolution and the New Public Sphere in Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco. Theatre Research International, 38(2), 87–103. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0307883313000011  

Auslander, P. (1999). Liveness : performance in an mediatized culture. London: Routledge.

Bayat, A. (2013). Life as politics : How ordinary people change the middle east, second edition. Stanford University Press.

Brown, R. A., (2023). Islam and Capitalism in the Making of Modern Bahrain. Oxford University Press EBooks. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192874672.001.0001  

Butler, J. (2011). Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street. Transversal Texts. Available at: https://transversal.at/transversal/1011/butler/en (accessed 20 April 2026).

Byun, C. C., & Hollander, E. J. (2015). Explaining the Intensity of the Arab Spring. Digest of Middle East Studies, 24(1), 26–46. https://doi.org/10.1111/dome.12057  

El-Khatib, M. S. (2013). Tahrir Square as Spectacle: Some Exploratory Remarks on Place, Body and Power. Theatre Research International, 38(2), 204-115. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0307883313000205  

Gerbaudo, P. (2012). Tweets and the streets: Social media and contemporary activism. Pluto Press.

Gregory, D. (2013). Tahrir: Politics, Publics, and Performances of Space. Middle East Critique, 22(3), 235-246. https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2013.814944  

Gunning, J. and Ilan Zvi Baron (2014). Why Occupy a Square? People, Protests and Movements in the Egyptian Revolution. Oxford University Press.

Habermas, J. (1989). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society (T. Burger & F. Lawrence, Trans.). MIT Press. (Original work published 1962)

Ismail, S. (2022). Urban spatial politics and collective action in revolutionary Cairo: Counter spaces and paradoxes of mobilisation. Political Geography, 98, 102716, 2-12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2022.102716  

Joseph, S. (2012). Social Media, Political Change, and Human Rights. Boston College International and Comparative Law Review, 35(1), 145-188. https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/social-media-political-change-human-rights/docview/1468665119/se-2  

Levine, M. (2015). When Art is the Weapon: Culture and Resistance Confronting Violence in the Post-Uprisings Arab World. Religions, 6(4), 1277-1313. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel6041277  

Mitchell, W. J. T. (2012). Occupy: Three inquiries in disobedience. Critical Inquiry, 39(1), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1086/668047  

Moritz, J. (2021). Bahrain’s transnational Arab Spring: repression, oil and human rights activism. International Affairs, 97(4), 965–983. https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiab088  

Norris, P. (2012, April). The impact of social media on the Arab uprisings: The Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube revolutions? [Paper presentation]. European Consortium Joint Workshops: Advancing Comparative Political Communication Research: New Frameworks, Designs and Data, Antwerp, Belgium.

Qadiri, M. I., & M Saif, u. R. (2015). Shaking Monarchy And Shouting Masses: Arab Spring And Bahrain Uprising 2011. Journal of the Research Society of Pakistan, 52(2) https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/shaking-monarchy-shouting-masses-arab-spring/docview/1767065395/se-2  

Rinnawi, K. (2012). Cyber uprising: Al-Jazeera TV channel and the Egyptian uprising. Language and Intercultural Communication, 12(2), 118–132. https://doi.org/10.1080/14708477.2012.671607  

Said, A. (2014). We ought to be here: Historicizing space and mobilization in Tahrir Square. International Sociology, 30(4), 348–366. https://doi.org/10.1177/0268580914551306  

Schechner, R. (1993). The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance. Taylor & Francis Group.

Soueif, A. (2012). Cairo: My city, our revolution. Bloomsbury.

Tawil-Souri, H. (2012). It’s still about the power of place. Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 5, 86–95. https://www.google.com/url?q=https://brill.com/downloadpdf/journals/mjcc/5/1/article-p86_12.pdf?srsltid%3DAfmBOopxnd035g-V5OSgkQX8hDt_Z2OYzHpMVRTRymJGIUnuQ6x90coa&sa=D&source=docs&ust=1776695878382875&usg=AOvVaw2H1TP_7ATdHM7rC7_NRpH0  

Tripp, C. (2013). The power and the people : Paths of resistance in the middle east. Cambridge University Press. 

Turner, V., Abrahams, R., & Harris, A (1995). The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Taylor & Francis Group.

van Gennep, A. (1960). The rites of passage (M. B. Vizedom & G. L. Caffee, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1909) 

Wolfsfeld, G., Segev, E., & Sheafer, T. (2013). Social Media and the Arab Spring: Politics Comes First. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 18(2), 115–137. https://doi.org/10.1177/1940161212471716