Ala?a Shehabi is a Bahraini writer and researcher. She is a co-founder of Bahrain Watch, an NGO that advocates for accountability and social justice in Bahrain. She previously worked as a policy analyst at RAND Corporation and as a lecturer at the Bahraini Institute for Banking and Finance during the 2011 uprising. Various parts of the book were written during a visiting position at Lund University and a fellowship at the Arab Council for Social Sciences.Marc Owen Jones is a writer researching political repression in Bahrain at Durham University. In addition to teaching Middle East politics, Marc is a member of the advocacy NGO Bahrain Watch and writes a blog on Bahrain. In 2011, he helped to expose fake journalist Liliane Khalil and appeared on Al Jazeera and France 24 to discuss how PR companies are using such figures to spread government propaganda.

What binds the essays is, first of all, that they are remarkably well crafted and share a sense of immediacy... (At least one of the contributors is currently imprisoned.) The essays also share an overarching sense of humanity, in that the book focuses on the experience of people, not members of specific religious or national groups.

• Foreword: On the Prelude to the 14 February Uprising - Abdulhadi KhalafIntroduction: Bahrain's Uprising, the Struggle for Democracy in the Gulf - Ala'a Shehabi and Marc Owen JonesPart I: Voices of the Condemned1. A Trial of Thoughts and Ideas - Ibrahim Sharif2. God After Ten O'Clock - 'Ali Al Jallawi3. A Room with a Wiew: An Eyewitness to the Pearl Uprising - Tony MitchellPart II: Configuring Dissent: Charting Movements, Space, and Self-Representation in Bahrain4. Shifting Contours of Activism and Possibilities for Justice in Bahrain - Luke G.G. Bhatia and Ala'a Shehabi5. The Many Afterlives of Lulu: The Story of Bahrain's Pearl Roundabout - Amal Khalaf6. Tn Tn Ttn and Torture in Bahrain: Puncturing the Spectacle of the 'Arab Spring' - John HornePart III: Suppressing Dissent in an Acceptable Manner: Modes of Repression, Foreign Involvement and Institutional Violence7. On the Side of Decency and Democracy: The History of British–Bahraini Relations and Transnational Contestation - Zoe Holman8. Rotten Apples or Rotten Orchards: Police Deviance, Brutality, and Unaccountability in Bahrain - Marc Owen Jones9. Social Media, Surveillance, and Cyberpolitics in the Bahrain uprising - Marc Owen Jones