Taking as its starting point the mental earthquake produced by the 2011 uprisings, this programmatic and exploratory paper tackles the epistemological questions of causality and contingency (Ermakoff, 2015), and hopes to foster dialogue between comparative political regimes studies, the sociology of revolutions, and social movement literature (e.g. Allal & Pierret, 2013; Beinin & Vairel, 2013). Based on a comparative analysis of some ‘positive cases’ (Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria), and a ‘negative case’ (Morocco), the main objective of this paper is to expand the scope of the attempts aimed at reconciling structure and contingency, by focusing on the formation of large coalitions and the spread of mobilizations, on division or defection from within the repressive apparatus, and on the impacts of crisis management by the incumbents. This comparative analysis draws upon the author’s fieldwork in Morocco, and theoretical analysis on social movements and uprisings in the Middle East. On the theoretical level, the paper argues that an interactionist and sequential approach (Fillieule, 2015; Duyvendak, 2015) can be helpful in further exploring how to deal with the ‘messiness’ of causation during an open-ended conjuncture (Beissinger, 2011). It should allow us: 1) to bring the actor back in—an actor inscribed in historicity, but also subject to emotion, uncertainty, an actor acted upon, acting and interacting; 2) to examine—sequence by sequence—the connections between the macro level of the environment, the meso level of relations among collective actors, and the micro level of individuals; 3) to grasp the contingency effects produced by the absence of ‘pre-established script,’ and 4) to explore in which way ‘time matters’ (Abbott, 2001). More specifically, the paper highlights that uncertainty affects all the actors present: the challengers as much as the incumbents and their international allies, the ordinary citizen as well as the officers and the recruits. Regarding the incumbents, for instance, how national and regional events are interpreted, the nature and timing of reactions, and the degree of disorganization manifested seem to have played a fundamental role, including in the maintenance or loss of external support for regimes.

It has been suggested that revolutions confound accepted standards of causal explanation (Goodwin, 2001; Keddie, 1995). This points towards the necessity for developing a more specific sociology of revolutionary situations. Doing so also constitutes an avenue for answering calls for reinserting the study of contentious politics into larger debates in social theory (Gould 2004). Indeed, it has been argued that revolutionary situations offer rich empirical material for thinking about fundamental sociological questions such as eventfulness and structural transformation (Sewell, 2005). The paper contributes to this debate through conceptualizations induced from the 2010/11 episode of revolutionary mass mobilization in Tunisia. It argues that, in revolutionary situations, structural conditions, especially those of the political field, become highly ambiguous, giving latitude to agency. Instead of resulting in voluntarism and subjectivism, however, interactional dynamics inside mobilized masses give rise to spontaneous social construction that produces innovative patterns orienting and structuring dispositions and strategic action. This chimes with a recent proposition for re-thinking spontaneity in the context of contentious politics more generally (Snow and Moss, 2014). Building on this, the paper introduces temporal, behavioral, and interpretive anchoring as individual-level cognitive dynamics to account for spontaneity. It then develops keynoting (Turner and Killian, 1987), bravery, and transformative associational bonding (Fantasia, 1989) to conceptualize forms of collectively creative agency. Empirical data comes from tracing the emergence and spread of three cases of innovations during the 2010/11 2010/11 revolutionary mass mobilization in Tunisia: the slogans “Ben Ali Dégage!” and “Ash-sha?b yur?d isq?? an-ni??m”, as well as the repertoire of permanently occupying the Kasbah. Data has been gathered in a multi-step process, ensuring triangulation of methods and sources. First, event catalogues were created based on selected news media for the period of December 18, 2010, when the protests began occurring in Sidi Bouzid, to January 28, 2011, when the first occupation of the Kasbah was forcefully ended. Second, social media content from the dates and locations identified in step one was analyzed. This included videos of protests posted on YouTube and textual sources like blogs, Facebook pages such as klna-mhmd-albwzyzy, as well as historical data for Twitter-hashtags. Finally, more than thirty in-depth interviews were conducted with actors present at the sites of emergence in Sidi Bouzid, Thala, Kasserine, Sfax, and Tunis which were identified in the previous two stages.

