In October 2019, mass peaceful protests spontaneously erupted against the sectarian elite and the political system in Lebanon. Hundreds of thousands of protestors from all walks of life demanded an end to rampant corruption and persistent clientelism that have exacerbated the economic struggles in the country. The protests gave hope to those seeking change, as they transcended sectarian identities and socioeconomic statuses. After several months, however, the protests became less frequent and their size decreased. Although new governments have been formed as a result of these protests, no reforms have been implemented. But as the economic situation worsens for most Lebanese, with over half of the Lebanese population currently living in poverty, social movements to topple the consociational democratic regimes will likely reignite and become more powerful in the near future. This paper examines the resilience of the Lebanese regime against the October 2019 protest movement and the factors impeding prospects of political reform and change. By building on the notions of constructive resistance and infrapolitics, the paper also inspects the possible modes of non-violent direct action and civil resistance that activists and social movements can utilize to influence change and reforms following the stagnation of the protests and their inability to be effective. Dubbed by James C. Scott, “infrapolitics” refers to the strategies of resistance that oppressed groups use without being detected by dominant groups. The concept of “constructive resistance” entails the ability to form new societies while simultaneously resisting oppressive regimes and challenging dominant discourses. It is a form of direct action that contrasts activism through protests seeking to force leaders or the state to make the change. Albeit engendering a slow transformation of values, this form of dissent is deemed the most powerful method of resistance. The paper concludes that as protests have demonstrated their ineffectiveness in forcing politicians to reform the political systems, other means and strategies of civil resistance and infrapolitics need to be examined for future activism in Lebanon.

When mass protest movements for democratic reform fail to deliver timely and substantive change, they are often labeled as failures by observers and participants alike. But this conclusion misses important ways in which such protest movements may nonetheless alter dynamics of contention and, in the long run, increase the politicization and lower the thresholds of mobilization of ordinary citizens (Lynch 2014). Scholars of the former USSR note that pro-democracy protests brutally repressed under communism helped pave the way for subsequent mobilization (e.g. Kozlov, Fitzpatrick, and Miranenko 2011). More recently, Berman has demonstrated how failed revolutions increase elite threat perceptions and drive greater concessions to protesters (2020). As the MENA region marks 10 years since the 2011 uprisings, efforts to better understand their legacy provide a necessary corrective to those who believe that the region’s authoritarian incumbents have successfully demobilized their critics and stabilized their rule. In this paper, part of a larger project on the dynamics of contention in contemporary Morocco, I explore the long-run impact of 2011’s February 20th Movement, illustrating that the movement’s splintering, and the regime’s failure to deliver promised reforms, have nonetheless heightened levels of politicization and given rise to novel forms of contention among ordinary Moroccans. This is in part, I argue, because of the regime’s long history of over-promising and under-delivering, which has increased ordinary citizens’ expectations while giving them an anodyne, apolitical language with which to make claims against the state—and even seek accountability from those at the top. The concessions granted to the February 20th Movement in 2011 were only the latest in this series of disingenuous reform efforts, and the emergence of novel forms of contention and indeed protest suggest that there may be a limit to the “power of empty promises” (Distelhorst 2017). These conclusions are supported by extensive documentary and interview evidence collected over the course of nearly 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Morocco. Specifically, this paper combines evidence from open-ended interviews with Moroccan activists, journalists, politicians, and academics, as well as analysis of local elite and popular media, to provide an account of increasing politicization and contention in Morocco in the years since 2011’s February 20th Movement.

"How do ordinary people become political opponents in an authoritarian state?" Based on in-depth interviews with ten Saudi men and women dissidents, this paper explores the reasons for opposing the Saudi regime in the period following the appointment of Mohammed bin Salman as the Saudi regime's crown prince. It is noteworthy that many Saudi citizens decided to leave Saudi Arabia and organize opposition to the Saudi regime since the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi. This paper explores the dynamics of growth of political opposition in relationship to changing styles of rule, power structure, conceptions of legitimacy, and the cost of repression. I argue that indiscriminate repression contributed to increasing the degree of solidarity with victims of political repression, leading some “ordinary people” to acquire a new identity as political opponents. According to the political process theory, when the regime becomes closed, the ability to mobilize will decrease, but the opposite seems to be happening in this case. In this light, the paper explores how when the governing system was relatively more open (between 2010 and 2015), the opposition was less mobilized but became more mobilized when the governing system became more closed after 2015.