Interactions and collective subjectivity – from localized resistance to revolutionary mass mobilization in the Tunisian Uprising

• In Event: 3161 - Critical Studies and Social Movement Frameworks

Abstract

It has been suggested that revolutions confound standards of causal explanation (Kurzman, 2004a). However, scholarship on the 2010/11 Arab Uprisings still relies on theories stressing anterior causal factors. An emerging strategic-interactionist perspective offers a possible theoretical alternative that recognizes the causality of protest events themselves (Jasper and Duyvendak, 2015; Jasper and Volpi, 2017). The paper contributes to this debate by theorizing based on the 2010/11 Tunisian Uprising. Empirical material was gathered in a two-step process. An event catalogue was created based on reports in local and international news media to select sites for in-depth study where more than fifty open, narrative interviews were conducted with protest participants. The paper shows that protests were characterized by high degrees of non-planed, spontaneous interactions and collective, creative agency. Some protest events, event though staged by small groups and for localized reasons, were causally significant for the emergence and trajectory of revolutionary mass mobilization. This was the case because changing interactions with security forces, especially escalating violence and deaths of protesters, altered the relations between protesters and the state. The paper proposes a series of conceptualizations that help to build our understanding of how spontaneous mobilization under conditions of ambiguity may lead to emerging transgressive practices, to the activation and forging of solidarities, and the formation of collective subjectivity. Arguing for revolutionary Praxis as a process that mediates these concepts, the paper contributes to our understanding of the Tunisian Uprising as well as to an interactionist sociology of revolutionary situations more generally.

Author

• Jann Boeddeling, London School of Economics and Political Science