Fear or Fury: How Mobilizing Emotions Explains the Diffusion of Revolt

• In Event: Politics of Emotions and Protest under Authoritarianism

Abstract

The “Arab Uprisings,” “the Eastern European revolutions,” “the 1848 revolutions” – these are some of the most easily recognized revolutionary waves in history. What explains this spread of anti-regime protests from one country to another? To date, our theories of the spread of revolt have mostly focused on specific historical instances of its diffusion; as a result, we have no generalizable explanation of when and why anti-regime protests are most likely to spread from one location to another, and no theory that can explain all of the three examples above. I argue that the spread of anti-regime protests in authoritarian settings is best explained by the emotional ties of protesters across borders: the closer the identity of any two countries, the greater the likelihood that critics of the regime will emulate the hope, anger, and pride of their neighboring country, and rise in protest. I test this argument using a new dataset of all anti-regime protests between 1945-2013, with new measures of shared identity, as well as 184 interviews with revolutionaries from Syria, Egypt, and Yemen, at the height of the uprisings in 2011. This combination of large data and a closer focus on the Arab Uprisings allows me to study and explain not only anti-regime protests that spread across borders, but also those that failed to do so. My results show that emotions interact in important ways with strategic considerations and, when protests succeed in countries that share a common identity, emotions are a powerful component of the diffusion of those protests.

Author

• Silvana A. Toska, Davidson College