On 6 August 2015, Veolia (the major, French, environmental and transport services multi-national) withdrew from financing, operating and maintaining the Jerusalem Light Rail. Officially, the decision was the result of a strategic re-focus. Company insiders, journalists, and activists alike, however, argue that the divestment was the result of pressure from the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights. The BDS movement claimed that Veolia was aiding and abetting illegal Israeli occupation and settlement activity, and was thus a fit target for boycott. High profile campaigns pressured the company by causing it to lose contracts or be excluded from tender in a number of municipalities. This paper involves an in-depth case study of this important episode of transnational contention, aiming to develop the use of an innovative methodology – dynamic interaction analysis. The latter draws on event-structure analysis (Heise 1989), eventful sociology (Sewell 1996), relational contentious politics (McAdam et al 2001), and strategic interaction perspectives (Duyvendak and Filleule 2015). The building blocks are (1) interactions between actors (economic, governmental, transnational-activist, domestic-political, and inter-governmental) (2) actor-dynamism (their re-constitution over time); (3) time-sequencing (causes must be anterior to effects); (4) interpretation (that actors interpret their situation and act on these interpretations); (5) actor-constitution (actors strive to be constituted, cohesive and integral – and recognized as such – in their efforts to bring about or resist change) and (6) fatefulness (decisions taken amid interaction generate path-dependencies – they deplete or change objects, reinforce instruments, have beneficiaries and bring about products that constrain future action). The episode of contention, beginning with the first challenges to Veolia’s involvement in 2005-6, is reconstructed with these building blocks using desktop and interview-based research and multi-sited fieldwork. The aim is to shed light on the causal mechanisms at work: how did actions by the BDS movement translate into pressures on Veolia? What activist strategies were viable and effective? How were actors reconstituted over time? The case-study aims to shed light on the possibilities and limits of the BDS movement, to offer tools for studying transnational activism, and to address debates about strategic interaction perspectives on protest.

Participants and observers of protests often have divergent understandings of what is happening. What they do before, during, and after protests are shaped by those understandings. Protesters often see themselves as demanding that some injustice be redressed, their actions constituting efforts to push back against powers that advance the interests of the powerful at the expense of the rest. Protesters view security forces as the enforcement arm of an unequal system, as agents of the regime who silence those who dare to speak truth to power or demand justice. Security forces, for their part, see themselves as maintaining order, defending the legitimate power structures against troublemakers, and protecting the broader public and its law-abiding citizens and their property. These diverse understandings often invoke one or more temporalities—frameworks about the past, present, future, and the unfolding of events over time—that can shape their actions on a practical level. In the course of a single protest event as well as across series of events, actors create, adopt, and adapt different understandings about what the event means, and what is possible, and what is to be done. Actors may include the police, the army, political parties, activists, and bystanders, but also members of parliament, cabinet members, the head of state, and the media. Extended audiences include foreign governments, international agencies, human rights organizations, foreign corporations, tourists, makers and marketers of security technology and hardware, and so on. Actors and audiences often disagree on what is happening. In this paper I will explore the temporalities of protests. I use a combination of ethnography, archival work, and memoirs to examine long-term, medium-term, and short-term temporalities, and notions of normal versus crisis periods. I begin by examining how scholarly temporal frameworks are often at odds with the temporalities of actors on the ground as well as those observing from a near or far distance. I develop two empirical examples from Jordan—the Adwan rebellion in the 1920s and the protests against the first Jordanian-Israeli trade fair held in 1997 in Amman—to illustrate the ways in which actors invoke temporal registers that are at odds with those of other actors. In both cases, tribal narratives and pre-Hashemite histories are invoked—by protesters in the first case and by security forces in the second—in ways that challenge ideas about loyalty to the nation, what that nation is, and who is even considered an authentic Jordanian.