Leaderless but Directed: Internet and Contention In A Wave of Protest in Iran

• In Event: Organizations & their Alternatives: the Recent Protest Waves in the Middle East

Abstract

Studies of protest and digital media contend that internet has made possible one of the long-standing aspirations of many social movements around the world, the desire for a leaderless movement based on a horizontal interpersonal network rather than conventional social movement organizations with a hierarchical organization and leadership at their summit. Scholars have substantiated this connection by evidence from recent movements such as the Occupy Wall Street or Arab Spring. The anti-regime protests in Iran during December 2017 presents the case of another leaderless movement, but we show how a small social media channel who rose in popularity during the wave of protest coordinated the time and location of protest for 10 days that this wave of protest lasted in Iran. In other words, instead of making protest possible through connecting many to many, internet in the case of Iran enabled a few individuals behind a social media channel to direct the wave of protest to various counties in the country. Based on original data, we use the subnational variation at the level of counties to test the effect of digital media along with other potentially important factors such as deprivation, climate change, development, political process, youth bulge, and spatial proximity. Our findings support the effect of one social media channel in coordinating this wave of protest. We also find that this effect has been stronger in less developed areas in the country. Finally, we also observe an effect for political opportunities different from the way the concept has been developed and empirically used in the literature.

Author

• Mohammad Ali Kadivar, Boston College