The Arab-European Association for Media and Communication Researchers

by Doina Boev On January 31, 2017, literally overnight, Romania transformed into a field of protests. People gathered in Victory Square in Bucharest to oppose an emergency decree. The decree would have decriminalized embezzlement beyond 44,000 Euros, among a number of other drastic modifications to the Penal Code. The protests were the largest Romania had seen since the Revolution of 1989, when communism was abolished. However, the #rezist movement, as it came to be known, was only the tip of an iceberg which had been forming in Romania since 2012, awakening a civil society that seemed to be dormant in…