Internet blackouts and digital authoritarianism: Dissolving and reclaiming protest time and space

Abstract

Drawing on qualitative research on internet shutdown during Bangladesh's July uprising, this paper introduces orchestrated digital dissolution—a form of digital authoritarianism that suppresses dissent by strategically withdrawing infrastructures. A layered shutdown dismantled the communicative terrain of protest (infrastructural subtraction) and fractured political time (chronopolitical disruption). Though coordination stalled and repression was masked, mobilisation recomposed through retrospective visibility via diaspora archives and delayed uploads. Uniting spatial, temporal, and affective dimensions, the framework advances debates on shutdowns as governance through absence and time as resistance.

Introduction

Sparked by a June court ruling restoring civil service quotas for Liberation War descendants, and inflamed when the Prime Minister labelled students “Razakarer Bachcha” (traitors), scattered protests quickly escalated into a digitally amplified campus-to-street movement. A turning point came on 16 July 2024, when a student was shot dead by police in Rangpur—captured on Facebook Live and shared via VPNs—sparking nationwide outrage and more protester deaths that day. With public campuses ordered closed and vacated, private university students led mass protests on 18 July, despite limited stake in the quota issue. Footage of sniper fire, police brutality, and killings flooded social media, intensifying outrage and widening participation. As digital circulation outpaced state narratives, the government escalated repression: mobile internet shutdowns near campuses, coordinated crackdowns, and by nightfall on 18 July, a nationwide internet and near-total blackout (Access Now, 2024a; ShutDown Watch, 2024).

I conceptualise the blackout as orchestrated digital dissolution—a form of digital authoritarianism operating not only through surveillance, censorship, and legal action, but also by disabling infrastructures sustaining protest coordination and visibility. It simultaneously masks state violence and human rights abuses (Access Now, 2024b). Digital infrastructure spans physical components (fiber cables, ISP terminals) and functional systems (mobile networks, data services). Bangladesh's case involved functional withdrawal—fragmenting both temporal flow and spatial coherence of dissent.

This form of shutdown fits within the expanding repertoire of digital authoritarianism: the strategic use of technologies to surveil, suppress, and control political expression under “national security” claims (Deibert, 2020; Roberts and Marjoke Oosterom, 2024). Enabled by global tech collaborations (Conduit, 2025), regimes combine legal sanctions with infrastructural withdrawal, from platform bans and throttling to nationwide shutdowns (Dragu & Lupu, 2021; Rydzak et al., 2020). In 2024, Access Now and #KeepItOn recorded 296 shutdowns in 54 countries—a 35 percent rise since 2022 (Access Now, 2024b). From Kashmir to Khartoum, Tehran to Kampala, such tactics fracture coordination, mask violence, and recalibrate protest temporalities. While states assert “cyber sovereignty” (Deibert, 2020), movements adapt in fragmented forms (Dadpour and Shewly, 2025; Shewly, 2025; Tufekci, 2017). Bangladesh's July 2024 blackout shows how these tactics can escalate to erasing the digital terrain itself, making analysis of orchestrated digital dissolution essential to understanding repression.

This paper draws on five weeks of qualitative research during the July uprising and long-term engagement with trans-spatial protest in Dhaka (Shewly, 2025). Data includes ten interviews, participant observation, and informal conversations conducted in various parts of Dhaka from 14 July–11 August 2024; public Facebook content (July 2024–July 25); and 22 follow-up interviews on blackout impacts (Dec 2024–Jan 2025).

Orchestrated digital dissolution: the critical factors of time and terrain

Orchestrated digital dissolution unfolds through two interlinked dynamics: disrupted terrain and fractured temporality. Disrupted terrain refers to the infrastructural volatility of sudden blackouts, which disable digital architectures. Infrastructural withdrawal works as desynchronisation—rendering protest uncoordinated and unseen, while masking state violence (also see, Access Now, 2024b).

