New media increasingly influence the development of collective action around contentious international issues. Within the framework of "technological environment", new media strengthens the globalization of media channels, and offer new instruments to loc alize the information narrative by grassroots actors. The result is empowering online collective action that generates policy reactions at the international level. The recent stream of protests against authoritarian regimes in North Africa lends empirical evidence to the potentialities of the Internet in transition countries. This scenario calls for new lines of research in the field of new media and international politics.
Research in this field must address new comparative research strategies in order t o explore the use of new media across countries and political systems. Moreover, the spread of new media and the globalization of a ?technological environment? has implications for many different disciplines and field of research. This demands an interdis ciplinary response, involving scholars with different backgrounds and different foci of analysis. So far, there has been limited dialogue between scholars in the field of new media, international relations, and practitioners promoting the use of new media in transition democracies.
The proposed workshop aims to bridge this dearth in existing research by taking an interdisciplinary approach to the state of the art on new media in transition countries, and implications for international political processes. The workshop will establish clear lines of collaborations between experts of new media and collective action, and scholars working in the field of international politics with a main focus on civil society and development, as well as practitioners in the field of new media and politics in transition countries. The proposed workshop has the goal to strengthen collaborations in order to launch further projects in the field of media and International politics.