Following media, academic, and public debates, it seems the Arab protests have been reduced to mono-causal narratives. Several analysts have produced limited interpretations by making parallels between current revolts and previous uprisings or, worse, by looking for explanations that follows their own political agenda. Another problem is a persistent black-and-white view, where different factions only recognize political actors that fit into their worldview. It is a difficult task to read the Arab revolts and even more difficult to establish their nature. Before we can understand these phenomena, we must first deconstruct several interpretations that only prevent us from recognizing their originality. This paper seeks to organize these tendencies, illustrating them with examples, and, thus, contribute to the discussion of the root causes of the revolts. It is not an analysis of the revolts, but a discussion related to the discourses most commonly used to explain them.
Commentators covering recent social movements, such as the Arab Spring, have claimed that cell phones and social media enable collective action. We develop a theoretical model to illustrate why, focusing on two mechanisms: first, by enabling communication among would-be protesters, cell phones lower the costs of coordination; second, these technologies broadcast information about whether a protest is repressed. Knowing that a large audience will now witness, and may be enraged by repression, governments refrain from squashing demonstrators, lowering the cost of protesting. We evaluate the model’s predictions using high-resolution global data on the expansion of cell phone coverage and the incidence of protest from 2007-2014. Our difference-in-differences estimates indicate that cell phone coverage increases the probability of protest by two times the mean. Consistent with our second mechanism, we also find that the expansion of coverage reduces the probability of repression.
Using data from the Arab Barometer, we assess the protest participation between 2005-08 in Algeria, Jordan, Morocco, and Yemen. We find protests were common during the years preceding the Arab Spring and the riskier form of protesting (marching in a demonstration) was approximately 1.5 to 2 times as common as the less risky form of protest (signing a petition), despite the dangers of voicing dissent in authoritarian regimes. We propose grievance and opportunity explanations of why people protested. We find support for economic grievance arguments connecting protest to income and corruption, but not to macro-economic policies. We find support for political grievance arguments connecting protest to exclusion from power and desire for democracy. We also find support for the argument that people are most likely to protest when they do not fear government reprisals. None of the arguments, however, have significant explanatory power in more than two of the four countries, suggesting that even in seemingly similar authoritarian regimes, people protest for different reasons. The propensity to seek a single explanation should be resisted.
During 2010-2011 we have seen the rise of social movements around the globe. The student protests in UK, the Arab Spring in the Middle East, the Indignados in Spain, the student demonstrations in Chile and other Latin American countries, and the Occupy Wall Street movement – which has been replicated in different cities across the US and abroad. They represent different sectorial and political aspirations, but all of them relied heavily on the Internet to communicate and organise. This research analyses two specific contentious processes – the UK student protests and the Chilean environmentalist protests in 2010 – to assess the effect that the Internet may have had on the protesters’ perception of democracy. In both cases, protesters used Twitter and Facebook to communicate with other protesters and to transmit information to mainstream media. Through data gathered from online surveys, interviews, and the Oxford Internet Survey 2009, this article observes the effect of the Internet in two dimensions: support for democracy, and the protesters’ conception of democracy. The data is analysed using methodological triangulation. Several linear and logistic regression models are combined with a qualitative analysis of the interviews. The findings show that the Internet affects the way that people perceive democracy, especially in relation with the concept of democracy between protesters. The evidence points towards the Internet fostering a more horizontal concept of democracy, based on the idea of less hierarchical political organisation. In that regard, respondents tended to connect the use of the Internet with ideas such as referendums, equal participation rights and more horizontal relations between constituents and representatives. This article raises concern about the actual democratic capabilities of the Internet. The question is whether the Internet is inherently democratic or if the observed effect is just the result of a performativity process, fostered by the utopian discourse about the online world.
The study of mass social movements, and their influence on legal, constitutional, and political reform, has long preoccupied legal scholars. Bottom-up social revolutions, ranging from the Civil Rights Movement in the United States to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, are studied extensively in the literature. The traditional conceptions of social movements largely portray them as somber occasions that reflect the gravity of the moment and the seriousness of their objectives. This Article identifies and studies a novel pattern emerging from the social movements of the 21st century, providing a unique contribution to the burgeoning legal literature on the role of non-state actors in shaping legal and constitutional change.
These new social movements — including the Arab Spring, the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the mass protests that took place in Summer 2013 in Turkey and Brazil — bear a counterintuitive ingredient in their conception and design: the ubiquitous use of humor. Although humor might appear to be antithetical to the somber nature of social movements, this Article argues, drawing on behavioral research and social movement theory, that humor can be an effective strategic tool to influence legal, constitutional, and political reforms. Humor can pierce the culture of fear prevalent in tyrannical regimes, serve as an effective coping mechanism against repressive government practices, and provoke government officials into reactionary conduct that furthers the social movement’s objectives. The use of humor can reframe and supplant the negative regime narratives of the movement and build solidarity among heterogeneous members of a movement with pre-existing sociopolitical differences. Humor can also support political mobilization by providing a low cost point of entry into a social movement, obtaining domestic and global resonance for the movement, and persuading others to join the movement by depicting an alternate, more appealing, reality. Finally, humor can provide an effective avenue for expressing popular discontent and undermine traditional methods for suppression employed by repressive leaders, including laws that criminalize and censor dissent and social mobilization.
Much information has been gathered and debated with regards to the catalytic factors, social and political context, and general revolutionary trends involved in and concerning the Arab Spring. However, one aspect of analysis that is lacking is the correlated strength and success of the revolution with regards to the discourse used throughout the various uprisings. Consequently, this paper seeks to add to that dimension by analyzing the discourse utilized by the revolutionaries during the protests. This particular analysis focuses on the contextual factors and their influence on the discourse employed in the 2011 and 2013 uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia. This is accomplished by studying the language employed during the uprisings from varied news outlets, blogs, and other social media. Lastly, I argue that little has changed in terms of the context of the protests, although some differences appear within and between the Egyptian and Tunisian experiences. In conclusion, this paper, by closely examining the discourse surrounding the uprisings, provides a new perspective on the success and strength of the Arab Spring protests.