Fractured temporality captures the rupture in protest rhythms—the capacity of collective action to unfold, escalate, and synchronise. During a blackout, momentum stalls, memories fragment, and the circulation of images and testimonies are suspended (Rydzak et al., 2020; Tufekci, 2017). Such disruptions affect not only the flow of information but also the affective temporality that sustains mobilisation. As scholars of media and digital infrastructure have shown (Milan, 2024; Pearce and Rodgers, 2020), infrastructures shape what becomes visible (livestreams, videos), mobile (messages, networks), and actionable (calls to protest, solidarity posts).

Orchestrated digital dissolution builds on this by adding a temporal layer: infrastructural withdrawal operates not just spatially but as a tactic of desynchronisation—breaking synchrony, isolating actors, and erasing real-time political presence. Bangladesh's 2024 blackout exemplified this: protesters lost not only connection and information, but continuity. Yet dissolution also prompts recomposition and resistance. Protesters reassemble fragments—offline organising, delayed testimonies, VPNs, alternative platforms—to restore visibility and sustain mobilisation (Shewly, 2025; Treré & Mattoni 2020; Zuckerman 2014). I extend Milan's (2024) “infrastructural resistance” by adding a temporal dimension: resistance to not just surveillance but disrupted time itself. Resistance also emerges after blackouts through archival reconstruction, diaspora mobilisation, and delayed circulation—a temporal resistance that reclaims political voice across fractured time.

From aspiration to repression: Bangladesh's digital turn

Once celebrated as “Digital Bangladesh,” ICT expansion soon became a tool of repression. Section 57 of the 2006 ICT Act enabled arrests for vague offences like defaming the state. Repealed in 2018, its logic persisted in the Digital Security Act (DSA), criminalising dissent after youth-led protests (Shewly, 2025). By 2023, over 2000 DSA cases had been filed—mainly against journalists, students, and activists—with a sharp rise after the 2018 protests (Amnesty International, 2023). Hundreds faced arrest, harassment, and prolonged legal battles, often without bail. Delays weaponised time, fostering participatory censorship, where fear and surveillance spurred self-silencing. Arrests over memes and satire were common; most starkly illustrated by the 2020 detention of cartoonist Ahmed Kabir Kishore and writer Mushtaq Ahmed for Facebook posts critical of the government's COVID-19 response—Ahmed, denied bail six times, died in custody in February 2021, while Kishore, released after public outcry, reported torture in detention (Amnesty International, 2021). Rebranded in 2023, the Cyber Security Act retained the DSA's core.

Alongside legal tools like the Anti-Terrorism Act (2009/2013) and the Broadcast Act (2018), repression expanded through spyware (Pegasus), content takedowns, throttling, and platform blocks. These were applied during protests, but a nationwide mobile shutdown was first imposed during the 2018 road safety movement. Bangladesh spent $90m on surveillance from 2016–2024 (TechGlobal Institute, 2025), supported by at least 22 laws. Surveillance systems were procured via third-country intermediaries and private firms to bypass export restrictions, embedding transnational corporate actors in the apparatus. These tactics reflect a global repertoire of digital authoritarianism enabled through surveillance partnerships (Conduit, 2025; Rydzak et al., 2020).

The July uprising and layered internet blackout

The nationwide blackout fractured protest's temporal lifelines—blocking medical facilities and coordination, enabling state propaganda, and pushing dissent into delayed visibility sustained through diaspora-supported archival release. On 19 July near Rampura, I learned that three students had set out after hearing fragmented word-of-mouth information that students were being killed. Entering a crossroad, they were surrounded by police and ruling-party supporters; one was shot, and the others tried to get him to safety. Two hospitals refused treatment—whether from fear or tacit collusion—and he died en route to a third. That evening in Mirpur—where protesters, police, and ruling-party supporters vied for control—I saw three severely wounded students brought into a clinic by rickshaw pullers who knew it discreetly treated protesters. From outside, it appeared shut to avoid detection. Such incidents reflect infrastructural violence: withdrawal of medical and digital capacity magnifying repression's lethality. The blackout's chronopolitical lag meant no alerts, no real-time updates, and no coordinated safe passage—only pockets of action cut off in time and space.

