The Arab uprisings have reinvigorated the study of protest politics in the Middle East and North Africa. Although much has been written on social and political mobilization in light of these events, the existing scholarship has largely focused on macro-level outcomes. To better understand protest dynamics in the region, we need to incorporate more historical and comparative approaches in our study of contentious politics under authoritarian rule. The papers on this panel explore a number of under-studied dimensions of protest politics in the lead-up to and aftermath of the Arab uprisings. Rather than focus exclusively on protest outcomes, the panel sheds light on protest processes and their enduring consequences for future contestation. The panel incorporates insights from cases outside the Arab uprisings, both historically and geographically.
Examining protests in Egypt, Turkey, Bahrain, and Morocco, the papers use archival research, fieldwork, and intertextual and spatial analyses to develop original and novel datasets. The first paper sheds light on the history and dynamics of the often-overlooked repertoire of sit-ins in Egypt, and explores how participants’ involvement in informal activities over the course of these sit-ins shapes lasting collective identities. The second paper looks at a dimension of protests that might traditionally be viewed as epiphenomenal and even trivial -- the role of satire and insult in the face of violence and repression -- to understand the escalation of the Gezi protests and Turkey’s subsequent societal polarization. The third paper explores the spatial dynamics of protest in Bahrain, mapping the spread of violence over time to explain how structural conditions have made repression especially effective. The final paper challenges the concept of Moroccan exceptionalism and argues that the key to understanding why protests fail lies not in the monarchy’s claims to legitimacy, but rather in its strategic response to protesters based on their backgrounds, interests, and aims.
Ultimately, this panel expands the theoretical and geographical scope of current scholarship on protest politics. Drawing on novel data sources and less-studied cases, these papers explore elements of protests that are often overlooked by conventional studies of contestation under authoritarian rule, but that can provide valuable insight into the dynamics of how state-society relations, as well as social movements themselves, evolve.
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What effects do a government’s rhetorical insults against protesters have on their mobilization? How do protesters’ peaceful uses of satire as a tool of opposition shape the dynamics of contestation against governments wielding violence? During the height of the nation-wide, anti-government demonstrations known as Turkey’s Gezi Protests in the summer of 2013, a protester in Ankara carried a banner proclaiming “No stone, no stick! Our goal is liberty!” This and thousands of other banners’ sentiments simultaneously denounced the brutal police crackdown that led to several deaths and thousands of serious injuries, and objected to the government’s demeaning characterization of peaceful protesters as looters, hooligans, and terrorists. Thousands more banners displayed clever humor deftly criticizing brutal crackdowns on demonstrators, such as “Help police! Hmm, guess you’re busy…” While many studies of the Gezi Protests mention the witty satire rife throughout demonstrators’ posters, graffiti, and social media posts making fun of the violence they witnessed, they treat humor as epiphenomenal to the protest dynamics. Similarly, studies criticizing the government’s rhetorical efforts to delegitimize protesters and thus defend the use of violence against them do not examine the constitutive effects these insults had on mobilization during the demonstrations. Rather than focus on the “sticks and stones” of violence, this paper analyzes the substantive and substantial impacts of words on protest mobilization and government response. Using intertextual analysis and process-tracing, I examine written, spoken, and symbolic texts of participants in the Gezi Protests and government officials in Turkey from June to August 2013. I trace the content of the language used by protesters and government officials as well as the timing and scope of demonstrations and government crackdowns. In doing so, I develop a psychological theory of protest escalation that captures the constitutive effects of satire and insult, to explain the timing and rhetorical content of protesters’ mobilization and the government’s counter-mobilization.
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Dr. Dina Bishara
Co-Authors: Elliott Colla
The eighteen-day uprising that started on January 25, 2011 and culminated in the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak is perhaps the most prominent example of an extended sit-in in Egyptian history. Nevertheless, Egyptians have a long history of resorting to this protest strategy, dating back to the 1970s. Extended sit-ins also featured prominently in the large wave of protests that preceded the January 2011 uprising. Despite the ubiquity of the sit-in as an important part of the protest repertoire in Egypt, and elsewhere, social movement scholars have rarely examined how the use of this form or protest affects important social movement outcomes, such as deepening ties among movement members or establishing networks. This paper draws attention to an oft-neglected dimension of extended sit-ins, namely the possibilities they allow for informal activities, such as sharing meals or exchanging experiences. Drawing on examples from Egypt, the paper highlights how participants’ involvement in informal activities shapes the group’s collective identity and contributes to subsequent contentious activism. In doing so, the paper moves beyond traditional accounts of individual acts of resistance on the one hand, and large-scale collective mobilization on the other. Instead, the paper theorizes the day-to-day, collective dynamics of contentious politics. The paper draws on a range of sources, including interviews with protest participants, chants and poems used over the course of various sit-ins, and archival material on historical cases.
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Dr. Trevor Johnston
With protests mounting in 2011, Bahrain's rulers made a sweeping offer of cash transfers for citizens. The regime had hoped that these benefits would end the open revolt growing on the streets. Their efforts failed. From Saudi Arabia to Oman, such cooptation had proven successful, helping quiet protests throughout the Arabian Gulf. In this paper, I explore why similar measures failed in Bahrain, where the regime had to resort to outright repression. Drawing on spatial econometric methods, I develop a novel dataset of protests in Bahrain from 2011-2016. I show how the spread and distribution of opposition groups throughout Bahrain has made cooptation prohibitively expensive. Facing a diverse population with distinct preferences over public goods, the regime cannot easily buy-off individual groups with targeted benefits. The spatial segregation of Shia villages has also reduced the cost of repression and made this strategy relatively more effective. These structural conditions have continued to shape protest dynamics and the regime's response since the uprising.
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Morocco, one of the first countries to defuse protests associated with the Arab uprisings, has been termed the Middle East’s exception. What explains the short-lived nature of Moroccan protests? Existing explanations of Moroccan exceptionalism focus primarily on people’s fears or their respect for the monarchy’s legitimacy. Very few sources address the regime’s role in defeating these protests. These accounts usually advance cultural, institutional, and actor-based explanations. These explanations are significantly flawed, however, because they are rarely based on historical comparisons with past protests in the country, and they overlook the tactical nature of the monarchy’s response to protests.
Drawing on theories of authoritarian resilience, this paper attributes the failure of Moroccan protests to the tactical nature of the monarchy’s response. Using a comparative historical approach, statistical comparisons, and within-case methods, this paper offers a systematic analysis of the Moroccan regime’s response to different types of protests and accounts for variation in the monarchy’s tactics. Specifically, it posits that the nature, severity, and leadership of protests shape regime reaction.
This paper makes three contributions to studies of Middle Eastern politics. First, it uncovers a pattern of regime response to protest that undermines the concept of Moroccan exceptionalism by highlighting the monarchy’s systematic strategic tendencies. Second, through its historical perspective, it provides new empirical evidence that challenges arguments about the predictive effects of regime type and wealth on monarchical reactions to dissent. In doing so, this paper effectively distances the Moroccan case from common arguments of exceptionalism and brings it back into the broader theoretical debates of authoritarian resilience. Finally, this project contributes to the study of the relationship between resource wealth and regime survival by shifting the analytical focus away from the interesting, yet over-studied topic of traditional rentierism towards a more sophisticated theory of non-rent accommodation that applies to resource-poor countries such as Morocco.
