In 2011, Libya witnessed an explosion of political mobilization against the Gaddafi regime that was both peaceful and militarized. It combined armed struggle within Libya with the journalistic and humanitarian efforts of Libyans residing in diaspora communities. Nevertheless, the country presents a puzzling challenge to understanding the emergence of political participation. Unlike other ‘Arab Spring’ countries, it lacked a civil society, formal opposition, political parties and other evident hallmarks of a ‘democratization’ process (Brynen et.al, 1995; 1998). This points to the need to expand our understanding of how and why people participate politically under authoritarian settings, and of political agency more broadly speaking (Maiguashca and Marchetti, 2013). In this paper, I combine the analytical methods and theories of constructivist social movement research (Snow and Benford, 1988; 2000) with the semiotic view of culture and agency put forth by Gamson (1992) and Wedeen (1999), in order to understand the case of Libya. Drawing on over 30 interviews with Libyan activists, fighters and aid workers who participated in 2011 uprising, as well as extensive documentary analysis and archival research, this paper investigates the motives and rationales underpinning opposition to the Gaddafi regime. In line with social movement framing theories, I analyze the way in which diverse groups and individuals aligned and extended their understandings of the revolutionary event, thus constructing collective action frames that enabled a unified stance against the Gaddafi regime. However, this paper develops these insights further by emphasizing processes of meaning-making in the Libyan uprising, as challenges to power structures in and of themselves. I argue that what has been termed the ‘publically political’ self (Wedeen, 1999), emerged not only in strategic political action, but through the production of symbols and metaphors of resistance, in which the Gaddafi regime’s dominant understandings of the political sphere were subverted. In this respect, discursive framing in the uprising was as much a performance of political subjectivities, as it was a manifestation of strategic pragmatism. It was rooted in historical negotiations of power practices under the Gaddafi regime, at the same time as it drew on changing opportunities and constraints. This paper has important implications for locating the Arab Spring movements within the social movements literature, whose theories have significant scope for expansion and development. Equally, and by drawing attention to political agency, it helps to bridge the much-replicated and insufficient dichotomy between strategic and ideational motivations for political action.

This paper investigates the effect of repression and education on individual motivation for insurgent mobilization. By using a unique individual-level dataset of Kurdish insurgents killed in action, I estimate the effect of declaration of emergency zones by Turkish government in 1987 and individual level educational attainment on mobilization of Kurdish Worker’s Party (PKK). The results suggest that there is a positive relationship between the number of individuals that joined the insurgency from a province and the provincial experience of emergency zones. However, individuals who experienced emergency zones took more time to look out for opportunities before joining the insurgency. Moreover, the results suggest that more educated individuals join the insurgency faster than their less educated counterparts. This suggests that educated people, with labor market skills to earn higher levels of income (Angrist and Krueger 1991), are more eager to join the insurgency. This paper contributes to the growing literature on individual-level motivation on insurgent mobilization, and while doing so it aims to explain patterns in the data that are not congruent with the opportunity cost theories of conflict.

Founded in the early 1960s by a group of radical student activists, the Sazman-e Mojahedin-e Khalq-e Iran, or the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI), played a crucial role in the final days of the revolutionary struggle in February 1979. With the collapse of the Shah-regime, the organization experienced a rapid growth and by 1980 it had formed the most formidable national opposition to the ruling Khomeini loyalists. As the interactions between the new revolutionary regime and its opponents turned violent, thousands of PMOI activists were arrested, executed, and forced into underground or exile. By the mid 1980s, the Islamic Republic was able to marginalize its contenders and to consolidate. Now in underground and exile the PMOI looked increasingly inward to find answers for its failure. Not the oppression of the regime but rather the organizational structure and lack of ideological commitments of the members were blamed for its shortcomings. Subsequently, in 1984, a group of the core leadership based in Parisian exile announced the so-called “internal ideological revolution” for the total restructuring of the organization. As a result, a dual leadership replaced the traditionally powerful and more democratic central committee. More importantly, the ranking of all members became contingent on their absolute loyalty to the new leadership proven through a long and exhausting “individual ideological revolution.” Critical to the increasing authoritarianism in the organization, thousands of members have left the PMOI, significantly reducing its social base inside and outside of the country. Scholars who investigate the impact of state repression on opposition activism assume that escalation or deterrence of social resistance depends mainly on the mobilization capacity of the dissident groups or the states’ capability of repression (e.g., Sarah Soule, Hank Johnston, and Christian Davenport). They rarely pay attention to the chosen tactics and strategies of actors involved in protest movements. Drawing on unpublished briefings, statements, and interviews with former and current members of PMOI I illustrate how a once influential and national social movement organization that represented the most powerful opposition to the Islamic Republic has been reduced to a mere exile group with no significant influence inside the country. Moving beyond the traditional assumption, my paper illustrates that the chosen strategies and the growing authoritarian restructuring of the PMOI were key factors in the contraction of protest movements in the 1980s, not the repressive capacity of the at the time weak Iranian state.

Social media has gained momentum as a new venue for resistance and engagement efforts, yet scholars are only beginning to investigate how well existing theories of civil society engagement, resistance and social movements apply to these platforms. Initial work by Lovejoy and Saxton applying communication theory to the digital sector suggests that digital platforms such as Twitter are being used by NGOs to engage through information dissemination, community and consensus building, and to mobilize others for action. In order to build on and refine this framework, we take their three communication functions and apply them to two resistance movements. Advocates for nonviolent resistance against the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, along with those seeking to hold Israel accountable for its bombardment of Gaza in the summer of 2014 have taken to Twitter to promote their respective causes. By conducting a content analysis of tweets collected during the early months of 2015 using the hashtag indicators #ICC4Israel and #BDS, we apply Lovejoy and Saxton’s framework to two different examples of digital engagement in political conflict. In our analysis we explore who is tweeting about these two topics, which modes of engagement they utilize, and which account characteristics and tweeting behavior (i.e. user influence, frequency of tweeting, geolocation, links, and hashtags utilized) are correlated with the various forms of engagement used. This paper addresses these questions by examining a sample of 2000 tweets with hashtags #ICC4Israel and #BDS collected via the Twitter streaming application interface (API) and a custom tweet collection program. We compare and contrast between the patterns generated by the two hashtags, examining the salience of messages through frequency analysis of retweeting and favoriting to determine which modes of engagement solicit the greatest response, and explore whether a form of collective identity is generated virtually in a manner analogous to that of traditional social movement identity formation. We then propose an additional category to Lovejoy and Saxton’s framework- political pressure- to the existing information, community, and action categories in order to allow for a more nuanced understanding of engagement aimed at institutional or policy change versus efforts rooted in civil society leverage.