During the digital cutoff, government and ruling-party pages amplified official narratives uncontested, while networks were jammed and activists tracked through spyware. Mainstream media largely echoed these narratives, deepening the informational and temporal vacuum. Diaspora networks sustained the movement's afterlife by mobilising global media, staging protests abroad, withholding remittances led by Middle East–based groups, and guiding activists on metadata preservation—transforming disrupted time into a delayed archive. Satellite-enabled media kept limited contact with activists, helping disseminate critical images and testimonies. Amid curfew, images of violence against unarmed civilians circulated globally, rupturing official narratives and reassembling retrospective visibility.

The blackout was also deeply affective—intensifying fear, isolation, and vulnerability. Testimonies reveal the psychic toll of disconnection: “We were reporting without internet… no idea what happens where… unless I’m there… then… risky for us,” said a journalist. “We know phones are tapped; we try to gather news face-to-face.” Journalists feared arrest even for returning home; one photojournalist avoided home for the entire movement, shifting locations repeatedly. Six journalists were killed, hundreds injured, and a UN report confirmed deliberate targeting (OHCHR, 2025; RSF, 2025). Protesters repeatedly called Facebook a “lifeline”—for information, help, and solidarity—that, once cut, left them exposed. This was an affective suspension: disconnection as psychological warfare, exhausting bodies and fragmenting determination. It created a window for the state to reassert control; student leaders paused to mourn the dead, and by 23 July, police and enforcers reoccupied intersections.

When low-speed internet returned on 24 July, activists moved quickly: urgent calls urged uploading evidence of killings, disappearances, and police brutality to GlobalLeaks (Netra News) or ProtonMail with metadata, warning that Facebook and WhatsApp strip verification. Footage soon showed a Border Guard officer and police firing on civilians. VPNs restored partial access, and a backlog of videos challenged official denials. These practices turned disrupted time into a counter-archive, akin to Weizman's (2017) forensic counter-temporality, where delayed release ruptures narratives and makes absence legible. The blackout bifurcated political time: inside Bangladesh, a silenced present; abroad, a deferred domain where protest memory was pieced together and re-injected into public space. Protesters described how seeing the brutality dissolved fear—“anger drove us to join the long march.” This was retrospective visibility—temporal resistance where erased presents became actionable pasts. Outrage reignited; student leaders issued a single demand (ék dofa): the government's resignation. Even a second blackout on 4 August could not halt the long march toward the Prime Minister's office. By the time she left for India on 5 August, the crackdown had killed hundreds by credible counts (Netra News, 2025; OHCHR, 2025).

Conclusion

The conceptualisation of orchestrated digital dissolution reframes digital authoritarianism as withdrawal alongside intrusion. Centered on two entwined mechanisms—infrastructural subtraction, the sovereign removal of terrain sustaining mobilisation, and chronopolitical disruption, fracturing protest's lifelines—this framework unites spatial and temporal politics in one analytic. Its strength lies in making absence visible as a governance strategy and temporality as a site of struggle, extending debates on digital repression, infrastructure, and activism.

Though grounded in Bangladesh, the framework applies to other contexts where connectivity withdrawal intersects with legal repression, infrastructural asymmetry, and digital aspiration. By identifying mechanisms, it offers a transferable tool for analysing how absence is produced, how dissent endures through deferred and diasporic circuits, and how time becomes a terrain of resistance. It also situates blackouts within a North–South political economy where corporate and transnational actors enable surveillance, network control, and state compliance.

As blackouts become routine, they compel us to center time, terrain, and affect in analysis—with disorientation and isolation integral to chronopolitical disruption. The suspension of connectivity also suspends the emotional and temporal rhythms sustaining mobilisation. To study digital authoritarianism today is to trace not only what is present, but also what is erased—when, how, and to what end.