Revolution in Flawed Democracies: The Lebanese Thawra & Iraq’s Tishreen Uprising

• In Event: Revolutions and Statebuilding: Transforming Political and Social Institutions

Abstract

Scholarly perspectives on revolution all but presuppose an authoritarian state as the target of popular mobilization. Yet citizens in procedurally democratic states – those characterized by a baseline of transparent multiparty elections and regular rotation of the executive (Schumpeter 1942) – have also used mass protests to demand systematic change, echoing the grievances and repertoires of their peers in neighboring dictatorships. In the fall of 2019, citizens of Iraq and Lebanon took to the streets, using the language of thawra (revolution) to demand wholesale replacement of corrupt elite political classes, alongside other social justice and rights-oriented goals. Both uprisings faced significant violence from state-affiliated forces, and both movements gained limited concessions in the form of governmental resignations. Yet neither succeeded in bringing down or fundamentally transforming their respective “regimes.”
What are the challenges and pitfalls of deposing a nominal democracy through collective action? How do authorities in flawed democratic systems respond to popular uprisings? And how might these trajectories of mobilization and state response differ from those found in authoritarian regimes? This paper compares contemporaneous uprisings in neighboring consociational democracies, Iraq and Lebanon, to shed light on the mechanisms and processes of revolutionary mobilization against flawed democracies.
We leverage original protest event catalogs, compiled from local sources in each state, to characterize each uprising with regards to participants, tactics, demands, and the nature of escalation and de-escalation over the course of the movement. Further, we examine patterns of state response, highlighting reliance on state-affiliated irregular militias to repress protests, and the palliative use of partial resignations and reshuffles in efforts to fragment and demobilize the protest movement. We conclude by observing that the fragmentation of power in nominal democracies may, paradoxically, render these regimes even more resilient to mass mobilization than their authoritarian peers.

Authors

• Chantal Berman, Georgetown University

• Killian Clarke, Georgetown University

• Rima Majed, American University of Beirut