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

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Mobilizing structures and social movement organizations are foundational components of the literature on social movements. This literature has been developed mostly around cases from the US or Western Europe in the Mid-to-Late Twentieth Century. Scholars focusing on recent social movements using digital media or cases from other regions of the world have contested the way that the concepts have been used in the literature. In this panel, we use both qualitative and quantitative data focusing on recent waves of protest in different Middle East countries to reexamine both the old and new methods of organizing in contexts outside of established western democracies.

Two of the papers with cases from Tunisia and Iran examine the importance of digital media in mobilizing leaderless movements. These papers tell us how internet has been actually used in these uprisings and how this usage relates to conventional understandings of digital media and protest. Another paper looks at the effect of conventional protest organizations under authoritarianism on protest activities after democratic transitions. A last paper examines the role of conventional political parties in Lebanon and their impact on sectarian mobilization in the country. Overall, the panel offers a range of original approaches and new data sources for the study of organization and collective action in contexts that have until recently been the subject of only limited attention in mainstream social science.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 11: Comparative Politics

Cosponsor

• DIVISION 12: Comparative Politics in Developing Countries

Individual Presentations

• Leaderless but Directed: Internet and Contention In A Wave of Protest in Iran - Mohammad Ali Kadivar, Boston College

• The Parochial Logics of Online Action: Social Media and the Tunisian Revolution - Christopher Barrie

• Civic Legacies: Corporatism, Fragmentation, and Protest in New Democracies - Chantal Berman, Princeton University

• Divided We Stand: Political Mobilization and Sectarian Polarization in Lebanon - Rima Majed, American University of Beirut

Chair

• Graeme Robertson

Discussants

• Graeme Robertson

• Adria Lawrence Johns Hopkins University