What are the new possibilities of enacting justice through the vast archives of digital eyewitness images and self-representations produced since 2011 by the grassroots Syrian opposition movement amidst both a nascent revolution and a war entailing gross human rights violations? Based on in-depth interviews with 15 anti-regime Syrian video activists, my article considers how the image makers themselves narrate the role and meaning of these archival records in efforts to reckon with Syria's tormented past and build a more just future. I thus seek to recognize the ongoing agency of the Syrian media activists who struggled, by centering them and their wishes in the current debate about the role that this new type of activist-fueled human rights records can play in helping to build roads to justice and healing in Syria.

A decade after the outbreak of the Arab revolutions, what remains of the political promise of cameras everywhere to permit activists and protesters in the region revived forms of agency, self-expression, and connectivity? This Special Section aims to provide a better understanding of what the opportunities and constraints are for practices of grassroots digital image activism within today's political struggles in the Arab world. Together, the articles track the current conditions of possibility for Arab digital image activism to actualize counterdominant practices of capturing, mobilizing, and archiving visual documentation of people's struggles for justice in the region. Where traditional media studies tend to focus on insurgent image making as content rather than as embodied and embedded practices, the contributions here feature a range of concrete, contextual, and innovative repertoires of activist video and photography practices. They specifically detail the struggle between resistance and control, between efforts to maintain the radical potential of grassroots forms and practices image- making in the region, and the renewed hegemonic threats and pressures of co-optation, commodification, and censorship.

My study brings a practice perspective to the study of video activism, specifically seeking to bridge a focus on activist agency with attention to structure. Hence, it provides a critical lens on new economies of image developing in relation to the post-2011 Syrian conflict, to theorize both the agency-the practices, aspirations, and need-of local Syrian videographers and how it is challenged and restricted by structure: that is, the dynamics of ruling perpetrated both by commercial platforms (particularly YouTube), that are now stepping up censorship of video, and by the international justice movement, that is now rushing to harness the probative power of online eyewitness video for grave crimes investigations and prosecutions. Based on semi- structured interviews with four key actors in the international justice movement and 15 Syrian videographers, the study advances our conception of the potentials and challenges of digital camera-practices for civic agency and activism within a contested global media space of ever-increasing exploitation, commodification, and censorship.

This article interrogates the emerging modes of civic engagement connected to the mobile camera-phone, and the ways in which they require us to rethink what it is to bear witness to brutality in the age of fundamentally camera-mediated mass self-publication. I argue that the camera-phone permits entirely new performative rituals of bearing witness, such as dissenting bodies en masse recording their own repression and, via wireless global communication networks, effectively mobilizing this footage as graphic testimony in a bid to produce feelings of political solidarity. Critically, the performance of what I elect to call citizen camera-witnessing', as exemplified by contemporary street opposition movements including those in Burma, Iran, Egypt, Libya and Syria, derives its potency from the ways it reactivates the idea of martyrdom: that is, from its distinct claim to truth in the name of afflicted people who put their bodies on the line to record the injustice of oppression.

Focusing on the critical case of the mobile phone footage of Gaddafi's death in the context of Swedish television news and its audiences, this article considers how the nature of media witnessing' is being transformed through the employment of user-generated footage. On the basis of a combined text/audience analysis study, it shows that citizen video encodes an extraordinary sense of presence and participation. Critically, however, its facilitation of pseudo-eyewitnessing' is not enough in itself to sustain practices of bearing witness. Rather, the author shows that moral responsibility is fundamentally conditioned by the symbolic management of distance - which, audiences stress, is most efficiently provided by professional news packages. Importantly, then, this empirical study corroborates the so far mainly theoretical claim in literature on media witnessing which advocates that media representations need to maintain a proper distance' in order to construct scenes of suffering and violence as a moral cause to spectators.

This study, based on interviews with journalists representing major news organizations in Finland and Sweden, explores how the professional ideology of journalists is shaped by the international trend of citizen witnessing. Citizen-created photographs and videos that have become a routine feature of mainstream news coverage are approached as a potential force of change that transforms professional imaginaries of journalism vis-a-vis crisis events. From journalists' lines of thought three interpretative repertoires were identified: resistance, resignation and renewal. Our results hint at a rethinking of the professional norms and roles of journalists.

The role of Syrian diaspora activists has been identified as key to both supporting and shaping the world's image of the Syrian uprising. This article examines the multifaceted media work of Syrian diaspora activists, conceptualized as cultural brokerage in a global and national setting. Based on personal interviews with activists in exile in five countries, this study identifies and analyzes three main aspects of brokerage: (a) linking the voices of protesters inside the country to the outside world, (b) managing messages to bridge the gap between social media and mainstream media, and (c) collaborating with professional journalists and translating messages to fit the contexts and understandings of foreign publics.