Dramatic Diffusion

Abstract

When 26-year-old Neda Agha Soltan went into the streets of Tehran to protest fraudulent presidential elections on June 20, 2009, she was just one among thousands of aggrieved Iranians. At the end of that day, however, she had been catapulted to the global public sphere and transformed into a symbol of political repression in Iran. At some point during the protests, Neda was hit and killed by a gunshot. The scene that followed, in which we see Neda collapsing and bleeding profusely, was recorded on a bystander’s cell phone and fed into global communicative networks. Within hours, the footage had been dramatically diffused worldwide, generating a global social movement of shocked reactions from a wide range of actors. The dramatic diffusion of Neda’s shooting exemplifies the role and power of what might be labeled as violent person-events in generating political action, locally, nationally, and globally. In recent years, such events have been at the center of political protest in several countries and on a global scale: for example, Khaled Said, beaten to death by Egyptian police in 2010 (Olesen, 2013b); Mohamed Bouazizi, who set himself on fire in a protest against local authorities in Tunisia in 2010 (Lim, 2013); Malala Yousafzai, shot and severely injured by the Taliban because of her advocacy for girls’ right to education in Pakistan in 2012; and Jyoti Singh, who died after being gang raped on a Delhi bus in 2012.