Geographers mobilize: A network-diffusion analysis of the campaign to free Ghazi-Walid Falah

Abstract

In summer 2006, Professor Ghazi-Walid Falah, a political geographer and editor-in-chief of the journal Arab World Geographer, was arrested by Israeli police after taking photographs of rural landscapes in Northern Galilee. Falah was subsequently held for 23 days, incommunicado, and without charge. An international campaign to “Free Ghazi” was launched by his family, friends and colleagues, largely over academic listservs and other media. Utilizing social network analysis and contextualizing the campaign within structures of telecommunications technologies, the purpose of this paper is to assess the various factors that contributed to the campaign’s coalescence, its rapid development, and its global reach.